The Library Storage Facility (LSF), whose contents can be ordered to the Library but cannot be borrowed, was opened in June 2018.  By the end of 2019, the store’s astonishing 4,000,000-book capacity will be one third full.  We in Collections and Academic Liaison have started sending a few books there, and this blog post looks at the what, the why, and the how.

Our department deals chiefly with newly bought books, with our book selection work underpinned by research activity in the University and beyond.  Since the LSF is a home for material considered “low use” in the Cambridge library context, it is inconceivable that we might ever send new purchases there.

Another significant part of our work involves donated books.  Some donated collections stand together in special classes held by Rare Books, but many donations are classified separately and distributed throughout our collections.  We have recently started to include the LSF among the potential locations for individually placed donated items.

The first books we sent to the LSF came from our acquisitions from the late Edward Braun’s library of Soviet drama texts and criticism, a collection introduced by an earlier blog post.  These books, as the majority of the donated items we usually handle, were all over 10 years old.  Cataloguing and classifying them allowed me to formulate, in consultation with other colleagues, a careful approach to what we might consider sending to the LSF.  Our agreed default is: when in any doubt, keep the book in the main UL.

The main kinds of individually placed donated books we now consider sending to the LSF are:

• items which are not fit for a borrowable class
  • these books might be very slight or fragile; for example, our Hispanic specialist has sent several mid-20th-century donated paperbacks to the store
• items which are particularly niche in terms of our usual collections
  • among Edward Braun’s books, for example, were a couple of Soviet-era Russian titles about English drama; I certainly wanted to keep them because of their provenance and because there will be readers for them at some point, but I felt that they did not sufficiently warrant space here in the main Library
• we also occasionally receive European-language Legal Deposit material, and we would now consider non-academic titles among these books to be automatic candidates for the LSF by default.

These are early days, so each potential group of material for the LSF is discussed carefully before decisions are taken.  The largest group of books sent by CAL to the LSF so far is rather a surprising one.  Over 200 Georgian books arrived in the Library under the Soviet book exchange system but were never catalogued, due to a lack of relevant expertise in other departments; these have now been catalogued by the wonderful and resourceful Slavonic assistant.  Some of these books had languished here, hidden from the catalogue, for 40 years.  Georgian is a relatively rarely used research language in the University, so these books – now visible in the catalogue – have gone to the LSF.

This link should provide the records for all material catalogued so far from Edward Braun’s collection.  A few extremely fragile items are still to be added.  One of the books sent to the LSF is Istoriia zapadnoevropeiskogo teatra by Stefan Mokul’skii.  Its rather nice cover is below.  On the inside of the cover is a tantalisingly legible-looking signature which has so far defeated me.  Should any reader have more success, please do e-mail me at slavonic@lib.cam.ac.uk

Mel Bach