A senior Cambridge staff member has warned about the potential hazards of a plan to move large amounts of low use library material into an external depository.

It comes following the announcement that the University of Cambridge plans to construct a off-site storage facility in Ely, to keep library material that is less frequently accessed. This proposed solution comes amid concerns that space within the University Library (UL) will be exhausted in the foreseeable future.

The UL building currently holds in the region of eight million books, and receives around 100,000 more each year due to its status as one of the UK’s five legal deposit libraries, which means it is entitled to request a copy of everything published in the United Kingdom.

If approved, the site will be based at Lancaster Way Business Park, outside Ely. This site was selected after consideration of more than thirty sites in a fifty mile radius of Cambridge, on the basis of criteria such as ground conditions, transport links and acquisition costs.

The building will store up to 106,000 linear metres of material, and will be approximately 5000 metres squared in size. The project will be budgeted at £17.1 million, including the cost of land, with further meetings being held in the future to discuss design, maintenance and recurrent costs.

The University has said that requests for material held at the site will be able to be made online, with a daily retrieval service in place to facilitate collection.

In a speech to the Senate House last week, delivered by a proxy, University Librarian Anne Jarvis, the most senior librarian within Cambridge, laid out the case for a new storage solution.

“The main UL shelves are full, as are many affiliated libraries” she said, noting that there is currently 98 km of material across all the University’s libraries which is currently low-use. This is expected to rise to 106 km by 2030.

She added that, despite the increase in electronic resources, access to physical library materials “remains critical for many academic staff and students”. A study of library materials found that large-scale digitisation of content was not a viable or desirable solution at present.

However, Professor Julian Evans raised concerns that the service could potentially leave students waiting much longer to get their hands on vital course materials.

He cited the example of Oxford, where the construction of an external storage unit to ease pressure on the Bodleian Library was blighted by planning permission issues, and introduced new delays upon book availability, which he described as causing a “decade of pain”.

“What sounds like a practical solution to a practical problem may have unforeseen academic consequences” he said.

He said that though deliveries of material were often prompt between Oxford’s Swindon-based depository and the Bodleian, books and other resources often took a long time to be returned, during which they would be unavailable.

He also spoke about the potential slowness of the proposed daily collection system, saying of the Bodleian’s external depository retrieval speeds: “Famously, it used to be quicker to drive from Oxford to Cambridge, borrow a book, go back to Oxford to read it, and then return to Cambridge, than to wait for Oxford’s copy to be fetched to a reading room. It would be a pity if that story began to be told in reverse.”

It is estimated that the storage facility will be operational by May 2018, with the University stating the building will be in use approximately 18 to 24 months after construction begins.

The storage facility will be operated by library staff, with a small team being responsible for the storage and retrieval of library material. Maintenance of the site will be carried out by estate management.

Material which is frequently requested will be transferred back into the regular libraries, with a University spokesperson saying “any material required for teaching and learning will continue to be available in the University’s faculty and departmental libraries.”

Separately, Varsity understands that the University may be continuing to investigate the possibility of lowering the number of physical copies of books it maintains, and opting for providing more digital resources. When questioned on the matter, a University spokesperson said “Cambridge University Library continues to acquire books, both in print and electronic format, through either purchase or legal deposit, in support of the teaching, learning and research carried out in Cambridge.”