The facts
Client: British Library
Location: Boston Spa, West
Yorkshire
Services: Project and Cost
Management
Contract Type: GEC Works
Project Value: £26m
Start/Completion: 2003-2009
The Video
The project
The British Library’s £26m Additional Storage Building
(ASB) provides the British Library with additional storage capacity
for seven million items from the UK national
collection.
The fully-automated facility comprises 262 linear km of extra
shelf space (enough to stretch from London to Manchester) for the
collection which is currently expanding at a rate of 12.5km of
linear shelf space per year.
Capita Symonds provided project and cost management services on
the project which is the first of its kind in the world to
incorporate automated storage and retrieval systems, optimum
environmental controls, and pioneering low-oxygen fire prevention
technology in a single building.
Although sprinklers are (usually) the preferred solution for
libraries (wet books can be freeze dried), the British Library has
adopted a low-oxygen system of fire prevention which sees oxygen
levels kept to just 14.8% (fires can only break out if oxygen
levels are at 17% and above).
To support this, the building is also one of the most air-tight
in the UK - the leakage rate specification is not more than 0.5
cubic metre of air per square metre of wall area per hour
(0.5m3/m2/hr).
The ASB building will house low-use material including patent
specifications, books, serials and newspapers in 144,000 storage
containers of three different sizes. When users of the St Pancras
Reading Rooms order a particular item that is stored at the
Additional Storage Building, the fully automated system will
identify the container holding the document and bring it to a
library operator for retrieval. The item will then be dispatched
via the regular delivery service to the main British Library
Reading Rooms at St Pancras in London where the applicant will be
able to inspect it within 48 hours of ordering.
Other features include:
- The racking housing the book containers is supported by a 350mm
thick, super-flat steel fibre reinforced floor slab which acts as a
raft to eliminate differential settlement and keep the building
perfectly level;
- The air conditioning system maintains a controlled,
microbe-free climate at a constant temperature of 16ºc (+/- 1%) and
constant humidity of 52% (+/- 5%);
- The storage repository itself features insulated vertical walls
with a four hour fire resistance rating and a double-sealed,
thermally efficient roof.