Update on plans for new research and reading room, Sammy Ofer Wing, National Maritime Museum

Those of you who have recently looked at the Sammy Ofer Wing construction site live webcam on the website, see http://www.nmm.ac.uk/about/sammy-ofer-wing/, will have been astonished to see the progress that has been made. The ground floor lobby is now roofed, the ramps up to the first floor terrace are in place, and the large skylights above the lobby in position. The south west wing is covered in plastic sheeting to ensure the building is kept dry whilst the interiors are completed. The tracks for the roller racking have been installed in the ground floor store, and the tracks in the other stores will be laid in December. Once the building has been handed over from the contractors in early 2011, the reading room and stores will be environmental monitored and the racking installed, prior to the move of the collections into the building.

Preparation work towards the new service

The Sammy Ofer Wing preparation projects are progressing well. With the help of volunteers, the archive team has completed 85% of Phase 2 of the location record and unit of production project for the manuscripts collection (editing archive catalogue records and rehousing manuscripts where appropriate), and the project is expected to be completed by December 2010. The archive team will then move on to other important tasks to help with document delivery in the new stores, including labelling boxes and volumes, and flagging items by size for the contractors.

Ahead of next year’s big move into the new wing, from the start of November 2010 until the middle of February 2011 the library team will be doing some ‘mini-moves’ – about 10% of the books in the current reading room will be moved offsite, and the more frequently requested items from the offsite stores will be moved into the Caird Library to take their place. This work is being done now so that the move into the new reading room and stores in the Sammy Ofer Wing from April-July 2011 can be done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Ancestry has begun photographing the collection of 160,000  master’s certificates (consisting of 1.4 million images) held in the Archive collection. The aim of the project is to improve access to the certificates by making them available through the website Ancestry.co.uk, and to aid retrieval of the original master’s certificates for the public in the new reading room. The indexed digitised images are expected to be launched to the public in 2012 (library users will be able to access them free of charge).

 What next

Plans for the methodology of the move are in development. Once the move contractor is appointed in December 2010, we will work closely with them to finalise the sequencing of the move.

We will update our plans for the move as they develop, and circulate them and put them on the website, but generally physical access to the archive and library collections (as well as our availability to answer enquiries and manage the reprographic service) will be severely disrupted from April–July 2011, when the Caird Library will be closed to all visitors. We will be in a position to announce the specific closure dates in January 2011. We advise all users of the Caird Library to check the website regularly for future updates.

For further information about the plans for the new reading room and library provision, including what the reading room will be like and how many books will be available on open access, see http://www.nmm.ac.uk/researchers/library/sammy-ofer-wing-library-faqs

For general information about the new wing, including photos of the construction site, see http://www.nmm.ac.uk/about/sammy-ofer-wing/