National Maritime Museum reading room
With just six months to go until the Sammy Ofer Wing opens to the public, work on site continues apace. The site is incredibly busy with over 200 contractors working at any one time. In the south west wing the dry lined walls are having their final plastering and the racking is expected to be installed in the archive stores in the spring. The services have been installed in the reading room, and the ceiling will be completed shortly. The bespoke furniture and bookcases for the new reading room is expected to be installed in May and June. Books and journals selected for open access in the reading room will cover subjects that our users are most interested in – shipping company histories, the Royal Navy, family history, biographies of key maritime figures, exploration, navigation and astronomy. The reading room will also contain runs of key resources such as Lloyds Register and the Merchant Navy List, and journals including the Mariner’s Mirror. Current issues of journals will also be available on open access.
Preparation work towards the new service
The Archive & Library team continues to prepare the collections prior to their move into the Sammy Ofer Wing. The last move of printed items from the outstore which have been selected to go into the new reading room, has been completed. These printed items have been integrated into the books already in the current reading room, which has required a lot of shifting and moving books around. The library team is now focussing on matching up sequences of about 800 journal titles that have been stored across several sites, so that they can be efficiently brought together when they are finally moved into the new stores.
The archive team is busy measuring individual oversize material destined for the new stores, so it can be stored as efficiently as possible. They will then move onto flagging manuscripts by size (both physically and in the collections management database), so that the items are stored on the most suitable sized shelving in the new stores.
We apologise for the disruption and inconvenience to users of the current Caird Library; the integration of books from the outstores has meant that some books are now located in different bookcases, and we ask that users take care walking around the crates of books at the end of the bays.
Next steps
We are working out the methodology for the move with Nexus, the contractors. The sequence of the move has to tie in with the building programme, as some spaces may be handed over and ready for occupation earlier than others, and time allowed for cleaning, snagging and environmental monitoring. The books destined for the new reading room will be moved first, followed by books, journals and manuscripts going into the new stores. The move of oversize items such as prints and drawings, and charts and maps into the ground floor store will overlap with these other moves. The E-Library, the space adjacent to the Caird Library, will become the major access route for books and journals being decanted, and used to store crates, so will not be accessible to the public during the move.
We will update our plans for the move as they develop and circulate them as widely as possible but we wish to remind our users that 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 late April–July 2011, when the Caird Library will be closed to all visitors. We will circulate specific dates for the Library’s closure period as soon as we can, and 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 Sammy Ofer Wing Library FAQs.
For general information about the new wing, including photos of the construction site, see the Sammy Ofer Wing pages.
Eleanor Gawne, Head of Archive and Library, National Maritime Museum
