(L-R) Hans-Herbert Schultz, managing director of Jungheinrich UK Ltd, Dr Sarah Thomas, Bodleian's Librarian and Professor Andrew Hamilton, Oxford University's Vice Chancellor at the recent official opening of the new warehouse.

A GBP26 million (USD41.1 million) warehouse to store 8.4 million books and maps was unveiled last week after one of the UK's most famous libraries ran out of space.

The Bodleian Library, at Oxford University, entitled to a copy of every book published in the UK, was running out of space to store works for decades. To deal with the backlog of books, arriving at a rate of 1,000 a day, millions of items are temporarily stored outside Oxford city, with thousands housed in a former Cheshire salt mine.

The solution was the Book Storage Facility (BSF) near Swindon, Wiltshire, consisting of 153 miles (246 km) of shelving - sufficient space to support the library for the next 20 years.

Jungheinrich UK Ltd has supplied forklifts to operate at the BSF. The warehouse has 31 aisles of very narrow aisle (VNA), high-density storage shelving. Each aisle is 71 metres (233 feet) long and the shelving is 11.4 metres (37.4 feet) high. The aisles will be served by nine Jungheinrich EKS 312 order pickers.

The VNA order pickers have been fitted with two types of picking trolley specially designed by Jungheinrich to allow books to be quickly and easily picked to fulfil student and researcher book requests, then returned to be put away in their allocated locations in the shelving.

Jungheinrich also supplied a fleet of powered pallet trucks and an electric counterbalance truck.

Over the next 12 months, nearly six million books and more than 1.2 million maps will be transferred from Oxford to BSF, in what will be the biggest move in the history of the Bodleian.

Librarian Dr Sarah Thomas says the BSF will provide a solution to the space problem that has long challenged the Bodleian. "We have been running out of space since the 1970s and the situation has become increasingly desperate in the last few years. Now we can look to the future with confidence that we are preserving one of the world's most complete records of the written word in state-of-the-art secure archival conditions."

When full, the new warehouse will house about 8.4 million books, maps, manuscripts, microfilms, periodicals and newspapers dating back to the 18th century.