Launch of the Stacks Capacity project

The UB stacks are practically full; with an estimated 2 out of the 75 km of shelf space left, the currently available stack space is scarce.

Since the UB opened its doors in 1985, space has not really been an issue; there was sufficient room for growth, and when the UB stacks threatened to fill up, temporary space was rented (Dierenriemstraat) and a permanent facility was added (Zernike stacks).

The library is being faced with a limited, fixed capacity on the one hand and the pressure of books offered for storage on the other. There is a lot of pressure as it is, and it will only increase in the next five years as a result of the planned clustering of library locations, which will mean that large parts of the collections on open shelves (almost 25 km in total) will be moved to the closed stacks.

Despite the increase in digital publishing, printed material will continue to be added for quite some time.

The stacks will have to undergo a reorganization in the coming period in order to create sufficient shelf space. New material has already been subjected to a critical deselection procedure based on locally and nationally established criteria. Last year, the project group managed to make some room to accommodate the upcoming relocations, but this will not be enough. A large deduplication project is scheduled to begin in the spring of 2013.