Rumours of the death of the book are premature: access to physical books and journals continues to be a key part of academic life. But e-resources have increased in importance, and a modern library needs to enable hybrid working across print and digital resources. Our plans allow for continued growth in the print collection, across well-lit and organised shelving. We’ll also have future-proof technology so that students can work together and collaborate in the digital sphere.

Currently, we cannot promote our archives and resources as well as we should, because we do not have dedicated storage or consultation space. Our Buttery Books, for example, dating from the 17th to the 19th centuries, are fantastic documents, full of detail about college life. They give a unique insight into the development of the early halls of the university. But they are currently stored in a cupboard next to a water pipe – and have had to have remedial conservation treatment because of these suboptimal conditions. Other elements of the archive are stored around the college, again, with risk to their long-term preservation and making them difficult to consult. The new archive storage will, for the first time, store our historic collections in environmentally-controlled conditions, and enable us to share them with students, researchers, and members of the public. Thanks in part to the generosity of the Wolfson Foundation, for the first time we will we will have a dedicated space for researchers to consult this extraordinary material

In addition, the college’s rare books will be brought together in the same location for the first time since the nineteenth century. Currently, a tranche of these early books, dating from the early years of the Royal Society and the intellectual ferment in which fellows of Magdalen Hall (our predecessor foundation) were so active, are in long term storage off-site. We long to reunite them with other volumes so that the intellectual connections of the early period of the college’s work can be rediscovered by researchers and academics: the new library will enable them to be housed, and consulted, in a single, dedicated,  and secure special collections reading room.

Our new design for the archives and rare books thus reunites our collections under one roof, connecting the college’s past, present, and future. Our new, purpose-built facilities will allow us, for the first time, properly to conserve our collections and, crucially, to make them available to researchers and members of the public.