Calendar: 1973-1974 Page 403

XXX Annual Report of the Delegacy THE LIBRARY Reorganisation of the Library The work of the Library during the session 1971-72 was inevitably dominated by the aftermath of the reorganisation carried out during the long vacation of 1971 following the completion of the first stage of the College's development scheme Much effort was expended in attempts to overcome the difficulties arising from discrepancies between the new building as planned on paper and the new building as handed over for occupation and from the ad hoc measures which had to be taken as result of the delayed handover of the building and the need to have the whole Library operational by the beginning of the Michael- mas term The situation improved steadily during the year and so far as readers were concerned culminated in the equipment of the science periodicals room with additional ranges of shelving to house the runs of periodicals which had had to be relegated to the basement book stack during the move As the session ended additional bookcases were also being installed in the catalogue hall to house collection of books in extra-curricular subjects and permit the expansion of the bibliographical and other reference material shelved in the hall The most serious defect in the Library accommodation in the new building proved to be the atmospheric conditions in the strong-rooms allocated respectively to rare books and military archives The insula- tion of these strong-rooms from the adjoining boiler room proved to be quite inadequate and resulted in relative humidity in the mid40 as compared with the recommended figure of 55-65 per cent and in temperature in the 70s as compared with the recom- mended figure of 55-65 deg As result it was impossible to move the rare books into the strong-room while the military archives had to be evacuated to the temporary strong-room they had previously occupied and which was fortuitously still available The fears voiced by some members of the College that the seating accommodation provided in the New Library would be inadequate appeared unjustified by the census of occupancy of the various reading rooms which was carried out hourly throughout the session This showed that even if all reading rooms had shown the maximum occupancy at the same time which was not in fact the case only 176 seats out of the 240 places provided in the New Library and 116 seats out of the 246 places remaining in the Old Library would have been