Robots Will Operate New British Library Facility
The British Library just revealed their new automated storage facility which is fully serviced by robots at their building in Wetherby at West Yorkshire. The Boston Spa building which was built for about £26m is completely self-run with robot labour. The robots are responsible for sorting and lifting.
The giant storage centre has a capacity for seven million items and will eventually house that many items from the UK national collection. These items will be stored in the over 140,000 bar-coded container systems which will be maintained by the robot workforce.
The robots will be responsible for retrieval of the items and then they are taken to staff workers who then remove the requested documents. The building will mostly house material which is rarely used, such as books and newspapers.
Rosie Winterton, the Minister for Yorkshire and Humber, official opened the facility and stated that it was an exciting new development for the British Library, and that the site at the Boston Spa would be a great location for such a historically important storage facility.
The new facility will become the home for millions of archives which are currently being held at a facility in London which is on lease. Currently the library has already begun moving some items to the new storage centre. High-use documents are being move to storage at the library headquarters in St. Pancras.
900 new jobs were created with the birth of the facility, and the library is also planning on establishing a new, separate newspaper storage facility on the same location as the new storage site.
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