In 2010 a major refurbishment program will take place at the New Bodleian Library. It will be transformed into the new Weston Library (named for the Garfield Weston Foundation), and will focus increasingly on special collections- with new exhibition spaces and better conservation & curation facilities, as well as rebuilt storage and more reading rooms.
For more information, see: http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/news/2009_mar_13
The New Bodleian Reading Room currently has an Asian and North African Collection that includes around 33 shelves of Arabic books, 16 shelves of Persian books, 16 shelves of Turkish books, 34 shelves of Indian books, 8 shelves of Oriental books and over 80 shelves of periodicals and reference books.
For more information, see: http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/bodley/library/rooms/nbrr
The plan is that many of these books will come to the Oriental Institute whilst the work is going on. Luckily, we’ve worked out that if we start using the top and bottom shelves of all our bookcases, we’ve just about got room to fit all of the books we need to accomodate. So don’t be surprised if over the next couple of months all the books in our library get shifted around a bit… Hopefully this will end up with our library having even more books, and being even more useful, than it is already!
In other news, the building works in our library are nearing completion. The stairs are in place, and the box around the stairs has been built. They’re currently doing plastering- hopefully they’ll be finished early next week, and the shelves will be back up by the end of next week.