The incoming Master of University College has has criticised the provision of library services in Oxford in a new report.
Sir Ivor Crewe compared the Bodleian’s services unfavourably with those at other universities such as Cambridge and LSE.
Crewe’s report, delivered to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), criticised “the combination of closed access (73% of the main collection) and very slow fetching times,”
A spokesperson for the University defended the library provisions, but admitted that the Bodleian suffers from a lack of funding. They said, “The Bodleian Library is widely agreed to be a world class library.
However, it does face significant funding challenges and we are active in raising money for the Library.”
Crewe has refused to elaborate on the data within the report, but referred to the figures for stack request speeds as indicative of his criticism.
In Cambridge, a stack request will take, on average, just 18 minutes, but in Oxford, the time can be anything between 114 minutes and three days for off-site books.
The University of London’s Senate House library and Manchester’s university library also far outperformed the Bodleian in this respect: average request times are just 25 and 20 minutes respectively.
The report also criticsed the percentage of Bodleian books available on open stacks. Oxford has about 2.4 million items on open stacks, about 27% of the total. While this is comparable to Cambridge, where the figure was 30%, other research libraries such as those of SOAS and UCL kept their entire collection on open stacks.
However, students have had mixed reactions to the report.
One first year historian from Hertford defended the Bod, saying that she thought, “two hours is pretty quick” for a stack request. But she added that she found it inconvenient that stack requests are limited to three per student.
Ally Paget, a classics student, also defended the speed of the Bodleian’s stack request service.
She said, “it is more important that there are enough staff in the Lower Reserve and the Bod itself to help you, rather than all of them being underground.”
Other students have complained about the opening hours of the libraries in Oxford. Both the Bodleian and Faculty libraries are closed on Sundays and are open only for a limited time on Saturdays.
In contrast, LSE’s British Library of Economic and Political Science is open 24 hours for the summer term, Crewe’s report states, and none of the research libraries it detailed had Saturday hours as short as Oxford’s.
Mike Heaney, the executive secretary of Oxford University Library Services (OULS), refused to comment on the report, saying that a press release would be ready soon.
Last November, Oxford City Council rejected the Bodleian’s plans to build a book depository at Osney Mead.
The depository would have been near the centre of the city and had a capacity of up to eight million volumes. Currently, the Bodleian is forced to use expensive, inaccessible storage space outside the city.
The council refused the plans because they claimed the depository would, “impact detrimentally on the historic views of, and across, the City skyline” and because it would form an “unacceptable and overlarge intrusion into the landscape.”
Oxford University has appealed against the council’s decision to veto the Bod’s plans. The case will be heard this July.
The university refused to comment on whether the rejection of the depository plan was detrimental to Oxford’s status as a world research centre, saying, that, as the council was yet to make a decision, “we will not be commenting on things related to [it]”.
