A couple of weeks ago our team made the journey up to Winsford in Cheshire to visit Deepstore. This is where much of our collection lives underground in the space created by Britain’s largest salt mine. Our Deepstore books are requestable through our online catalogue. It is important for at least one member of the library team to visit Deepstore a year in order to check on the storage conditions of our books there. This year since we have new team members, we all went.
For the first leg of the journey we all assembled at Euston at 8.30, poised to take the 2 hour train to Crewe. We would then be picked up by taxi and driven to the salt mine. It wasn’t all fun and games on the train! We made sure to get in some user experience design time by thinking about how to optimise the layout of our website.
Once we had arrived at the mine we met our account manager at the visitor centre and were briefed on appropriate safety measures for down in the mine. We were then kitted out in the correct mine equipment including : hard hats with headlamps, high vis vests, and belts with breathing apparatuses attached in the event of fire or loss of oxygen. Then we were taken to the entrance to one of the mining shafts. We took the elevator down almost 150 metres!
The mine is so vast (the size of 700 football pitches) that we had to be driven by car to our storage unit. Apparently there is a particular knack to driving and navigating the roads down in the mine!
At Winsford salt mine, mining is done in a cross shape that leaves central pillars standing. These pillars are what hold up the roof of the mine, allowing storage units to be created within the empty space. Our books are stored in the naturally dry and stable environment of the mine, which is at a continuous temperature of 15ºC all year round. This makes it a more sustainable option than artificial environmental control.
Once we reached the storage unit, we wanted to check on some of our boxes to survey their condition. We walked up the shelving structure inside the storage unit to reach our section of boxes. The space is shared with a number of other customers, including the National Archives.
I personally used our visit as an opportunity to fix an indexing mistake I had made back at the library (indexing a couple of books into the wrong box). I had a list of boxes to check for the books, which were technically missing in the system. Luckily I was able to find them, so crisis was averted!
After our tour concluded, we had a quick lunch and headed back to London on the train. We used our journey to re-design the catalogue front page layout. All in a day’s work.
Overall, it was amazing to see where our offsite storage books live and get to go inside a working mine!
AL
What are your thoughts about the above?