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Library Projects: Home

Overview of the ongoing Library projects

Overview

The Hartley Library is our biggest library and is at the heart of the Highfield campus. There are over 600,000 print books on 5 floors and over 2000 study spaces. It is open 24/7 during term time and is a favourite place for students to meet and study. We welcome all staff, researchers, and wider civic communities into the building throughout the year to study and use our extensive collections.

We want to ensure our library services are modern and relevant and so are working behind the scenes to ensure we create a more adaptable, inclusive, accessible, creative and sustainable space with a renewed and refreshed collection for all our diverse communities to use.

What are we doing?

As part of the ongoing development of our campuses we will be continuing to invest in our learning spaces, this includes plans to invest in Hartley Library.

To enable this, we are currently working on another major project within the library, in consultation with our staff and students, to ensure a renewed and refreshed print book collection. We will be making it simpler to find the books by moving to a single classification system (Library of Congress), as well as enhancing our current catalogue records and resequencing our books into a more logical order. The library will contribute towards a national collection by retaining items which are scarce, and will be providing inter-library loans for items held in other libraries.

Why is this important?

All of this work supports the University Strategy as well as supporting the Civic University Agreement and is timely because 

  • The building is old and difficult to maintain, it is stuffy in the summer and cold in the winter.
  • We need improved core functions such as lifts, toilets, heating, lighting and ventilation.  
  • We want more accessible and adaptable spaces for our diverse user communities.
  • We want to promote and facilitate interdisciplinary learning, research and collaboration.
  • It is hard to navigate, and the current space is not used optimally.
  • The shelves are overfull - causing damage to the books.

While these transformative projects are ongoing;

You will still be able to access our printed book collection and study spaces during the current project which finishes in the summer of 2024.

You can use the Click and Collect (Hold) service to request the books you need. More information on how to use this service here. 

We will update you via this page regularly on when and how the library service will be changing during these exciting projects.  

National picture

We are a member of Research Libraries UK (RLUK) which is a consortium of the most significant research libraries in the UK and Ireland, Their purpose is to shape the research library agenda and contribute to the wider knowledge economy through innovative projects and services that add value and impact to the process of research.

RLUK is scoping the UK Distributed Print Book Collection (UKDPBC) which is a national distributed collection of print monographs which seeks to preserve access to printed books for current and future generations of scholars. This collection will allow libraries to release space occupied and builds on from the successful UK Research Reserve project for printed journals.

Contact us

We welcome feedback from all library users about these projects - email libenqs@soton.ac.uk. We aim to respond within two working days.