I'm no expert on the Memorial Library, but I did spend many, many years before retirement from the day job, as a librarian at the BBC and in universities. The problem of space is not unique to the VWML - it's a fact of life for all libraries with any kind of budget and an acquisitions policy - i.e. where material regularly accrues to the collection.

For many of us working in the then pre-digitisation age, there were some stark choices to be made when the shelves started to overflow:

- new premises (often an impossibility for logistical or financial reasons)
- rented, off-site stack areas for remote storage of archival or lesser-used material
- co-operative schemes whereby libraries transferred specialist stock to agreed centres and disposed of duplicated material
- disposal of out-of-date material (not always easy for some collection types)

With digitisation, there is now another option - also time-consuming and expensive, but still an extra option - of digitising certain materials, or creating access to digital materials such as journals, and disposing of the originals or retaining them in remote storage. The remote storage option creates space in the working building. This was not always popular in pre-digitisation periods, given the sometimes diifficult logistics of retrieving material for the user. Retaining computer files to remotely housed materials not only saves space but widens access to users online. Some university libraries, such as Cranfield, were actively following a policy of converting their journals collections en masse to digital format and losing the paper originals. Not an option I favour, personally, but an option nevertheless.

There's far more to it, obviously, than I can write here, but at least the opportunity is there - as long as appropriate and sufficient funding is made available - for the VWML to retain its premises, utilise space efficiently and make its resources more widely available. The Take 6 project shows the way.