Library Moves

Jamie Briggs was first established in February 2000 to transfer antiques and fine arts in the North Oxfordshire area. The business grew and developed into the transfer of libraries and museums alongside office and other commercial businesses and residential moves.

We are regularly working with Libraries and Archives where we need to reconstruct or interfile collections because the library is relocating or building works provide the opportunity to rethink the deposition of the collection. Our largest move has been the transfer of 18 libraries from in and around Oxford along with the salt mines in Cheshire and warehoused material into the new Bodleian Book Storage Facility in Swindon. This move required the transfer of just over 150,000 linear metres of materials and archives (somewhere in the region of 5,100,000 objects) in addition to a million maps. The collection transferred included 23,979 linear metres of special collections including, a section of Oxyrhynchus Papyri, ephemera and large or unusual objects, more details of this and other moves can be found in the case studies section.
(http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/07/bodleian-library-swindon)

For library moves we offer the following services:

  • Shelf to shelf moves
  • Resequencing, interfiling and, integration of dispersed collections
  • Crate hire
  • Cataloguing
  • Project Management and move planning
  • Project specific project plans and risk assessments
  • Transfer of library offices, computers, micro fiche readers and other equipment
  • Library pictures, art works and the portrait of the founder and donors
  • Off-site secure storage of collections with the option to have a call service for materials
  • Delivery or collection from third party storage
  • Wherever possible we look to recycle and or environmentally friendly dispose of old or unwanted equipment and are licensed waste carriers. This includes WEEE, furniture, metals, and wooden items.

Please contact the Office on 01869 233777 if your requirements are not listed and one of our specialised surveyors will discuss them with you personally

For all projects we look to work closely with the site teams including, Library, Academic, Facilities, Health and Safety, Porters and alongside allied services including builders, contractors and architects. Having worked work with Libraries of Congress, the Deci, Nicholson and other collection cataloguing systems we are confident that we can support your requirements. We are not above asking for your guidance upon occasion and are willing to learn new systems and styles from you. In recent times we have worked with left to right catalogues and then presented the materials with right to left aesthetic display of titles along the spines of a collection in Arabic and Cantonese.

We enjoy a challenge and look to working with you in solving them. These have included removing materials during revision for finals in Colleges, taking materials out of a 4th storey Library in Central London town house without an internal lift, working with tight, narrow or load restricted roads and unusual site access. Alongside these we have shared sites with the media including TV and film crews on site (e.g. X-Men First Class, Lewis and, Stephen Fry on Books). We regularly work in and around public intensive areas and are used to negotiating passage through tourists and other obstacles.

Examples of recent moves

  • Paul Mellon Centre, London (Yale University in London) - 711 Linear Metres
  • Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies - 413.4 Linear Metres
  • Magdalen College Library - 2,441 Linear Metres
  • Brasenose College Archives - 120 Linear Metres
  • HD Chung Chinese Studies - 1,345 Linear Metres + 17 Offices
  • Leopold Muller Memorial Library - 1404 Linear meters + 12 Offices + 3 Lecture Rooms
  • Bodleian Library - 150,000 Linear meters + 1 Million Maps
  • St Edwards School
  • Ashmolean Museum

Contact us to find out more

Commercial Removals

Office Removals

Museum moves


Video: The Jamie Briggs team completing a library move at the Paul Mellon Centre Public Study Room