The shelves are too damn high!: £190m Library of Birmingham SLAMMED as tens of thousands of books are out of reach

Health and safety fears have left tens of thousands of books literally out of reach at a brand new £190 million library – because the shelves are TOO HIGH.

The Library of Birmingham became the biggest in Europe when it opened its doors to the public  in September last year after taking more than three years to build.

It was heralded as a flagship super-library and was described by Dutch architect Francine Houben as a “people’s palace” boasting a collection of over a million books.

But yesterday it emerged that thousands of archives in the landmark building’s storage area are completely inaccessible to library staff.

Despite being open for six months, mobile platform equipment used for reaching the high shelves has still not been purchased by the council-run facility.

It means barmy health and safety concerns have now left librarians unable to retrieve reading material requested by visitors in case they fall from ladders and injure themselves.

Students, researchers and academics have since slammed the facility and branded it “unfit for purpose”.

Medieval historian George Demidowicz , from the University of Birmingham, fumed: “The library is great to gawp at, but it is unfit for purpose.

“This is what happens when you design a library which is not big enough and cut the staffing levels.

“They were warned this would happen.

“This is not the fault of staff whatsoever, they are struggling to maintain a basic service with a hugely reduced workforce.”

Architectural historian Andy Foster added: “It used to take about half-an-hour – now it is a week.

“And the reference stack is still not open. For some of us this has been absolutely dreadful.

“We all feel pretty lousy about this.”

Another university academic said: “The new Library of Birmingham is brilliant if you want to wander through and go up and have a look from the roof.

“But if you want to use it for the purpose it was intended then it is useless.

“We are having students who want to find research material, but they are being told the staff can’t find it.

“It seems like unless it is on the shelves around the library, then basically it has disappeared.

“In the first couple of months people could understand there were teething problems, but now it is more than six months since it opened last September.

“This should have all been sorted out by now and it is an absolutely farcical situation.”

All the research books and old periodicals are kept in what is known as ‘the stack’ – storage areas with special containers which are closed to the public.

But academics and students have been unable to access the stack for 18 months because it was also closed for a year while the building was under construction.

Student Harry Poll, 21, from Edinburgh ,who is studying politics at the University of Birmingham, said: “When I came down here I was told by proud Brummies about their brand new futuristic super library.

“But when I requested some research material I was told I couldn’t have it because they couldn’t access the books. I’m doing my dissertation and it’s just unacceptable.

“To find out its because of health and safety fears is just bonkers. They spend £190 million but can’t afford a little crane to reach the shelves.

“What is the point in having this swanky new library if you can’t read the books they have?”

One worker at the building said staff were “demoralised” because they were unable to help frustrated visitors.

They added: “We lost a lot of people who worked in the Central Library around the time of the transfer through voluntary redundancy and early retirement.

“We have got a lot of people now who are agency workers, and who don’t know how the old system worked.

“Staff are getting very demoralised because they can’t help people who come in.”

Brian Gambles, director of the Library of Birmingham, yesterday apologised to customers for the blunder.

He said: “We fully understand how popular materials in the closed stack areas of the Library of Birmingham are and it is frustrating that we haven’t yet been able to give our customers access to them.

“We had planned to introduce this service in the autumn, after the initial post-opening rush had settled a little, but because we’re still awaiting delivery of equipment to enable staff to retrieve items from the storage stacks safely, we have had to delay this service.

“We are in frequent contact with the suppliers to get a delivery date.

“We need mobile platform lift devices to enable safe working at heights.

“The contractor has not as yet supplied an option which satisfies all our requirements, so we are testing alternatives.

“I’d like to apologise to our customers and ask that they bear with us – we hope to have the service available later this spring.”

The creation of the £190million library was shrouded in controversy after it emerged cash-strapped Birmingham City Council had been forced to axe four community libraries as part of £2 million cuts.

It was officially opened by inspiration Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafza in September last year.

It was built to replace the city’s 1970s Central Library – which was likened to an ugly book-burning incinerator by Prince Charles.

The library contains around a million books as well as access to a vast film and television archive belonging to the British Film Institute

The 31,000 sq m (333,000 sq ft) building – which is clad partly in gold and covered in 5,357 interlocking metal circles – is also the new home of the second largest repository of Shakespeare’s works in the world.

The shelves that library staff are banned from reaching are 16ft (4.9m) high.

They were left inaccessible after a removal company used their own lifting equipment to transfer books to the library’s closed stack area.

Over 66,000 crates of books from the old public library were shifted to the new building 100 yards (91m) away during the move in August 2012.

A spokeswoman for the Library of Birmingham added: ” We fully understand how valuable this service is to researchers and are as concerned as they are to restart the service.

“However, to put this in context, we have been operating the service for items from the Archive, Heritage and Photography collections – comprising millions of items – since September.

“It is the low use book items where we have this problem.

“These are items kept in high storage because they are requested only infrequently.

“The Library has over 400,000 volumes of the most popular resources available on the public floors, more than double the number on show at Central Library.

“We have welcomed more than 1.7 million visitors to the Library of Birmingham since opening and it is a relatively very small number of people who ask for items from the stack storage.”