Refurbishment is expected to be completed in March next year to adequately house and protect the nation's cultural and historical legacy.
Cape Town - The National Library of South Africa will temporarily close its Cape Town campus in Queen Victoria Street for renovations.
Library spokesperson, Jolene Bhadais, said the exercise was to conduct maintenance at the heritage building. Planned construction will include refurbishment of the roof and ablution facilities.
“It’s a bit of a renovation project, so we are renovating the roof, and replacing parts.
“We are also refurbishing ablution facilities in the Cape Town campus building,” Bhadais said.
It is anticipated the construction, which started yesterday, will end in March next year. Bhadais said the construction will affect library services due to the extent of the work that is scheduled.
“It is going to impact our services, you can imagine because I think what makes this project a little bit more complicated is because our Cape Town campus is a heritage building, so everything needs to be overseen by the heritage consultant.
“We have a responsibility towards the building to maintain it and make it conducive for our collections and users.”
A national library’s primary duty is to house and protect the nation’s cultural and historical legacy.
Bhadais said they were going to attempt to relocate as many of their services as possible. The library provides a wide range of services, including national and international reference and information services.
“We are going to relocate as many services as we can to our Centre for the Book, which is up the road.
“So limited services will be conducted but the campus itself won’t be accessible to the public,” she said.
Bhadais added: “Some of our collections will not be accessible, but some of the collections will be. If they call the number that we are promoting, our librarians would see if the collections are housed in the Matrix House or Centre for the Book.”
Researchers will also receive some much-needed assistance.
“We will work with our researchers because of the nature of what they are doing. If we can get our staff in Cape Town campus to maybe photocopy or digitise some collections, we will try to do that and do it on a one-to-one basis,” Bhadais said.
To get in touch with the library, call 064 649 6113 or email [email protected] for assistance.
Cape Argus