About 100,000 new books are added to the shelves every year - placing enormous pressure on space.

As well as providing a home for the university's own books, the establishment is also a legal deposit library - which means every book published in the UK ends up at Cambridge.

According to Peter Fox, university librarian, the space in Europe's largest open-access library is "almost full"

It takes one of 14 "fetchers" about 30 minutes to find a text located on the library's computer system which logs each of the seven million books.

"We've got space for another year or two's intake", Mr Fox said.

"But then we shall need to build another extension."