Moving the collection

The Crewe Collection arrived at Trinity in late 2015, a week before Christmas. The move was carefully planned, and preceded by months of visits to West Horsley Place, the last residence of the Duchess of Roxburghe, by the librarians, who browsed the original shelves and started making amazing discoveries.

Back in Cambridge, excitement was mounting and, finally, boxes and boxes of books were delivered and stored in a room in Burrell’s Field. Library staff started working on the collection: cleaning, sorting, moving, classifying, identifying.

The books were moved to the Wren in early 2016: more sorting took place, and then shelving. The cataloguing team and digitisation team became actively involved; you can read more on what they have achieved so far in the Work on the Crewe Collection page.