Tour of NLB facility gives public rare look at how books get readied for library shelves

SINGAPORE – The distinct scent of thousands of new books fills the air of a warehouse in Changi South.

It is not a bookshop but the Library Supply Centre (LSC), where some 3,000 brand new books are catalogued and processed daily.

In a year, the volume of materials processed in the warehouse exceeds one million items.

The centre, which spans about 7,000 sq m, serves as the central warehouse and processing facility for the National Library Board’s (NLB) network of public libraries across Singapore.

For the first time, the public on Sept 5 got a behind-the-scenes look at how incoming library materials are received and processed before they make their way to the shelves at public libraries.

The tour of the LSC is part of the month-long Love Our Libraries and Archives 2025 festivities celebrating NLB’s 30th anniversary. 

NLB expects about 200 patrons to join six guided tours of the LSC over three separate days. All tours have been fully subscribed.

During the tour, staff will first perform a quality check against the goods receipt to verify that the books purchased are correct and in good condition.

The books are then tagged with a unique barcode before being catalogued, to help with the ease of searchability of the books. Bibliographic records are also created during the cataloguing process, to make the search and retrieval of library materials via the online public access catalogue easier.

Spine labels are pasted onto the books, which also get radio frequency identification tags that enable patrons to return their books through automated bookdrops. Finally, the books are registered in the NLB system.

Those on the LSC tour also get to learn about the preservation and conservation work done by the Legal Deposit and the Archives Conservation Lab at LSC.

Preserving Singapore’s heritage

Under the National Library Board Act, NLB functions to “provide a repository of archives of national or historical significance and to facilitate access to these archives”. 

The Legal Deposit does just that. It requires publishers to submit physical and digital copies of all materials published and distributed in Singapore to the National Library, ensuring the nation’s published heritage is preserved and made accessible for future generations.

Currently, the Legal Deposit has over one million items.

Mr Gareth Teng, 38, manager of resource management at NLB, said that the Legal Deposit does not acquire only new materials, but also old materials from donors.

These include maps, posters, yearbooks and magazines.

One of the oldest materials in the Legal Deposit is the programme booklet commemorating the foundation stone-laying ceremony of Clyde Terrace Market – once Singapore’s largest market – on March 29, 1873.

“This is actually a programme booklet meant only for that particular day, but it gives us historical information, for current researchers to look back at what we had back then,” Mr Teng said.

If library materials and donated materials of heritage value are in poor condition, the team at the Archives Conservation Lab work to repair them before they are preserved, exhibited or digitised.

When repairing items, they respect the original integrity of the items and avoid excessive restoration.

Mr Teng hopes the tour will transform patrons’ understanding of how Singapore’s library system operates.

“This allows patrons to have a behind-the-scenes look at how our libraries have progressed and transformed over the years in processing and cataloguing library materials,” he said.

Other Love Our Libraries and Archives events include the 10th edition of

the Big Book Giveaway

, where some 60,000 books will be given away on Sept 13 and 14.

Correction note: An earlier version of the story said the Library Supply Centre spans over 7,000 sq m. The National Library Board has clarified that it covers an area of 6,977 sq m.