How many shelves are in the LSE Library?

We don't know! Asking various colleagues who (arguably) should know (they 'do books'; we don't) the estimated answers varied between 2,500 and 18,000. My rough estimate after a quick count of one area was about 5,000 and this tallied with the un-prompted guess from our LMS manager.

By 'shelves' we mean one side of a single vertical stack, about 1.2m wide and normally of 7 actual rows of books. Here is an overview of one typical area of our stacks.

We think LSE is fairly representative of the 'large' end of libraries for which the LibraryLocator will be usable (i.e. not the BL or the Library of Congress). If the answer is in the region of 5,000 we can probably use a simple and fast in-memory approach to lookup; but not using a rdb backend would mean we'd have to do slightly more work on the maintenance user interface.