British Library

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British Library
Britishlibrary.gif
British library london.jpg
The British Library from the concourse
Country United Kingdom
Type National library
Established 1973 (1753)
Location 96, Euston Road, London, England, NW1 2DB
Branches 2 (Boston Spa, West Yorkshire and Colindale, London)
Collection
Items collected books, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings and manuscripts
Size

150,000,000 total items
13,950,000 books[1]
824,101 serial titles
351,116 manuscripts (single and volumes)
8,266,276 philatelic items
4,347,505 cartographic items
1,607,885 music scores

3,000,000 sound recordings
Legal deposit Yes, as enshrined in the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003
Access and use
Access requirements Open to anyone with a need to use the collections and services
Other information
Budget £142million[1]
Director Roly Keating (Chief Executive, since 12 September 2012)
Website www.bl.uk

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom.[2] The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from many countries, in many languages[3] and in many formats, both print and digital: books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, videos, play-scripts, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings. The Library's collections include around 14 million books,[4] along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 2000 BC. British Library is one of the two largest libraries in the world, the other being The Library of Congress.

As a legal deposit library, the British Library receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland, including a significant proportion of overseas titles distributed in the UK. It also has a programme for content acquisitions. The British Library adds some three million items every year occupying 9.6 kilometres (6.0 mi) of new shelf space.[5]

The library is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It is located on the north side of Euston Road in St Pancras, London (between Euston railway station and St Pancras railway station) and has a document storage centre and reading room at Boston Spa, Wetherby in West Yorkshire.

The library was originally a department of the British Museum and from the mid-19th century occupied the famous circular British Museum Reading Room. It became legally separate in 1973, and by 1997 had moved into its new purpose-built building at St Pancras, London.

Contents

Historical background [edit]

The British Library was created on 1 July 1973 as a result of the British Library Act 1972.[6] Prior to this, the national library was part of the British Museum, which provided the bulk of the holdings of the new library, alongside smaller organisations which were folded in (such as the National Central Library, the National Lending Library for Science and Technology and the British National Bibliography).[6] In 1974 functions previously exercised by the Office for Scientific and Technical Information were taken over; in 1982 the India Office Library and Records and the HMSO Binderies became British Library responsibilities.[7] In 1983, the Library absorbed the National Sound Archive, which holds many sound and video recordings, with over a million discs and thousands of tapes.[8]

The core of the Library's historical collections is based on a series of donations and acquisitions from the 18th century, known as the 'foundation collections'.[9] These include the books and manuscripts of Sir Robert Cotton, Sir Hans Sloane, Robert Harley and the King's Library of King George III,[10] as well as the Old Royal Library donated by King George II.

The British Library at Boston Spa (on Thorp Arch Trading Estate), West Yorkshire

For many years its collections were dispersed in various buildings around central London, in places such as Bloomsbury (within the British Museum), Chancery Lane, Bayswater, and Holborn with an interlibrary lending centre at Boston Spa, Wetherby in West Yorkshire (situated on Thorp Arch Trading Estate) and the newspaper library at Colindale, north-west London.[6]

Initial plans for the British Library required demolition of an integral part of Bloomsbury - a seven acre swathe of streets immediately in front of the Museum, so that the Library could be situated directly opposite. After a long and hard-fought campaign led by Dr George Wagner, this decision was overturned and the library was instead constructed on a site at Euston Road next to St Pancras railway station.[11]

Since 1997 the main collection has been housed in this single new building, although post-1800 newspapers are still held at Colindale, and the Document Supply Centre is in Yorkshire. The Library previously had a book storage depot in Woolwich, south-east London, which is no longer in use. The new library was designed specially for the purpose by the architect Colin St John Wilson.[6] Facing Euston Road is a large piazza that includes pieces of public art, such as large sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi (a bronze statue based on William Blake's study of Isaac Newton) and Antony Gormley. It is the largest public building constructed in the United Kingdom in the 20th century.[12][13]

The British Library and St Pancras

In the middle of the building is a six-storey glass tower containing the King's Library, with 65,000 printed volumes along with other pamphlets, manuscripts and maps collected by King George III between 1763 and 1820.[14] In December 2009 a new storage building at Boston Spa was opened by Rosie Winterton. The new facility, costing £26 million, has a capacity for seven million items, stored in more than 140,000 bar-coded containers, which are retrieved by robots,[15] from the 162.7 Miles of temperature and humidity-controlled storage space.[16]

On Thursday, April 5, 2013, Lucie Burgess, the British Library's head of content strategy, announced that, starting that weekend, the Library will begin saving all sites with the suffix .uk- every British website, e-book, online newsletter, and blog, in a bid to preserve the nation's "digital memory" (which as of then amounted to about 4.8 million sites containing 1 billion web pages). The Library will make all the material publicly available to users by the end of 2013, and will ensure that, through technological advancements, all the material is preserved for future generations, despite the fluidity of the Internet.[17]

Legal deposit [edit]

Interior of the British Library, with the smoked glass wall of the King's Library in the background.

In England, legal deposit can be traced back to at least 1610.[18] The Copyright Act 1911 established the principle of the legal deposit, ensuring that the British Library and five other libraries in Great Britain and Ireland are entitled to receive a free copy of every item published or distributed in Britain. The other five libraries are: the Bodleian Library at Oxford; the University Library at Cambridge; the Trinity College Library at Dublin; and the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales. The British Library is the only one that must automatically receive a copy of every item published in Britain; the others are entitled to these items, but must specifically request them from the publisher after learning that they have been or are about to be published, a task done centrally by the Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries.

Further, under the terms of Irish copyright law (most recently the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000), the British Library is entitled to automatically receive a free copy of every book published in Ireland, alongside the National Library of Ireland, the Trinity College Library at Dublin, the library of the University of Limerick, the library of Dublin City University and the libraries of the four constituent universities of the National University of Ireland. The Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, and the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales are also entitled to copies of material published in Ireland, but again must formally make requests.

In 2003 the Ipswich MP Chris Mole introduced a Private Member's Bill which became the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003. The Act extends United Kingdom legal deposit requirements to electronic documents, such as CD-ROMs and selected websites.[19]

The Library also holds the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections (APAC) which include the India Office Records and materials in the languages of Asia and of north and north-east Africa.[20]

Using the library's reading rooms [edit]

The mechanical book handling system (MBHS[21]) used to deliver requested books from stores to reading rooms.
Bronze sculpture. Bill Woodrow's 'Sitting On History' was purchased for the British Library by Carl Djerassi and Diane Middlebrook in 1997.
Sitting on History, with its ball and chain, refers to the book as the captor of information which we cannot escape

The bust visible top left is Colin St. John Wilson RA by Celia Scott, 1998 a gift from the American Trust for the British Library. Sir Colin designed the British Library building

The Library is open to everyone who has a genuine need to use its collections. Anyone with a permanent address who wishes to carry out research can apply for a Reader Pass; they are required to provide proof of signature and address for security purposes.[22]

Historically, only those wishing to use specialised material unavailable in other public or academic libraries would be given a Reader Pass. The Library has been criticised for admitting numbers of undergraduate students, who have access to their own university libraries, to the reading rooms. The Library replied that it has always admitted undergraduates as long as they have a legitimate personal, work-related or academic research purpose.[23]

The majority of catalogue entries can be found on Explore the British Library, the Library's main catalogue, which is based on Primo.[24] Other collections have their own catalogues, such as western manuscripts. The large reading rooms offer hundreds of seats which are often filled with researchers, especially during the Easter and summer holidays.

Material available online [edit]

The British Library makes a number of images of items within its collections available online. Its Online Gallery gives access to 30,000 images from various medieval books, together with a handful of exhibition-style items in a proprietary format, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. This includes the facility to "turn the virtual pages" of a few documents, such as Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks.[25] Catalogue entries for a large number of the illuminated manuscript collections are available online, with selected images of pages or miniatures from a growing number of them,[26] and there is a database of significant bookbindings.[27]

The British Library's commercial secure electronic delivery service was started in 2003 at a cost of £6 million. This offers more than 100 million items (including 280,000 journal titles, 50 million patents, 5 million reports, 476,000 US dissertations and 433,000 conference proceedings) for researchers and library patrons worldwide which were previously unavailable outside the Library because of copyright restrictions. In line with a government directive that the British Library must cover a percentage of its operating costs, a fee is charged to the user. However, this service is no longer profitable and has led to a series of restructures to try to prevent further losses.[28] When Google Books started, the British Library signed an agreement with Microsoft to digitise a number of books from the British Library for its Live Search Books project.[29] This material was only available to readers in the US, and closed in May 2008.[30] The scanned books are currently available via the British Library catalogue or Amazon.[31]

In October 2010 the British Library launched its Management and business studies portal. This website is designed to allow digital access to management research reports, consulting reports, working papers and articles.[32]

In November 2011, four million newspaper pages from the 18th and 19th centuries were made available online. The project will scan up to 40 million pages over the next 10 years. The archive is free to search, but there is a charge for accessing the pages themselves.[33]

Electronic collections [edit]

Explore the British Library is the latest iteration of the online catalogue. It contains nearly 57 million records and may be used to search, view and order items from the collections or search the contents of the Library's website. The Library's electronic collections include over 40,000 ejournals, 800 databases and other electronic resources.[34] A number of these are available for remote access to registered St Pancras Reader Pass holders.

Exhibitions [edit]

Bronze sculpture. Inscription reads
'NEWTON' after William Blake by Eduardo Paolozzi 1995 Grant aided by The Foundation for Sport & the Arts. Funded by subscriptions from the football pools, Vernon, Littlewoods, Zetters

A number of books and manuscripts are on display to the general public in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery which is open seven days a week at no charge. Some of the manuscripts in the exhibition include Beowulf, the Lindisfarne Gospels and St Cuthbert Gospel, a Gutenberg Bible, Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (King Arthur), Captain Cook's journal, Jane Austen's History of England, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and a room devoted solely to Magna Carta, as well as several Qu'rans and Asian items.[35]

In addition to the permanent exhibition, there are frequent thematic exhibitions which have covered maps,[36] sacred texts[37] and the history of the English language.[38]

Business and IP Centre [edit]

In May 2005, the British Library received a grant of £1 million from the London Development Agency to change two of its reading rooms into the Business & IP Centre. The Centre was opened in March 2006.[39] It holds arguably the most comprehensive collection of business and intellectual property (IP) material in the United Kingdom and is the official library of the UK Intellectual Property Office.

The collection is divided up into four main information areas: market research, company information, trade directories, and journals. It is free of charge in hard copy and online via approximately 30 subscription databases. Registered readers can access the collection and the databases.[40]

There are over 50 million patent specifications from 40 countries in a collection dating back to 1855. The collection also includes official gazettes on patents, trade marks and Registered Design; law reports and other material on litigation; and information on copyright. This is available in hard copy and via online databases.[41]

Staff are trained to guide small and medium enterprises (SME) and entrepreneurs to use the full range of resources.[41]

Sound archive [edit]

Tape players used in the British Library Sound Archives, 2009 photo.
Main article: British Library Sound Archive

The British Library Sound Archive holds more than a million discs and 185,000 tapes.[42] The collections come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound from music, drama and literature to oral history and wildlife sounds, stretching back over more than 100 years. The Sound Archive's online catalogue is updated daily.

It is also possible to listen to recordings from the collection in selected Reading Rooms in the Library through their SoundServer[43] and Listening and Viewing Service, which is based in the Rare Books & Music Reading Room.[44]

In 2006 the Library launched a new online resource Archival Sound Recordings which makes over 10,000 hours of the Sound Archive's recordings available online for UK higher and further education and the general public.[45]

Newspapers [edit]

British Library Newspapers, Colindale

The British Library Newspapers section is based in Colindale in North London.[46] The Library has an almost complete collection of British and Irish newspapers since 1840. This is partly because of the legal deposit legislation of 1869, which required newspapers to supply a copy of each edition of a newspaper to the library. London editions of national daily and Sunday newspapers are complete back to 1801. In total the collection consists of 660,000 bound volumes and 370,000 reels of microfilm containing tens of millions of newspapers with 52,000 titles on 45 km of shelves. In May 2010 a ten-year programme of digitisation of the newspaper archives with commercial partner DC Thomson subsidiary brightsolid began.[47][48] In November 2011, BBC News announced the launch of the British Newspaper Archive, an initiative to facilitate online access to over one million pages of pre-20th century newspapers.[49]

Among the collections are the Thomason Tracts, containing 7,200 17th century newspapers,[50] and the Burney Collection, featuring nearly 1 million pages of newspapers from the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century.[51] The Thomason Tracts and Burney collections are held at St Pancras, and are available in digital facsimile.

The section also has extensive records of non-British newspapers in languages that use the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. The Library's substantial holdings of newspapers in the languages of Asia and the Middle East may be accessed at the Library's reading rooms at St. Pancras.

Philatelic Collections [edit]

Main article: British Library Philatelic Collections
Philatelic collections
The entrance gate and its shadow (designed by Lida and David Kindersley)

The British Library Philatelic Collections are held at St Pancras. The collections were established in 1891 with the donation of the Tapling collection,[52] they steadily developed and now comprise over 25 major collections and a number of smaller ones, encompassing a wide range of disciplines. The collections include postage and revenue stamps, postal stationery, essays, proofs, covers and entries, "cinderella stamp" material, specimen issues, airmails, some postal history materials, official and private posts, etc., for almost all countries and periods.[53]

An extensive display of material from the collections is on exhibit, which may be the best permanent display of diverse classic stamps and philatelic material in the world. Approximately 80,000 items on 6,000 sheets may be viewed in 1,000 display frames; 2,400 sheets are from the Tapling Collection. All other material, which covers the whole world, is available to students and researchers.[53] As well as these collections, the library actively acquires literature on the subject. This makes the British Library one of the world's prime philatelic research centres. The Head Curator of the Philatelic Collections is David Beech.[53]

Highlights of the collections [edit]

Highlights selected by the British Library include:[54]

Collections of manuscripts [edit]

Foundation collections [edit]

The three foundation collections are those which were brought together to form the initial manuscript holdings of the British Museum in 1753:[59]

Other named collections [edit]

Other "named" collections of manuscripts include, but are not restricted to, the following:

Additional manuscripts [edit]

The Additional Manuscripts series covers manuscripts that are not part of the named collections, and contains all other manuscripts gifted, purchased or bequeathed to the Library since 1756.[60]

Transport connections [edit]

Service Station/Stop Lines/Routes served
London Buses London Buses British Library Handicapped/disabled access 10, 18, 30, 59, 73, 91, 205, 390, 476,
N73, N91
London Underground London Underground King's Cross St. Pancras Handicapped/disabled access Circle line
Hammersmith & City line
Metropolitan line
Northern line
Piccadilly line
Victoria line
London Overground London Overground Euston Handicapped/disabled access Watford DC Line
National Rail National Rail King's Cross Handicapped/disabled access
St Pancras Handicapped/disabled access

See also [edit]

Portal icon British Library portal

References [edit]

  1. ^ a b British Library thirty-seventh annual report and accounts. 2009/10. ISBN 978-0-10-296664-0 
  2. ^ Reitz, Joan M. (2004). Dictionary for Library and Information Science. Libraries Unlimited. p. 103. ISBN 978-1-59158-075-1 
  3. ^ "Collection Development Policy". British Library. Retrieved 2011-01-15. 
  4. ^ "The British Library; Explore the world's knowledge". British Library. Retrieved 2010-04-12. 
  5. ^ The British Library Annual Report and Accounts 2010/11, p.31
  6. ^ a b c d "History of the British Library". British Library. Archived from the original on 2010-02-07. Retrieved 2010-02-07. 
  7. ^ Whitaker's Almanack; 1988, p. 409
  8. ^ "About the British Library Sound Archive". British Library. Archived from the original on 2010-02-07. Retrieved 2010-02-07. 
  9. ^ Wedgeworth, Robert (1993). World Encyclopedia of Library and Information Services (3 ed.). ALA Editions. p. 149. ISBN 978-0-8389-0609-5 
  10. ^ "Similar Projects - The British Library". Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. Archived from the original on 2010-02-07. Retrieved 2010-02-07. 
  11. ^ "What and Where is Bloomsbury Village?". Casweb.org. Retrieved 2013-02-27. 
  12. ^ "British Library - About Us". British Library. Archived from the original on 2010-02-07. Retrieved 2010-02-07. 
  13. ^ Walkowitz, Daniel J.; Knauer, Lisa Maya (2009). Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation. Duke University Press. p. 103. ISBN 978-0-8223-4236-6 
  14. ^ Nichols, Thomas (1870). A handy-book of the British Museum: for every-day readers. Cassell, Petter, and Galpin. p. 396 
  15. ^ "Robots used at £26m British Library store". BBC. 2009-12-03. Archived from the original on 2010-02-07. Retrieved 2010-02-07. 
  16. ^ "Minister opens British Library's new £26 million storage facility in Yorkshire – the most advanced in the world.". British Library. 2009-12-03. Archived from the original on 2010-02-07. Retrieved 2010-02-07. 
  17. ^ http://news.msn.com/world/british-library-to-preserve-nation%e2%80%99s-entire-internet-history
  18. ^ Robert C. Barrington Partridge "The history of the legal deposit of books throughout the British Empire", London: Library Association, 1938
  19. ^ "Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003". Office of Public Sector Information. Archived from the original on 2010-02-07. Retrieved 2010-02-07. 
  20. ^ "Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections". British Library. Retrieved 2010-02-08. 
  21. ^ "Glossary of Map terms". British Library. 2003-11-30. Retrieved 2011-01-28. 
  22. ^ "How to register for a Reader Pass". British Library. Retrieved 2010-02-08. 
  23. ^ Brierley, Danny (2008-04-21). "British Library like a branch of Starbooks say the literati". Evening Standard. Retrieved 2010-02-08. 
  24. ^ Primo. Exlibris Group. 8 December 2011 
  25. ^ "Explore the British Library". British Library. Retrieved 2010-02-25. 
  26. ^ "Catalogue of Illuminated manuscripts". Bl.uk. Retrieved 2013-02-27. 
  27. ^ "Database of bookbindings". Bl.uk. Retrieved 2013-02-27. 
  28. ^ "PCS strike: your reports". Socialist Worker. 31 January 2007. Retrieved 2010-04-12. 
  29. ^ Tran, Mark (4 November 2005). "Microsoft teams up with British Library to digitise books". The Guardian (London: Guardian News and Media). Retrieved 2010-04-12. 
  30. ^ Helft, Miguel (2008-05-24). "Microsoft Will Shut Down Book Search Program". New York Times. Retrieved 2010-02-26. 
  31. ^ "Amazon seals British Library deal for free Kindle classics". 
  32. ^ "Management and business studies portal: About this site". British Library. Retrieved 3-Mar-2011. 
  33. ^ "British Library scans 18th and 19th-Century newspapers". November 29, 2011. 
  34. ^ "Electronic collections, British Library, 2012-07-25. Retrieved 2012-08-01". Bl.uk. 2003-11-30. Retrieved 2013-02-27. 
  35. ^ "Sir John Ritblat Gallery: Treasures of the British Library". British Library. Retrieved 2010-02-08. 
  36. ^ Magnificent Maps on British Library website
  37. ^ Sacred on British Library website
  38. ^ "Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices". British Library. Retrieved 2011-02-06. 
  39. ^ Chadwick, Gareth (5 June 2007). "The British Library: An excellent business support centre". The Independent. "The pilot was such a success that in May 2005 the London Development Agency, the Mayor of London's agency for business and jobs, announced a £1m funding package to turn the project into a permanent resource. The centre's facilities were enlarged and upgraded to include state-of-the-art meeting rooms, a networking area and wireless internet access. A team of information experts is on hand to help people find the information they need. The new centre re-launched in March 2006. In the 14 months since, it has welcomed more than 25,000 people through its doors." 
  40. ^ "What's on offer at the British Library Business & IP Centre?". Startups. Retrieved 2011-01-28. 
  41. ^ a b "British Library Business & IP Centre in London | Frequently asked questions". British Library. 2003-11-30. Retrieved 2011-01-28. 
  42. ^ "UK music archive in decay warning". BBC News. 25 September 2006. 
  43. ^ "British Library Sound Archive staff exchange program". National Film and Sound Archive, Australia. 2010-07-30. Retrieved 2011-01-28. 
  44. ^ "British Library Acquires Major Sound Collection Of Welsh Dialects". Culture24. 22 July 2008. Retrieved 2011-01-28. 
  45. ^ "British Library archival sound recordings project". JISC. 27 July 2010. Retrieved 2011-01-28. 
  46. ^ Cleaver, Alan (2011-01-19). "Farewell to history?". Independent. Retrieved 2011-01-28. 
  47. ^ "British Library digitises 40m newspaper pages to enable paid-for web access". Document Management News. 2010-05-19. Retrieved 2011-01-28. 
  48. ^ "British Library and Brightsolid partnership to digitise up to 40 million pages of historic newspapers". Brightsolid. Retrieved 2011-01-28. 
  49. ^ "British Newspaper Archive launched online". November 29, 2011. Retrieved December 5, 2011. 
  50. ^ "Secret gold chest in treasure ship". Mail Online. 2007-05-26. Retrieved 2011-01-28. 
  51. ^ "The Burney Collection of 17th and 18th Century Newspapers". Web.resourceshelf.com. Retrieved 2011-01-28. 
  52. ^ "The Tapling Collection". British Library. Retrieved 2010-04-12. 
  53. ^ a b c David Beech; Paul Skinner; Bobby Birchall; Catherine Britton. Treasures in Focus – Stamps. British Library. ISBN 978-0-7123-0953-0. Retrieved 2011-01-16 
  54. ^ "Highlights tour". British Library. 2003-11-30. Retrieved 2011-02-06. 
  55. ^ "BL, Facts & figures". British Library. Retrieved 2010-04-12. 
  56. ^ Sinai: The Site & the History by Mursi Saad El Din, Ayman Taher, Luciano Romano 1998 ISBN 0-8147-2203-2 page 101
  57. ^ "Beowulf: sole surviving manuscript". The British Library. Retrieved 2008-10-22. 
  58. ^ "Let There Be Light". Library of Congress Information Bulletin. Library of Congress. July 1997. Retrieved 2010-04-12. 
  59. ^ Nickson, M.A.E. (1998). The British Library: Guide to the catalogues and indexes of the Department of Manuscripts (3rd ed.). London: British Library. p. 4. ISBN 0712306609. 
  60. ^ "Manuscripts: Ongoing collections". British Library. 

Further reading [edit]

  • Alan Day: Inside the British Library. Library Association, London 1998, ISBN 1-85604-280-4
  • Philip Howard: The British Library, a treasure of knowledge. Scala, London 2008, ISBN 978-1-85759-375-4
  • Mandelbrote, Giles; Taylor, Barry (2009). Libraries Within the Library: The Origins of the British Library's Printed Collections. British Library. ISBN 978-0-7123-5035-8 
  • Colin St John Wilson: The design and construction of the British Library. British Library, London 1998, ISBN 0-7123-0658-7
  • Robert Proctor A Critical Edition of the Private Diaries of Robert Proctor: the life of a librarian at the British Museum; edited by J. H. Bowman. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010 ISBN 0-7734-3634-0
  • Michael Leapman: The Book of the British Library. The British Library, London 2012, ISBN 0-7123-5837-8

External links [edit]

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