British Library Euston Road entrance, with distinctive red logo.
The 'British Library' ('BL') is the
national library of the
United Kingdom. It is based in
London and is one of the world's most significant
research libraries, holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats;
books,
journals,
newspapers,
magazines,
sound and music recordings,
patents,
databases,
maps,
stamps,
prints,
drawings and much more. The Library's collections include around 25 million books,
[1] along with substantial additional collection of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300
BC.
As a
legal deposit library, the BL receives copies of nearly all books produced in the United Kingdom, including all foreign books distributed in the UK. It also purchases many items which are only published outside Britain. The British Library adds some 3 million items every year.
Historical background
As an institution the British Library is young compared with its equivalents in other countries, having been created in 1973 by the ''British Library Act 1972''. Prior to this, the national library was part of the
British Museum, which provided the bulk of the holdings of the new library, alongside various smaller organisations which were folded in (such as the British National Bibliography). In 1983, the Library absorbed the
National Sound Archive. The core of the Library's historical collections is based on a series of donations and acquisitions from the eighteenth century, known as the 'foundation collections'. These include the books and manuscripts of
Sir Robert Cotton,
Sir Hans Sloane,
Robert Harley and
King George III.
For many years its collections were dispersed in various buildings around
central London, in places such as
Bloomsbury (within the
British Museum),
Chancery Lane, and
Holborn, with the lending library at
Boston Spa,
Yorkshire and the newspaper library at
Colindale, north-west London. However, since 1997 the main collection has been housed in a single new building on
Euston Road next to
St. Pancras railway station. The new library was designed specially for the purpose by the architect
Colin St. John Wilson. 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
Anthony Gormley. It is the largest public building constructed in the
United Kingdom in the 20th century. However, post-1800 newspapers are still held at Colindale, and the Document Supply Centre is still in Yorkshire. The Library also has a book storage depot in
Woolwich, south-east London.
At the heart of the building is a four-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.
Interior of the British Library, with the smoked glass wall of the King's Library in the background.
Legal deposit
An
Act of Parliament in 1911 established the principle of the
Legal Deposit, ensuring that the British Library, along with five other libraries in
Great Britain and
Ireland, is entitled to receive a free copy of every item published in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. The other five libraries are: the
Bodleian Library at
Oxford; the
University Library at
Cambridge;
Trinity College Library in
Dublin; and the National Libraries of
Scotland and
Wales. The British Library is the only one that must receive a copy of every item published in Britain; the others are entitled to these items but must specifically request them from the publisher.
In 2003 the
Ipswich MP
Chris Mole introduced a
Private Member's Bill which eventually passed, becoming the
Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003. This Act extends the Legal Deposit requirements to electronic documents such as
CD-ROMs and selected
websites. The BL explains its policies on legal deposit
here.
Using the Library's Reading Rooms
The Library is open to everyone who has a genuine need to use its collections, however it is most suited to those wishing to use specialised material that is not always available in public or academic libraries. Anyone with a permanent address who wishes to carry out research can register for a
Reader Pass, providing they provide proof of signature and address for security purposes. The Library has come under criticism for admitting
undergraduate students (who have access to their own university libraries) to the reading rooms, but the Library says that they have always admitted undergraduates as long as they have a legitimate personal, work-related or academic research purpose.
[2]
Catalogue entries can be found on the British Library Integrated Catalogue, which is based on Aleph (a commercial
Integrated Library System). Western Manuscripts are indexed and described on
MOLCAT and the Digital Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts. The Library's
website also offers other specialised catalogues and research services.
According to the website, more than half a million people use the Library's reading rooms every year. The large reading rooms cover hundreds of seats which are often filled with researchers every day, especially during the Easter and Summer holidays.
Exhibitions
A number of important works are on display to the general public in a gallery called the
Sir John Ritblat Gallery which is open to the public seven days a week at no charge. Some of the treasures visitors can see in the Gallery include the
Magna Carta, Captain Cook's journal, and Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre.
The Library also stages temporary free exhibitions on a wide range of subjects. Previous examples include
London: A Life in Maps, and
the Front Page: 100 years of newspapers in Britain.
The current main exhibition "
Sacred", running from 27 April-23 September 2007, features over 150 holy texts from the religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, and dozens of other religious items. Documents on show include a fragment of the
Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest Jewish Biblical documents; one of the earliest two Christian Bibles, the
Codex Sinaiticus; and one of the earliest Qur'ans, dating from the eighth century.
Business & IP Centre
In May 2005, the British Library was awarded £1 million by the
London Development Agency to transform two of its reading rooms into the Business &
IP Centre. The Centre was opened as a permanent resource in March 2006. It holds arguably the most comprehensive collection of business and intellectual property in the United Kingdom and is the official library of the
UK Intellectual Property Office.
The Business & IP Centre is separated into two distinct areas:
'Business information'
The collection is divided up into four main information areas:
market research; company information; trade directories; and
journals. It is available for free in hard copy and online via approximately 30 subscription databases. You must have a reader pass to access the collection and the databases.
'Patent and intellectual property information'
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. You must have a reader pass to access the collection and the databases.
Impartial information experts are trained to guide
SMEs and
Entrepreneurs to use the full range of resources. The Business & IP Centre also offers additional services including:
• The provision of a networking area for SMEs to meet and network with other SMEs, find out about the Library's full range of services and get inspiration from success stories about products and services conceived by other centre users.
• Workshops and clinics run by the British Library and its business partners on subjects including: using intellectual property resources to check if ideas are novel, how to protect your ideas & designs, capitalising on market research resources, financing, marketing and selling skills, and pinpointing customers. Some of these workshops have a specific focus on supporting the needs of women, black and Asian minority ethnic groups, and entrepreneurs with disabilities. These are free or charged at a subsidised rate.
• Events featuring successful entrepreneurs. Previous events have included ‘Winners – The Rise and Rise of Black British Entrepreneurs’, ‘The Asian Advantage’, ‘Mothers of Invention’, and talks by
Anita Roddick. These are available as webcasts.
Sound Archive
The
British Library Sound Archive holds more than a million discs and 200,000 tapes. 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 can be viewed at http://cadensa.bl.uk, and it is updated daily.
It is also possible to listen to recordings from the collection in selected Reading Rooms in the Library through their 'SoundServer' and 'Listening and Viewing Service', which is based in the Rare Books & Music Reading Room.
Researchers will need a Reader Pass to access these services.
In 2006 the Library launched a new online resource
Archival Sound Recordings which makes over 4,200 hours of the Sound Archive's recordings available online for UK higher and further education.
Newspapers
British Library Newspapers, Colindale
The British Library Newspapers section is based in
Colindale in North London. The Library has a more or less complete collection of British and Irish newspapers since 1840, owing in part to legal deposit legislation of 1869 mandating that the Library receive a copy of each edition of a newspaper. 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 45km of shelves.
A collection of particular interest is the
Thomason Tracts, containing 7,200
seventeenth century newspapers, and the
Burney Collection featuring newspapers from the late
eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. The Thomason Tracts and Burney collections are held at St Pancras, and are available in facsimile.
The section also has extensive records of non-British newspapers in languages that use the
Latin and
Cyrillic alphabets. The collection is less substantial for languages of the
Middle East and the rest of Asia, though some holdings of these are held at the main library in St. Pancras.
Philatelic collections
The British Library
Philatelic Collections are the National Philatelic Collections of the United Kingdom. The Collections were established in 1891 with the donation of the
Tapling Collection, they steadily developed and now comprise over twenty five 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.
An extensive display of material from the collections is on exhibit and is probably 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 by appointment.
As well as these extensive collections, the subject literature is very actively acquired, and makes the British Library one of the world's prime philatelic
research centres.
Miscellaneous information
The Library also holds the
Oriental and India Office Collections (OIOC), now called APAC (Asia, Pacific & Africa Collections) which contain the collections of the
India Office Library and Records, and materials in the languages of Asia and of north and north-east Africa.
The British Library does not specifically serve the legislature.
Parliament has its own libraries, the
House of Commons Library and the
House of Lords Library.
In the British Library's
Digital library project collections can be toured online and the virtual pages of
Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and other great works can be turned electronically. The British Library's
secure electronic delivery service, started in 2003 at a cost of 6 million pounds, brings access to more than one hundred million items (including 280,000 journal titles, 50 million patents, 5 million reports, 476,000 U.S. dissertations and 433,000 conference proceedings) for researchers and library patrons worldwide which were previously unavailable outside the Library due to
copyright restrictions.
The use of the Library's web catalogue also continues to increase. In 2003 more than 9.7 million searches were conducted.
''
The Guinness Book of World Records'' currently lists the American
Library of Congress as the "World's Largest Library".
[3] However, this is based on the shelf space the collection occupies; the Library of Congress states that its collection fills about 530 miles (850 km),
[4] while the British Library reports about 388 miles (625 km) of shelves.
[5] On the other hand, the Library of Congress holds about 130 million items with 29 million books,
[4] as against approximately 150 million items with 25 million books for the British Library.
Highlights of the collections
★ The
Stein collection from Central Asia.
★ The
Diamond Sutra, claimed to be the world's oldest dated printed book
★ The
Lindisfarne Gospels
★ Two
Gutenberg Bibles
★ Two 1215 copies of
Magna Carta
★ ''Papyrus Egerton 2'', the
Egerton Gospel
★ The only surviving
manuscript copy of the poem ''
Beowulf''
★ 347 leaves of the
Codex Sinaiticus
★ The Codex Arundel one of
Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks.
★ Working manuscripts by
J.S. Bach,
W.A. Mozart,
Gustav Mahler and
Benjamin Britten.
★ ''
My Ladye Nevells Booke of Virginal Musick by William Byrd, one of the two surviving collections of 16th century music for the virginal.
Threatened cutbacks to services
In February 2007 it was announced that threatened Treasury cuts to the British Library budget may necessitate cutbacks in services and facilities. These would include reducing the reading room opening hours, introducing charges for researchers and the closure of the public exhibitions, schools learning programs and the national newspaper archive in
Colindale. There is considerable public resistance to this, especially from academics and students, and several thousand names have been subscribed to a petition to the government.
[7]
References
1. Encyclopædia Britannica Article: British Library
2. A.N. Wilson, ''Evening Standard''; Tristram Hunt, ''Guardian''.
3. Guiness World Records: Amazing Feats: Big Stuff: Library: Largest library
4. Welcome Message from the Librarian of Congress
5. The British Library: About us: Did you know?
6. Welcome Message from the Librarian of Congress
7. British Library petition on the 10 Downing Street e-petitions site
★
Philatelic collections
★
Stamp World London 90, souvenir handbook, Sussex, John (editor), , , Stamp World Exhibitions, 1990, ISBN 0-9515891-0-5
See also
★
National Sound Archive
★
British literature
★
British Museum Reading Room
★
Incunabula Short Title Catalogue
★
Library of Congress Digital Library project
★
List of digital library projects
★
National Archives
★
National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program
★
National Library of Scotland
★
National Library of Wales
★
Theatre Archive Project
External links
★
The British Library homepage
★
The British Library Catalogue
★
The King's Library contained within The British Library
★
The 'Bibliotheca Universalis' homepage
★
The World's Earliest Dated Printed Book
★
Turning the Pages, digitizations of a few important books, with explanations (Macromedia Shockwave format)
★
The British Library Act, 1972
★
The Business & IP Centre homepage
★
Blog on entrepreneurship, innovation and business information by Neil Infield, Business & Ip Centre Manger at the British Library
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