TheBritish Library is the national library of the United Kingdom.[3] Based in London, it is one of thelargest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries.[4][5][6][7] As alegal deposit library, it receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland, as well as a significant proportion of overseas titles distributed in the United Kingdom. The library operates as anon-departmental public body sponsored by theDepartment for Culture, Media and Sport.
The British Library is a major research library, with items in many languages[8] 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,[9] along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and items dating as far back as 2000 BC. The library maintains a programme for content acquisition and adds some three million items each year occupying 9.6 kilometres (6 mi) of new shelf space.[10]
The Library's purpose-built building stands next toSt Pancras station in London. It was officially opened byElizabeth II on 25 June 1998, and is classified as a Grade Ilisted building "of exceptional interest" for its architecture and history.[11] Off-site storage is provided at a second site nearBoston Spa in Yorkshire.
The British Library was created on 1 July 1973 as a result of the British Library Act 1972.[12] Prior to this, the national library was part of theBritish Museum, which provided the bulk of the holdings of the new library, alongside smaller organisations which were folded in (such as theNational Central Library,[13] the National Lending Library for Science and Technology and theBritish National Bibliography).[12] In 1974 functions previously exercised by the Office for Scientific and Technical Information were taken over; in 1982 theIndia Office Library and Records and theHMSO Binderies became British Library responsibilities.[14] In 1983, the Library absorbed theNational Sound Archive, which holds many sound and video recordings, with over a million discs and thousands of tapes.[15]
The core of the Library's historical collections is based on a series of donations and acquisitions from the 18th century. These are known as the "foundation collections",[16] and they include the books and manuscripts ofSir Hans Sloane (d. 1753), whose decision to donate his library and natural history collection to the nation led to the formation of theBritish Museum.[17] The trustees of the museum also purchased theHarleian Library collection ofRobert Harley (d. 1721) for £10,000;[18][19][a] Also provided to the library was theCotton library, the former collection ofSir Robert Cotton (d. 1631); this was already in public possession and had been housed atAshburnham House, Westminster.[19] These three collections were later joined by theOld Royal Library, donated byGeorge II,[21] and theKing's Library ofGeorge III;[22]
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 byJohn Laing plc[23] on a site atEuston Road next toSt Pancras railway station.[24]
Following the closure of the Round Reading Room on 25 October 1997 the library stock began to be moved into the St Pancras building. Before the end of that year the first of eleven new reading rooms had opened and the moving of stock was continuing.[25] From 1997 to 2009 the main collection was housed in this single new building and the collection of British and overseas newspapers was housed atColindale. In July 2008 the Library announced that it would be moving low-use items to a new storage facility inBoston Spa in Yorkshire and that it planned to close the newspaper library at Colindale, ahead of a later move to a similar facility on the same site.[26] From January 2009 to April 2012 over 200 km of material was moved to the Additional Storage Building and is now delivered to British Library Reading Rooms in London on request by a daily shuttle service.[27] Construction work on the Additional Storage Building was completed in 2013 and the newspaper library at Colindale closed on 8 November 2013. The collection has now been split between the St Pancras and Boston Spa sites.[28] The Library previously had a book storage depot inWoolwich, south-east London, which is no longer in use.[29]
Entrance hall with tapestry
The new library was designed specially for the purpose by the architectColin St John Wilson[12] in collaboration with his wifeMJ Long, who came up with the plan that was subsequently developed and built.[30] Facing Euston Road is a large piazza that includes pieces ofpublic art, such as large sculptures byEduardo Paolozzi (a bronze statue based onWilliam Blake's study ofIsaac Newton) andAntony Gormley. It was the largest public building constructed in the United Kingdom in the 20th century.[31][32]
In the middle of the building is a six-storey glass tower inspired by a similar structure in theBeinecke Library, containing theKing's Library with 65,000 printed volumes along with other pamphlets, manuscripts and maps collected by King George III between 1763 and 1820.[33] In December 2009 a new storage building at Boston Spa was opened byRosie Winterton. The new facility, costing £26 million, has a capacity for seven million items, stored in more than 140,000bar-coded containers and which are retrieved by robots[34] from the 162.7 miles of temperature and humidity-controlled storage space.[35]
The Euston Road building was Grade I listed on 1 August 2015.[11] It has plans to open a third location inLeeds,[36] potentially located in the Grade 1 listedTemple Works.[37]
In 2005 the British Library started theUK Web Archive project, collecting and preserving websites from the UK. Each time the library collected data, it contacted the website owners for the permission to archive their websites.[38]
In 2012 the UKlegal deposit libraries signed a memorandum of understanding that have allowed the library: to automatically collect all websites[38] and create a shared technical infrastructure implementing the Digital Library System (DLS) developed by the British Library.[39] On 5 April 2013 the Library announced a project to archive all sites with the suffix.uk 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 made all the material publicly available to users by the end of 2013,[needs update] and would ensure that, through technological advancements, all the material is preserved for future generations, despite the fluidity of the Internet.[40] After UK government passed the "Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013", British Library were able to add an extension to the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 to include non-print electronic publications from 6 April 2013.[41]
Four storage nodes locations (in London,Boston Spa,Aberystwyth, andEdinburgh) are linked via a secure network in constant communication automatically replicate, self-check, and repair data.[42] A completecrawl of every.uk domain (and otherTop-level domains) has been added annually to the DLS since 2013,[43][44] which also contains all of theInternet Archive's 1996–2013 .uk collection. The policy and system is based on that of theBibliothèque nationale de France, which has crawled the.fr domain annually since 2006; with the help of the Internet Archive until 2010.[citation needed]
On 28 October 2023 the British Library's entire website went down due to a cyber attack,[45] later confirmed as aransomware attack attributed to ransomware groupRhysida.[46][47][48] Catalogues and ordering systems were affected, rendering the great majority of the library's collections inaccessible to readers. The library released statements saying that their services would be disrupted for several weeks,[49] with some disruption expected to persist for several months.[50]
As at January 2024, the British Library continued to experience technology outages as a result of the cyber-attack.[51][52] By October 2024 many of the previously inaccessible services had been restored, including remote item ordering, online learning services and online manuscripts.[53]
In March 2025, the British Library announced plans for a £1.1 billion renovation, funded by Japanese property developerMitsui Fudosan. The project aims to expand the library's public spaces, adding 100,000 square feet for cultural, learning, research, and business activities, along with 600,000 square feet of new commercial and retail areas.[54]
The British Library is alegal deposit library.[55] In England, legal deposit can be traced back to at least 1610.[56] TheCopyright 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: theBodleian Library atOxford; theUniversity Library atCambridge;Trinity College Library inDublin; and theNational Libraries of Scotland andWales. 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 theAgency for the Legal Deposit Libraries.[55]
Under the terms ofIrish 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 theNational Library of Ireland, Trinity College Library in Dublin, the library of theUniversity of Limerick, the library ofDublin City University and the libraries of the four constituent universities of theNational 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.[55]
The British Library Document Supply Service (BLDSS) and the Library's Document Supply Collection and itsSecure Electronic Delivery is based at the Library's site in Boston Spa. Collections housed in Yorkshire, comprising low-use material and the newspaper and Document Supply collections, make up around 70% of the total material the library holds.[58] The Library also holds theAsia, Pacific and Africa Collections (APAC) which include theIndia Office Records and materials in the languages of Asia and of north and north-east Africa.[59]
TheAdditional Manuscripts series covers manuscripts that are not part of the named collections, and contains all other manuscripts donated, purchased or bequeathed to the Library since 1756. The numbering begins at 4101, as the series was initially regarded as a continuation of the collection of Sloane manuscripts, which are numbered 1 to 4100.[61]
Former British Library Newspapers building,Colindale
The Library holds 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 ofmicrofilm containing tens of millions of newspapers with 52,000 titles on 45 km (28 mi) of shelves. From earlier dates, the collections include theThomason Tracts, comprising 7,200 seventeenth-century newspapers,[62] and theBurney Collection, featuring nearly 1 million pages of newspapers from the late 18th and early 19th centuries.[63] The section also holds extensive collections of non-British newspapers, in numerous languages.[64]
The Newspapers section was based inColindale in North London until 2013, when the buildings, which were considered to provide inadequate storage conditions and to be beyond improvement, were closed and sold for redevelopment.[65][66] The physical holdings are now divided between the sites at St Pancras (some high-use periodicals, and rare items such as the Thomason Tracts and Burney collections) and Boston Spa (the bulk of the collections, stored in a new purpose-built facility).[66]
A significant and growing proportion of the collection is now made available to readers as surrogate facsimiles, either on microfilm, or, more recently, in digitised form. In 2010 a ten-year programme of digitisation of the newspaper archives with commercial partner DC Thomson subsidiaryBrightsolid began,[67][68] and theBritish Newspaper Archive was launched in November 2011.[69] A dedicated newspaper reading room opened at St Pancras in April 2014, including facilities for consulting microfilmed and digital materials, and, where no surrogate exists, hard-copy material retrieved from Boston Spa.[66][70]
The British Library makes a number of images of items within its collections available online. ItsOnline 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 theLindisfarne Gospels. This includes the facility to "turn the virtual pages" of a few documents, such asLeonardo da Vinci's notebooks.[71] Catalogue entries for many of theilluminated manuscript collections are available online, with selected images of pages or miniatures from a growing number of them,[72] and there is a database of significantbookbindings.[73]
The British Library's commercialsecure 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 ofcopyright 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.[74]When Google Books started, the British Library signed an agreement withMicrosoft to digitise a number of books from the British Library for itsLive Search Books project.[75] This material was only available to readers in the US, and closed in May 2008.[76] The scanned books are currently available via the British Library catalogue orAmazon.[77]
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.[78]
In November 2011, four million newspaper pages from the 18th and 19th centuries were made available online as theBritish Newspaper Archive. The project planned to 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.[79]
As of 2022,Explore the British Library is the latest iteration of the online catalogue.[80] 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.[81] A number of these are available for remote access to registered St Pancras Reader Pass holders.[82]
TheBritish Library Philatelic Collections are held at St Pancras. The collections were established in 1891 with the donation of theTapling collection;[85] they steadily developed and now comprise over 25 major collections and a number of smaller ones, encompassing a wide range of disciplines. The collections includepostage andrevenue stamps,postal stationery,essays,proofs,covers and entries, "cinderella stamp" material, specimen issues,airmails, somepostal history materials, official and privateposts, etc., for almost all countries and periods.[86] 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.[86]
The mechanical book handling system (MBHS[87]) used to deliver requested books from stores to reading roomsBronze sculpture.Bill Woodrow's 'Sitting on History' was purchased for the British Library byCarl Djerassi andDiane 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 isColin 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.[88]
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.[89]
The majority of catalogue entries can be found on Explore the British Library, the Library's main catalogue, which is based on Primo.[90] Other collections have their own catalogues, such as western manuscripts. There are eleven reading rooms at the London site and one in Yorkshire.[91]
British Library Reader Pass holders are also able to view the Document Supply Collection in the Reading Room at the Library's site inBoston Spa in Yorkshire as well as the hard-copy newspaper collection from 29 September 2014. Now that access is available to legal deposit collection material, it is necessary for visitors to register as a Reader to use the Boston Spa Reading Room.[92]
In addition to the permanent exhibition, there are frequent thematic exhibitions which have covered maps,[94] sacred texts,[95] history of the English language,[96] and law, including a celebration of the 800th anniversary ofMagna Carta.[97]
In May 2005, the British Library received a grant of £1 million from theLondon Development Agency to change two of its reading rooms into the Business & IP Centre. The centre was opened in March 2006.[98] It holds a comprehensive collection of business and intellectual property (IP) material and is part of the UK's National Network of Business and IP Centres.[99]
The collection is divided up into four main information areas:market research, company information, trade directories, andjournals. It is free of charge in hard copy and online via approximately 30 subscription databases. Registered readers can access the collection and the databases.[100] Staff are trained to guidesmall and medium enterprises (SME) and entrepreneurs to use the full range of resources.[101]
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 andRegistered Design; law reports and other material onlitigation; and information oncopyright. This is available in hard copy and via online databases.[101]
In 2018, a Human Lending Library service was established in the Business & IP Centre, allowing social entrepreneurs to receive an hour's mentoring from a high-profile business professional.[102] This service is run in partnership with Expert Impact.[103]
As part of its establishment in 1973, the British Library absorbed the National Lending Library for Science and Technology (NLL), based nearBoston Spa in Yorkshire, which had been established in 1961. Before this, the site had housed aWorld War IIRoyal Ordnance Factory,ROF Thorp Arch, which closed in 1957. When the NLL became part of the British Library in 1973 it changed its name to the British Library Lending Division, in 1985 it was renamed as the British Library Document Supply Centre and is now known as the British Library Document Supply Service, often abbreviated as BLDSS.[104]
BLDSS now holds 87.5 million items, including 296,000 international journal titles, 400,000 conference proceedings, 3 millionmonographs, 5 million official publications, and 500,000 UK and North American theses and dissertations. 12.5 million articles in the Document Supply Collection are held electronically and can be downloaded immediately.[105]
The collection supportsresearch and development in UK, overseas and international industry, particularly in thepharmaceutical industry. BLDSS also provides material to Higher Education institutions, students and staff and members of the public, who can order items through theirpublic library or through the Library's BL Document Supply Service (BLDSS).[106]
In April 2013, BLDSS launched its new online ordering and tracking system, which enables customers to search available items, view detailed availability, pricing and delivery time information, place and track orders, and manage account preferences online.[107]
Tape players used in the British Library Sound Archives, 2009 photo
The British Library Sound Archive holds more than a million discs and 185,000 tapes.[108] 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.[109]
It is possible to listen to recordings from the collection in selected Reading Rooms in the Library through theirSoundServer[110] andListening and Viewing Service, which is based in the Rare Books & Music Reading Room.[111]
In 2006, the Library launched a new online resource,British Library Sounds, which makes 50,000 of the Sound Archive's recordings available online.[112][113]
Launched in October 2012, the British Library's moving image services provide access to nearly a million sound and moving image items onsite, supported by data for over 20 million sound and moving image recordings.[114] The three services, which for copyright reasons can only be accessed from terminals within the Reading Rooms at St Pancras or Boston Spa, are:
BBC Pilot/Redux: A collaboration withBBC Research & Development to mirror its archive which has, since June 2007, been recording 24/7 of all of the BBC's national and some regional broadcast output. BBC Pilot includes 2.2 million catalogue records and 225,000 playable programmes, but unlike BBC Redux it does not include any broadcasts beyond 2011.[citation needed] BBC Redux ceased operations in 2022.[115]
Broadcast News: Since May 2010, the British Library has been making off-air recordings of daily TV and radio news broadcasts from seventeen channels, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky News, Al-Jazeera English, NHK World, CNN, France 24, Bloomberg, Russia Today and China's CCTV News. Many of the programs come with subtitles, which can be electronically searched, greatly enhancing the value of the collection as a research tool.[citation needed]
Television & Radio Index for Learning & Teaching (TRILT): Produced by the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC), TRILT is a database of all UK television and radio broadcasts since 2001 (and selectively back to 1995). Its 16 million records, growing by a million per year, cover every channel, broadcast and repeat.[citation needed]
British Library employees undertake a wide variety of roles including curatorial, business and technology. Curatorial roles include or have included librarians, curators, digital preservationists, archivists and keepers.[120] In 2001 the senior management team was established and consisted of Lynne Brindley (chief executive), Ian Millar (director of finance and corporate resources), Natalie Ceeney (director of operations and services), Jill Finney (director of strategic marketing and communications) and Clive Field (director of scholarship and collections). This was so the problems of a complex structure, a mega hybrid library, global brand and investment in digital preservation could be managed better[121]
^The National Central Library, a tutorial system and a scholarly library for working people who were not connected to an academic institution, had been founded byAlbert Mansbridge. "Mansbridge, Albert."Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006.
^Walkowitz, Daniel J.; Knauer, Lisa Maya (2009).Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation. Duke University Press. p. 103.ISBN978-0-8223-4236-6.
^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.ISBN0712306609.
^Chadwick, Gareth (5 June 2007)."The British Library: An excellent business support centre".The Independent. Archived fromthe original on 5 April 2008.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.
^Richard Ebdon, 'The World's One-Stop-Shop for Information Needs',Pipeline: The Journal of the Pharmaceutical Information & Pharmocovigilance Association, 40 (March 2013), pp. 12–13
Barker, Nicolas (1989)Treasures of the British Library; compiled by Nicolas Barker and the curatorial staff of the British Library. New York: Harry N. AbramsISBN0-8109-1653-3
Francis, Sir Frank, ed. (1971)Treasures of the British Museum. 360 pp. London: Thames & Hudson; ch. 6: manuscripts, by T. S, Patties; ch. 9: oriental printed books and manuscripts, by A. Gaur; ch. 12: printed books, by H. M. Nixon
Harris, Phil (1998).A History of the British Museum Library, 1753–1973. London: British Library.ISBN0712345620.
Leapman, Michael (2012).The Book of the British Library. London: British Library.ISBN978-0712358378.
Mandelbrote, Giles, andBarry Taylor (2009).Libraries Within the Library: The Origins of the British Library's Printed Collections. London: British Library.ISBN978-0712350358.
Proctor, Robert (2010).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, New York:Edwin Mellen Press.ISBN0773436340.
Ritchie, Berry (1997).The Good Builder: The John Laing Story. James & James.ISBN978-1848845589.
.jpg)
_by_Bill_Woodrow%2c_British_Library%2c_London%2c_UK_-_20061031.jpg)
