A Visit to the British Library by Christine Tate, CILIP North West New Professionals Support Officer

In order to increase my knowledge of the wider profession I recently attended a tour of the British Library alongside seven other Library and Information Professionals from the North of England.

Our tour guide for the afternoon was the friendly and informative Chris. Chris started the tour by introducing us to the history of the building at St Pancras. We were told that when the Library was constructed it was the largest public building project in the 20th century and it took over 30 years to reach completion. It was designed by architect Sir Colin St John Wilson and has a number of nautical features such as port hole shaped windows. 

The collection

The visual centre piece of the Library is the King’s Library Tower. The 85,000 books displayed in the six-storey glass tower formed King George III’s personal collection. The collection can be used by readers and whilst we were visiting we saw one of the Library staff retrieving a book via the internal lift and retractable bookshelves.

Bust of King George III in front of the King’s Library Tower

However, the King’s Library Tower is only a small proportion of the collection which is composed of items that were transferred from the British Museum following the creation of the Library under the British Library Act 1972, donations, and legal deposit items. Legal deposit requires that the publishers of every UK print publication must provide a copy of the book to the British Library and to five other major libraries that request it. This process ensures that the publications are preserved for future generations and access to the deposited items is also granted to visitors to the Library who have a Reader Pass (The British Library Board, undated). In 2013 legal deposit was extended to cover digital and online material as well. This is achieved using web crawling software but it is supplemented by manual processes when content requires a password or subscription to access it (The British Library Board, undated 2). As with physical legal deposit items, access to digital material is restricted to readers who are present on the premises of the deposit library (The British Library Board, undated 2).

The majority of the collection is held out of sight of visitors. The collection is vast: this year 298,000 physical items were added as part of the legal deposit scheme and the collection now extends to 746 km of shelving (British Library 2018). It is held in a series of four basements built beneath the Library and it is estimated that the Library has enough space to meet its needs for the next twenty years. I work in a Higher Education library and space is always at a premium so it was surprising to learn that the British Library has so much room available to allow for the expansion of its collection.

Chris explained the process of retrieving items and that after it has been requested it usually takes an hour for a book to be retrieved and be ready for use in the Reading Room. It is hand-picked from its location by one of the 80 Library assistants. The books are stored in size order and identified using barcodes.  Once located, items are placed on the conveyor belt system which carries the book up to the appropriate Reading Room.

Illustration of the British Library showing the basements

Funding 

Due to the cuts affecting the library and information sector we were interested to learn about how the British Library is funded. In 2017-18 the British Library’s income was £120.8m of which £93.4m was Grant in Aid (British Library, 2018). Grant in Aid is the Library’s primary source of funding and it is received from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. For 2019/20 there will be a 7% reduction in the resource budget so the Library has to make reductions in its core operating expenditure. The remaining income for the Library consists of donations and legacy income, charitable activities, grant in aid, grants, investment income and other trading activities.

Exhibitions 

A major success from the past year was the Harry Potter exhibition, ‘A History of Magic’. The exhibition combined J.K. Rowling manuscripts with magic-themed artefacts from the Library’s collection. For example, Coronelli’s celestial globe from 1693 was reanimated with Augmented Reality in partnership with Google (British Library 2018). This attracted 170,000 visits to the British Library and a further 750,000 people engaged with linked exhibitions in 40 library venues across the UK (British Library 2018).

After the tour, we called into the permanent exhibition ‘The Sir John Ritblat Gallery: Treasures of the British Library’. The range of items on display really highlighted the diverse nature of the collection, with items ranging from a letter that Jane Austen wrote to her brother from 1809, to John Lennon’s handwritten lyrics for a ‘Hard Day’s Night’ to the 1225 magna carta. A number of the items on display have been digitised and can be viewed on the British Library Website.

References

British Library. (2018). British Library Annual Report and Accounts 2017/18. Available at: https://www.bl.uk/aboutus/annrep/2017to2018/bl-annual-report-2017-18.pdf.pdf (Accessed 17 August 2018).
The British Library Board. (undated). Introduction to legal deposit. Available at: https://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/introduction/ (Accessed 17 August 2018.)
The British Library Board. (undated 2). Depositing websites and web pages. Available at: https://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/index.html (Accessed 17 August 2018.)