The British Library At Fifty

The British Library is fifty this year and is inviting you to share in its celebrations.  If you don’t live in London, you can still check out some of its resources for free on its YouTube channel, Facebook page, and its own website.

As might be suspected, the actual Library goes back a long way before the 1970s. The British Library, technically the British Museum Library, was founded in 1753 and was originally located at Bloomsbury. The modern British Library was founded by an Act of Parliament passed in 1972. 

As well as the National Library of Britain, the British Library is a Legal Deposit library. With a few exceptions, a copy of every book and newspaper published in Britain is supposed to be deposited with the British Library and one copy with each of the five other copyright libraries in the British Isles. These are the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Cambridge University Library; the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; and Trinity College, Dublin. 

The British Museum is in the same building and is still home to the British Museum Library which now contains a modest collection of around 335,000 books, modest being the word. 

In 1990, before the Library moved to its new permanent home in the dedicated building at Saint Pancras, I conducted an interview with one of its consultants, the late Dr Robin Alston. At that time it was collecting five shelf miles of material every year. The main reading room was the spectacular domed Round Reading Room. Here is a famous seat in which I sat on occasion. It was the one used by Karl Marx – the seat, not the modern chair.

There was also the North Library, the North Library Gallery, Official Publications and the Map Room. BLISS – the librarians’ service – was housed in a separate building round the back. The main reading rooms were for humanities; down the road at Aldwych in a multi-storey building the Life Sciences could be found, and in Holborn proper was an even larger building for the physical sciences and related subjects (known as SRIS). The India Office was south of the Thames and the Sound Archive (which I never used) was at South Kensington. The Newspaper Library was based at Colindale, and the Boston Spa Reading Room (which likewise I have never used) was based on a massive dedicated site.

Now, with the exception of Boston Spa, all the other reading rooms have been moved to Saint Pancras. BLISS and the Sound Archive have been integrated into the main collections. The Newspaper Library at Colindale closed in November 2013 being replaced by the Saint Pancras Newsroom.

As well as a dedicated reading room, Boston Spa is a major repository. The basements at Saint Pancras store many publications but a great many are housed at Boston Spa; the former can often be retrieved in under an hour; off-site publications must be ordered 48 hours in advance.

Kids growing up today and younger people don’t realise how easy they have it. Ordering books at the British Library used to be a tiresome process involving consulting its manual catalogue, filling out order slips and waiting. Now, you can order in advance at home from the catalogue and collect your orders when you arrive. Colindale was even worse. If you wanted to take photocopies from volumes or microfilms you had to fill out slips, pay a hefty fee and collect them the following week or have them posted. Now, newspapers and books alike can be scanned for free in the reading rooms, although most readers take copies on their phones.

Most borough libraries in Britain along with libraries great and small around the world now have similar set ups. There are now staggering amounts of publications on-line free to access with a click of a mouse. Australia has an excellent on-line library called Trove; the United States has inter alia Chronicling America (a project of the Library of Congress) – a massive collection of historical newspapers free to access on-line. Then there is the Internet Archive which currently has over 38 million text publications along with ten million videos and billions of archived webpages.

There are not many things going for free in the modern world, but universal access to knowledge is one of them. Now if we can only fend off all those who would censor us, and sort real knowledge from the disinformation they keep peddling.