July 1: British Library

On Wednesday morning we visited the British Library.

The collection was originally housed at the British Museum.Its current location was designed to look like a "ship of knowledge." You can see it in the shape of the building, shown in this model...

...and in other design features, such as windows shaped like portholes throughout the building.

The British Library is a legal deposit library (meaning that it receives a copy of every publication in the UK--like the Library of Congress does in the US). The collection contains more than 150 million items, with 3 million items added every year. In fact, if you looked at 5 items each day, it would take you 80,000 years to see the whole collection.

This is not a lending library--the materials stay on the premises. There are 11 reading rooms for readers to use, with a total of 1400 seats. The one shown here is the largest.

To access materials at the library, a user must apply for a reading card, search the catalog for the items they want, then place their order. Materials are housed onsite and at another location in Yorkshire. If the material is onsite, the waiting time is about an hour. If the material is stored offsite, there is a fee and a two-day wait. Readers can register and preorder in advance of their visit, however, so that the materials are ready when they get there.

Most of the materials at that location are stored underground (the tube actually cuts through some of the floors; workers can hear trains pass by on the other side of the wall) in a low-oxygen, temperature-constant environment. The delivery process is fully automated. Materials are sorted by size and chronological order (no Dewey or other classification system). A worker receives an order, searches by number, scans the item, and sends it up to the main floor in trays via an elaborate conveyor system containing miles of track. Some materials can travel for 15 minutes, depending on where they're stored.  

Among its many treasures, the British Library has King George III's library, comprising 85,000 volumes. King George IV donated the collection with the stipulation that it be kept together and on display at all times. The designers of the current building honored this requirement by housing the collection in a glass enclosure running down the center of the library--for six floors.

As impressive as this looks, I think the coolest thing about this is that the collection is still accessible (as long as you can make a case for why you need to see that specific edition; I'm finding that this is the idea of "access" for many libraries here). Readers can request items from the collection, which still follows its original cataloging scheme; around 50 to 60 items are viewed each day.

It's a beautiful building, with tons of material and information available (I could see my classmates light up when thinking about using this library to access material for their papers). I'm glad this huge repository of "good stuff" is available to the British public...and its visitors.