British Library

Our visit to the British Library was just as fantastic as St. Paul's, but completely different. Our tour guide, Kevin, the Donations Officer, made us very welcome.

Although the building houses a gift shop, art galleries, a cafe, etc, Kevin pointed out that it is, in fact a working library; the books are just out of sight, on four floors underground. The library has three legal obligations:
1. To acquire the entire bibliographic output of the nation
2. To keep it archived forever
3. To make the collections available for use
It is also their professional duty to maintain and compile the bibliographic record of all the contents of the library. The library has a staff of 2,300 and an annual budget of £120 million with which to fulfill these obligations. The British Library is the third largest in the world, with a collection of around 35 million items on the underground shelving, which grows by about 3 million items per year.

A national collection began when Sir Hans Sloane, a philanthropist and scholar who believed that all knowledge should be shared, left his personal library to the nation is 1753. Other wealthy men followed his example in bequeathing their collections to the state. The national collection was, for many years, housed in the British Museum.
The decision to create a national library was made in the 1960s, but did not come to fruition until the 1970s. For many years the library was scattered amongst several buildings. Eventually all public records collections were brought under the umbrella of the British Library, which was finally able to move into a single building in 1998.

The books in the library are not classified by subject; they are not classified at all, but rather shelved according to size, due to space restrictions. The spine labels are marked with a grid reference showing location, rather than a classification mark.
Patrons must know the books they are looking for, and place a request with a staff member. These requests are then printed out downstairs, and brought up by an "automated book retrieval system," one of four systems which interact with each other to keep track of all the books.
Even thought the books are stored and retrieved this way, the various reading rooms are separated by subject, so that patrons have access to staff members who are experts in the subjects they are researching.
35% of library users are researchers from overseas, who come for the extensive collections of items in foreign languages.

Probably the most incredible part of the active collection, for me, was the library of King George III. He left 19,000 books to the library on the condition that they be on display and available for use. They are displayed in a multi-story glass case in the center of the library, with a small elevator for traveling to the walkways within the case to retrieve requested books.

The very best overall part of the library was the room of historical books and documents. Some of the amazing things I saw in there include:

• Beowulf - oldest known copy, fully bound
• Shakespeare's First Folio
• Letter from Jane Austen to her sister, Cassandra
• Booklet with a story by Jane Austen, written as a young woman, dedicated to her sister, Cassandra ("To Miss Austen")
• Asian book (Korean?), written on a scroll, in gold ink on a background dyed with indigo
• Illuminated hymnal (maybe a psalter?) from the mid-13th century, written over the course of several years by a single scribe
• Handwritten Beatles lyrics by John and Paul on various scraps of paper; A Hard Day's Night on a card from John to Julian for his first birthday

*Note of interest: the English are apparently willing to insert humor even into an environment considered too serious for jokes by Americans. The description of the plot of Beowulf included a parenthetical about Gredel's "(not necessarily attractive) mother." I love it!