So once we arrived at the enormous library, we waited for a while and perused the gift shop before starting in on our tour of the building. I took vigorous notes, as this place was amazing. It's absolutely enormous, and unfortunately due to funding cuts, they will not be expanding it to the size they originally planned.
Back in the 1960s there was talk about moving all of Britain's special collections/rare items, etc. into one large British Library. In 1972, they began bringing all of them together. The building took 14 years to finish. The first reading room opened in 1997 and it was officially opened by the Queen in 1998.
There are 200 MILLION items in the collection, and it grows every day by 8000 items PER DAY. It continues to grow so much because nothing can actually be checked out from this library. It is purely a research library. (No weeding!!!!! Talk about huge shelf-space concerns!!!) So, individuals who wish to utilize the services of the British Library must register their application. To utilize their facilities, you must provide-- proof of signature, proof of address, photo identification, reading list/letter from employer/why you're studying there, etc. Users of the library can only have access for up to 3 years, but most applications are processed to be used for only 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year...or at the very most, 3 years.
Their materials handling system is amazing. Being the second largest library in the world (second only to the Library of Congress) they have a state of the art conveyor belt system that brings books from the bottom 5 floors beneath the library, and takes them to one of the eleven reading rooms. When a person requests a book, they fill out a form, and a card is printed out. The card is then sent to the appropriate area, placed on the shelf for someone to pull. At that time, the person pulls the book and puts it into a red box with a barcode on the box, scans it, and sends it to its appropriate room. Once it's scanned a person knows it's on its way to them. The goal of the library is to have 90% of all requests filled within 70 minutes. But it often takes 2 days to process some items. After an item comes to you, you may reserve to use it for 3 working days. After that, it goes back to wherever it came from in the depths of the basement (or one of the four off-site storage facilities). At that point, the researcher would have to fill out another request and the 70 minute to 2 day process would start all over again. I would love to tell our patrons they had to wait 70 minutes for a book....AND that they couldn't check it out! Apparently a person kept coming into the British Library and request Harry Potter. After she'd finally requested it for the last possible time, someone told her she needed to go to a public library. I said, "Well the public library's copies are probably all checked out...that's why she comes here. HP is always here, and she could just read it while she was here, come here everyday for 3 days and finish it." (I thought that was pretty funny.)
- There are 1200 seats for researchers in the building, and 298 in their largest reading room-- the Humanities reading room.
- The basement beneath the library is 24 meters long, the deepest basement in London, and actually is 4 floors of nothing but movable stacks of books.
- If a disaster would occur, the british library has a contract with surrounding markets (the supermarket kind) to utilize their freezer space while they wait for proper preservation facilities.
King George III's Collection
They also have this amazing (what looks like a piece of art) book tower viewable outside of the reading rooms that is created out of 80,000 volumes of books from King George III. Apparently he created his library by appearance as opposed to by subject/interest, so it's a beautiful collection, but there are some strange titles within it. The 80K volumes make up 6 floors of books, which were donated by King George IV, who was not as keen on reading as his father. There were two requirements regarding use of this library: It must be a working collection, and it must be on display. I thought that was pretty clever. Because it is very difficult to display 80K volumes of incredibly old books, they created this tower, and it is made of glass, so all books can be viewed from the outside. Evacuation from the tower can only be done through the roof or the basement, so only qualified and trained individuals can actually get in the tower to retrieve an item.
Items on the shelves are still categorized by size/appearance, and are actually categorized that way throughout the British Library, thanks to a man named Sir Anthony Panizzi. He introduced the size sorting concept to the library, and also spear-headed the library becoming a legal depository for all published information in England. So as the collection grows 8000 items per day, they are continually being placed on shelves based on size. So strange, but understandable, as they are obviously VERY concerned about space.
Treasures Gallery
This was amazing, and I had very little time to appreciate every piece I wanted to see. Here are some highlights:
- Shakespeare's First Foliio (worth at least £3.11M)
- Only surviving document with Shakespeare's signature on it....in the world.
- Leonardo DaVinci's Sketchbook
- Handwritten version of Alice in Wonderland
- Galileo's sketchbook
- Gutenberg Bible (stunning)
- Magna Carta
ound and looked at things for a while, and ended up "happening upon" the Reduced Shakespeare Company's production of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged at the Arts Theatre & Bar (picture here). I've seen it before, in London-but it was too neat that we came up to the building at 2:20 as the show started at 2:30. We paid our £15, went inside and sat down for a good hour and a half of entertainment. I love that show. Hilarious.
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