The British Library - Tuesday, July 8th

Our second class trip was to the British Library where Kevin, the donations officer, toured us around. He told us he had been working at the British Library for 25 years. In our tour introduction, Kevin reminded us that the British Library is a working library with around 170 million items (35 million of which are stored in six floors of subbasements), 800 miles of shelving that grows by 8 miles per year, and 2,300 people on the staff. They must "deliver the obligations of all British Libraries," for which they must
* Acquire the national Bibliographic Input (acquire all books published in the U.K. within a month of their publishing date)
* Keep any item forever (no weeding of the archive)
* Make available the collections to any person who wished to use them


Some facts about the British Library:
* In 1961 the British Library began the separation process from the British Museum. The books are legally separated from the museum and belong solely to the library.
* The land on which the library now stands was purchased from British Rail in 1973.
* The library building was designed by Sir Colin St. John Wilson and was offically opened June 25th, 1998.
* The largest tapestry commissioned in the last century hangs in the foyer to dampen the sound.
* The library houses the largest philatelic collection in the world, and includes 8 1/4 million items, one of which is considered the most valuable stamp in the world. The stamp was commissioned for Queen Victoria in 1847, but the words were misprinted and most were destroyed. Only 14 of these stamps are in existence.
* The building looks somewhat like a large boat because the architect was in the Royal Navy and never had control of his own ship.
* The library avoids the the threat of floods by channeling accumulating rainwater into the Thames.
* The British Library is the 3rd largest in the world after Moscow (1) and the Library of congress (2).
* There is no shelf browsing; users must know what they are looking for and request it.
* Roughly 35% of the library's users come from overseas, making the British Library one of the most popular research libraries in the world
* There is a collection for nearly every spoken language curated by a librarian fluent in that language
* Items are catalogued then shelved by size to maximize space efficiency (large books on the lower shelves to the smallest books on the top shelves.
* The book collection donated by King George III contains roughly 90,000 items. According to his stipulations, the books must be on display and must be used regularly (are not meant to be museum pieces). About 30 books from the collection are used in a given day.
* The library has a budget of about £120m a year, and generate about £20m themselves by selling the cataloge to other English-speaking countries

This was another really fascinating tour (I'm starting to sense a trend here...). Personally, my favorite part of the library is the "treasures" room, a dark space where some priceless works of literature are displayed behind glass. This room is pretty much every bibliophile's dream--highlights include the sole remaining manuscript of Beowulf, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, a book of Jane Austen's handwritten short stories and notes, orginal music and lyrics notes and compositions by the Beatles, pages from the Codex Sinaiticus, the first folio binding of Shakespeare's works, handwritten sheet music by Beethoven and Mozart, and the Diamond Sutra...and that's barely a fraction of the collection. the cool thing about the British Library is that despite not being able to actually check-out any books (all items are in-house only) it seems like a really normal library. It is only when you start to check out the catalogue that the full-weight of the libraries (literal) awesomeness is revealed. I was also pretty surprised that it is such a new building. For some reason I had just assumed that it would be a really historic building, but it's barely even 10 years old, despite separating from the British Museum in the 1960s. Overall, an extremely enjoyable trip.