British Library  

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The British Library (BL) is the national library of the United Kingdom and the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is one of the world's major research libraries, holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings and much more. The Library's collections include around 14 million books (second only to the American Library of Congress), along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.

As a legal deposit library, the BL receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, including all foreign books distributed in the UK. It also purchases many items which are only published outside Britain and Ireland. The British Library adds some three million items every year.

The Library is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It is located on the north side of Euston Road in St Pancras, London, between Euston railway station and St Pancras railway station.

Historical background

The British Library was created on 1 July 1973 by the British Library Act 1972. Prior to this, the national library was part of the British Museum, which provided the bulk of the holdings of the new library, alongside various smaller organisations which were folded in (such as the National Central Library, the National Lending Library for Science and Technology and the British National Bibliography). In 1974 functions previously exercised by the Office for Scientific and Technical Information were taken over; in 1982 the India Office Library and Records and the HMSO Binderies became British Library responsibilities. In 1983, the Library absorbed the National Sound Archive, which holds many sound and video recordings, with over a million discs and thousands of tapes.

The core of the Library's historical collections is based on a series of donations and acquisitions from the eighteenth century, known as the 'foundation collections'. These include the books and manuscripts of Sir Robert Cotton, Sir Hans Sloane, Robert Harley and King George III.

For many years its collections were dispersed in various buildings around central London, in places such as Bloomsbury (within the British Museum), Chancery Lane, and Holborn, with an interlibrary lending centre at Boston Spa, Wetherby in West Yorkshire (situated on Thorp Arch Trading Estate) and the newspaper library at Colindale, north-west London. However, since 1997 the main collection has been housed in a single new building on Euston Road next to St. Pancras railway station, although post-1800 newspapers are still held at Colindale, and the Document Supply Centre is still in Yorkshire. The Library also has a book storage depot in Woolwich, south-east London. The new library was designed specially for the purpose by the architect Colin St. John Wilson. Facing Euston Road is a large piazza that includes pieces of public art, such as large sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi (a bronze statue based on William Blake's study of Isaac Newton) and Antony Gormley. It is the largest public building constructed in the United Kingdom in the 20th century.

In the middle of the building is a four-storey glass tower containing the King's Library, with 65,000 printed volumes along with other pamphlets, manuscripts and maps collected by King George III between 1763 and 1820. In December 2009 a new storage building at Boston Spa was opened by Rosie Winterton. The new facility which cost £26million will house seven million items, stored in more than 140,000 bar-coded containers, which are retrieved by robots, from the 262 kilometres of temperature and humidity-controlled storage space.

Highlights of the collections

• The Stein collection from Central Asia.
• The Diamond Sutra, the world's earliest dated printed book<ref>{{

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• The Lindisfarne Gospels
• Two Gutenberg Bibles
• Two 1215 copies of Magna Carta
• Papyrus Egerton 2, the Egerton Gospel
• The sole surviving manuscript copy of the poem Beowulf<ref>{{

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• 347 leaves of the Codex Sinaiticus
• Codex Alexandrinus
• The Codex Arundel, one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks.
• William Tyndale's 1534 English translation New Testament, the personal copy of Anne Boleyn.
• Working manuscripts by J.S. Bach, W.A. Mozart, Arthur Sullivan, Gustav Mahler and Benjamin Britten.
• My Ladye Nevells Booke of Virginal Musick by William Byrd, one of the two surviving collections of 16th century music for the virginal.
• Manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll (given to the British Library by a consortium of American bibliophiles "in recognition of Britain's courage in facing Hitler before America came into the war")
• Handwritten lyric sheet of The Beatles song "I Want to Hold Your Hand".

Collections of manuscripts

• Additional Manuscripts
• Arundel collection
• Cotton Library
• Harleian Collection

See also

• British literature
• British Museum Reading Room
• Friends of the British Library
• Incunabula Short Title Catalogue
• Lawrence Durrell Collection
• National Archives
• National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program
• National Library of Scotland
• National Library of Wales
• National Preservation Office
• National Sound Archive
• Theatre Archive Project
• The SS (Suppressed Safe) collection of the British Library is an article by Patrick J. Kearney
• The Private Case: An annotated bibliography of the Private Case Erotica Collection in the British (Museum) Library (1981) - Patrick J Kearney