The British Library: July 8th, 2007

(photo taken from blog.lib.umn.edu/hgroteva/innergeek/023681.html)

A mecca and place of pilgrimage for fellow librarians.

If I was blown away by the ambiance of Saint Paul's Cathedral Library yesterday, the British Library sufficed my pallet to view a collection with breadth and depth. The British Library is actually the 3rd largest library in the world, housing a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland, and adding approximately 3 million items a year. The collection is comprised of a total of 150 million items to include books, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, patents, maps, and drawings. Interestingly, the library stores books by the size and not content. In retrospect, the latter is more common in the libraries here than I had anticipated.

There are a total of four levels above and below the ground that house this collection. Although the library is a reference library and open to the public, patrons are not allowed to pull books from the shelves and must see a reference library for retrieval of items. Thus, one can assume that most patrons are visiting the library for personal or scholarly research endeavors. Users of the library must also register for a reader's pass. This pass is available to any member of the public who has a permenant addresss and identification.

Speaking of retrieval, I found the system that they have set of for retrieval interesting. Kevin, our guide and a donations officer at the library, gave us a tour of one of the rooms in which a conveyor belt inhabits. Each floor has conveyor belts with barcodes unique to the floor a librarian is on. To send a book to a different floor, a librarian scans the barcode of the destination floor, puts the book in a bin, and the book is then delivered to that floor. How intuitive a system is that?

Finally, Kevin allowed us to view the exhibits. I think that we all found this the most memorable part of the tour as we were able to view the Magna Carta, Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, and one of my personal favorites, Charlotte Bronte's handwritten Jane Eyre. Wow.