British Library

The entrance of the British Library

One fact I learned early in our tour was that until 1997 (within my lifetime!) the British Library and British Museum were one. Prior to coming to its current location, the materials were split into 19 different buildings. Now about half the collection is within the building (the other half is in Yorkshire), although much is out of sight, in eight stories worth of underground storage. A full mile of system for delivery services get the books from the stacks to the reader using an intelligence which calculates the quickest route from start to end. With 11 reading rooms, 2,500 to 3,000 material requests a day, material in every known language of the world, and a National Sound Archives of 4.5 million items, this is a major operation.

The crowning jewel (pun intended) of the collection sits smack dab in the middle of the main section of the library and is nearly impossible to miss - the King's Library. King George the III started the library by donating his personal collection of 100,000 volumes, not without stipulations. He qualified his donation by stating it needed to be displayed in its entirety, hence the six floors of books encased in glass for all to see but not touch. The access to this collection is incredibly strict, even for staff. Our guide had been working at the library for 34 years and was still not able to enter the King's Library. I can't imagine how frustrating that might be, especially when the collection is temptingly and overtly in view. These books may be requested under special circumstances and are delivered by hand rather than the automated system. The closest any of us LIS students got to the collection was to eat lunch in the cafe, which is just feet away from the King's Library.

The King's Library, with the cafe beside it

The library also holds some non-book items which seem better suited for the British Museum than the Library, which even our guide could not fully explain. These included the ashes of the poet Shelley and Alexander Fleming's petri dish with the original penicillin discovery. Strangely enough, they are still occasionally requested - a penicillin scholar recently came to look at Fleming's petri dish and apparently was not thoroughly convinced it held penicillin (although our guide said at this point it's quite moldy).

Although the British Library has some amazing materials, particularly in its Treasures Collection, which was absolutely surreal to me, the library building itself (minus the King's Library) was somewhat underwhelming. Not that it wasn't an impressive architectural work, but it was too modern for my liking. In terms of libraries this size, I prefer the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, which is exactly one hundred years older than the current British Library building. What can I say, I'm an old-fashioned gal.