The British Library is a major research library, with items in many languages[8] and in many formats, both print and digital: books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, videos, play-scripts, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings. The Library's collections include around 14 million books,[9] along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and items dating as far back as 2000 BC. The library maintains a programme for content acquisition and adds some three million items each year occupying 9.6 kilometres (6 mi) of new shelf space.[10]
Prior to 1973, the Library was part of the British Museum, also in the Borough of Camden. The Library's modern purpose-built building stands next to St Pancras station on Euston Road in Somers Town, on the site of a former goods yard.[11] There is an additional storage building and reading room in the branch library near Boston Spa in Yorkshire. The St Pancras building was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 25 June 1998, and is classified as a Grade I listed building "of exceptional interest" for its architecture and history.[12]
Early foundations
The British Library was created on 1 July 1973 as a result of the British Library Act 1972.[13] Prior to this, the national library was part of the British Museum, which provided the bulk of the holdings of the new library, alongside smaller organisations which were folded in (such as the National Central Library,[14] the National Lending Library for Science and Technology and the British National Bibliography).[13] 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.[15] 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.[16]
The core of the Library's historical collections is based on a series of donations and acquisitions from the 18th century.
These are known as the "foundation collections",[17] and they include the books and manuscripts:
Initial plans for the British Library required demolition of an integral part of Bloomsbury – a seven-acre swathe of streets immediately in front of the Museum, so that the Library could be situated directly opposite. After a long and hard-fought campaign led by Dr George Wagner, this decision was overturned and the library was instead constructed by John Laing plc[21] on a site at Euston Road next to St Pancras railway station.[22]
Following the closure of the Round Reading Room on 25 October 1997 the library stock began to be moved into the St Pancras building. Before the end of that year the first of eleven new reading rooms had opened and the moving of stock was continuing.[23] From 1997 to 2009 the main collection was housed in this single new building and the collection of British and overseas newspapers was housed at Colindale. In July 2008 the Library announced that it would be moving low-use items to a new storage facility in Boston Spa in Yorkshire and that it planned to close the newspaper library at Colindale, ahead of a later move to a similar facility on the same site.[24] From January 2009 to April 2012 over 200 km of material was moved to the Additional Storage Building and is now delivered to British Library Reading Rooms in London on request by a daily shuttle service.[25] Construction work on the Additional Storage Building was completed in 2013 and the newspaper library at Colindale closed on 8 November 2013. The collection has now been split between the St Pancras and Boston Spa sites.[26] The British Library Document Supply Service (BLDSS) and the Library's Document Supply Collection is based on the same site in Boston Spa. Collections housed in Yorkshire, comprising low-use material and the newspaper and Document Supply collections, make up around 70% of the total material the library holds.[27] The Library previously had a book storage depot in Woolwich, south-east London, which is no longer in use.
The new library was designed specially for the purpose by the architect Colin St John Wilson[13] in collaboration with his wife MJ Long, who came up with the plan that was subsequently developed and built.[28] 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.[29][30]
In the middle of the building is a six-storey glass tower inspired by a similar structure in the Beinecke Library, 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.[31] In December 2009 a new storage building at Boston Spa was opened by Rosie Winterton. The new facility, costing £26 million, has a capacity for seven million items, stored in more than 140,000 bar-coded containers and which are retrieved by robots[32] from the 162.7 miles of temperature and humidity-controlled storage space.[33]
On Friday, 5 April 2013, the Library announced that it would begin saving all sites with the suffix .uk in a bid to preserve the nation's "digital memory" (which as of then amounted to about 4.8 million sites containing 1 billion web pages). The Library would make all the material publicly available to users by the end of 2013, and would ensure that, through technological advancements, all the material is preserved for future generations, despite the fluidity of the Internet.[34]
The Euston Road building was Grade I listed on 1 August 2015.[12] It has plans to open a third location in Leeds,[35] potentially located in the Grade 1 listed Temple Works.[36]
Legal deposit
In England, legal deposit can be traced back to at least 1610.[37] The Copyright Act 1911 established the principle of the legal deposit, ensuring that the British Library and five other libraries in Great Britain and Ireland are entitled to receive a free copy of every item published or distributed in Britain. The other five libraries are: the Bodleian Library at Oxford; the University Library at Cambridge; Trinity College Library in Dublin; and the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales. The British Library is the only one that must automatically receive a copy of every item published in Britain; the others are entitled to these items, but must specifically request them from the publisher after learning that they have been or are about to be published, a task done centrally by the Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries.
Further, under the terms of Irish copyright law (most recently the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000), the British Library is entitled to automatically receive a free copy of every book published in Ireland, alongside the National Library of Ireland, Trinity College Library in Dublin, the library of the University of Limerick, the library of Dublin City University and the libraries of the four constituent universities of the National University of Ireland. The Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, and the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales are also entitled to copies of material published in Ireland, but again must formally make requests.
The Library is open to everyone who has a genuine need to use its collections. Anyone with a permanent address who wishes to carry out research can apply for a Reader Pass; they are required to provide proof of signature and address.[41]
Historically, only those wishing to use specialised material unavailable in other public or academic libraries would be given a Reader Pass. The Library has been criticised for admitting numbers of undergraduate students, who have access to their own university libraries, to the reading rooms. The Library replied that it has always admitted undergraduates as long as they have a legitimate personal, work-related or academic research purpose.[42]
The majority of catalogue entries can be found on Explore the British Library, the Library's main catalogue, which is based on Primo.[43] Other collections have their own catalogues, such as western manuscripts. The large reading rooms offer hundreds of seats which are often filled with researchers, especially during the Easter and summer holidays.
British Library Reader Pass holders are also able to view the Document Supply Collection in the Reading Room at the Library's site in Boston Spa in Yorkshire as well as the hard-copy newspaper collection from 29 September 2014. Now that access is available to legal deposit collection material, it is necessary for visitors to register as a Reader to use the Boston Spa Reading Room.[44]
Online, electronic and digital resources
Material available online
The British Library makes a number of images of items within its collections available online. Its Online Gallery gives access to 30,000 images from various medieval books, together with a handful of exhibition-style items in a proprietary format, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. This includes the facility to "turn the virtual pages" of a few documents, such as Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks.[45] Catalogue entries for many of the illuminated manuscript collections are available online, with selected images of pages or miniatures from a growing number of them,[46] and there is a database of significant bookbindings.[47]British Library Sounds provides free online access to over 60,000 sound recordings.
The British Library's commercial secure electronic delivery service was started in 2003 at a cost of £6 million. This offers more than 100 million items (including 280,000 journal titles, 50 million patents, 5 million reports, 476,000 US dissertations and 433,000 conference proceedings) for researchers and library patrons worldwide which were previously unavailable outside the Library because of copyright restrictions. In line with a government directive that the British Library must cover a percentage of its operating costs, a fee is charged to the user. However, this service is no longer profitable and has led to a series of restructures to try to prevent further losses.[48]When Google Books started, the British Library signed an agreement with Microsoft to digitise a number of books from the British Library for its Live Search Books project.[49] This material was only available to readers in the US, and closed in May 2008.[50] The scanned books are currently available via the British Library catalogue or Amazon.[51]
In October 2010 the British Library launched its Management and business studies portal. This website is designed to allow digital access to management research reports, consulting reports, working papers and articles.[52]
In November 2011, four million newspaper pages from the 18th and 19th centuries were made available online as the British Newspaper Archive. The project planned to scan up to 40 million pages over the next 10 years. The archive is free to search, but there is a charge for accessing the pages themselves.[53]
Electronic collections
As of 2022, Explore the British Library is the latest iteration of the online catalogue.[54] It contains nearly 57 million records and may be used to search, view and order items from the collections or search the contents of the Library's website. The Library's electronic collections include over 40,000 ejournals, 800 databases and other electronic resources.[55] A number of these are available for remote access to registered St Pancras Reader Pass holders.
In 2012, the UK legal deposit libraries signed a memorandum of understanding to create a shared technical infrastructure implementing the Digital Library System developed by the British Library.[57] The DLS was in anticipation of the Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013, an extension of the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 to include non-print electronic publications from 6 April 2013.[58] Four storage nodes, located in London, Boston Spa, Aberystwyth, and Edinburgh, linked via a secure network in constant communication automatically replicate, self-check, and repair data.[59] A complete crawl of every .uk domain (and other TLDs with UK based server GeoIP) has been added annually to the DLS since 2013, which also contains all of the Internet Archive's 1996–2013 .uk collection. The policy and system is based on that of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which has crawled (via IA until 2010) the .fr domain annually (62 TBs in 2015) since 2006.
Cyber attacks
On 28 October 2023 the British Library's entire website went down due to a cyber attack,[60] later confirmed as a ransomware attack attributed to ransomware group Rhysida.[61][62][63] Catalogues and ordering systems were affected, rendering the great majority of the library's collections inaccessible to readers. The library released statements saying that their services would be disrupted for several weeks,[64] with some disruption expected to persist for several months.[65]
The British Library continues to experience technology outages as a result of cyber-attacks.[66][67]
In addition to the permanent exhibition, there are frequent thematic exhibitions which have covered maps,[69] sacred texts,[70] history of the English language,[71] and law, including a celebration of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta.[72]
Services and departments
Business and IP Centre
In May 2005, the British Library received a grant of £1 million from the London Development Agency to change two of its reading rooms into the Business & IP Centre. The centre was opened in March 2006.[73] It holds arguably the most comprehensive collection of business and intellectual property (IP) material in the United Kingdom and is the official library of the UK Intellectual Property Office.
The collection is divided up into four main information areas: market research, company information, trade directories, and journals. It is free of charge in hard copy and online via approximately 30 subscription databases. Registered readers can access the collection and the databases.[74]
There are over 50 million patent specifications from 40 countries in a collection dating back to 1855. The collection also includes official gazettes on patents, trade marks and Registered Design; law reports and other material on litigation; and information on copyright. This is available in hard copy and via online databases.[75]
Staff are trained to guide small and medium enterprises (SME) and entrepreneurs to use the full range of resources.[75]
In 2018, a Human Lending Library service was established in the Business & IP Centre, allowing social entrepreneurs to receive an hour's mentoring from a high-profile business professional.[76] This service is run in partnership with Expert Impact.
Stephen Fear was the British Library's Entrepreneur in Residence and Ambassador from 2012 to 2016.[77]
Document Supply Service
As part of its establishment in 1973, the British Library absorbed the National Lending Library for Science and Technology (NLL), based near Boston Spa in Yorkshire, which had been established in 1961. Before this, the site had housed a World War IIRoyal Ordnance Factory, ROF Thorp Arch, which closed in 1957. When the NLL became part of the British Library in 1973 it changed its name to the British Library Lending Division, in 1985 it was renamed as the British Library Document Supply Centre and is now known as the British Library Document Supply Service, often abbreviated as BLDSS.[78]
BLDSS now holds 87.5 million items, including 296,000 international journal titles, 400,000 conference proceedings, 3 million monographs, 5 million official publications, and 500,000 UK and North American theses and dissertations. 12.5 million articles in the Document Supply Collection are held electronically and can be downloaded immediately.[79]
The collection supports research and development in UK, overseas and international industry, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry. BLDSS also provides material to Higher Education institutions, students and staff and members of the public, who can order items through their Public Library or through the Library's BL Document Supply Service (BLDSS).[80] The Document Supply Service also offers Find it For Me and Get it For Me services which assist researchers in accessing hard-to-find material.
In April 2013, BLDSS launched its new online ordering and tracking system, which enables customers to search available items, view detailed availability, pricing and delivery time information, place and track orders, and manage account preferences online.[81]
Sound archive
The British Library Sound Archive holds more than a million discs and 185,000 tapes.[82] The collections come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound, from music, drama and literature to oral history and wildlife sounds, stretching back over more than 100 years. The Sound Archive's online catalogue is updated daily.
It is possible to listen to recordings from the collection in selected Reading Rooms in the Library through their SoundServer[83] and Listening and Viewing Service, which is based in the Rare Books & Music Reading Room.[84]
In 2006, the Library launched a new online resource, British Library Sounds, which makes 50,000 of the Sound Archive's recordings available online.[85][86]
Moving image services
Launched in October 2012, the British Library's moving image services provide access to nearly a million sound and moving image items onsite, supported by data for over 20 million sound and moving image recordings.[87] The three services, which for copyright reasons can only be accessed from terminals within the Reading Rooms at St Pancras or Boston Spa, are:
BBC Pilot/Redux: A collaboration with BBC Research & Development to mirror its archive which has, since June 2007, been recording 24/7 of all of the BBC's national and some regional broadcast output. BBC Pilot includes 2.2 million catalogue records and 225,000 playable programmes, but unlike BBC Redux it does not include any broadcasts beyond 2011.
Broadcast News: Since May 2010, the British Library has been making off-air recordings of daily TV and radio news broadcasts from seventeen channels, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky News, Al-Jazeera English, NHK World, CNN, France 24, Bloomberg, Russia Today and China's CCTV News. Many of the programs come with subtitles, which can be electronically searched, greatly enhancing the value of the collection as a research tool.
Television & Radio Index for Learning & Teaching (TRILT): Produced by the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC), TRILT is a database of all UK television and radio broadcasts since 2001 (and selectively back to 1995). Its 16 million records, growing by a million per year, cover every channel, broadcast and repeat.
Periodicals and philatelic collections
Newspapers
The Library holds an almost complete collection of British and Irish newspapers since 1840. This is partly because of the legal deposit legislation of 1869, which required newspapers to supply a copy of each edition of a newspaper to the library. London editions of national daily and Sunday newspapers are complete back to 1801. In total, the collection consists of 660,000 bound volumes and 370,000 reels of microfilm containing tens of millions of newspapers with 52,000 titles on 45 km (28 mi) of shelves. From earlier dates, the collections include the Thomason Tracts, comprising 7,200 seventeenth-century newspapers,[88] and the Burney Collection, featuring nearly 1 million pages of newspapers from the late 18th and early 19th centuries.[89] The section also holds extensive collections of non-British newspapers, in numerous languages.
The Newspapers section was based in Colindale in North London until 2013, when the buildings, which were considered to provide inadequate storage conditions and to be beyond improvement, were closed and sold for redevelopment.[90][91] The physical holdings are now divided between the sites at St Pancras (some high-use periodicals, and rare items such as the Thomason Tracts and Burney collections) and Boston Spa (the bulk of the collections, stored in a new purpose-built facility).[91]
A significant and growing proportion of the collection is now made available to readers as surrogate facsimiles, either on microfilm, or, more recently, in digitised form. In 2010 a ten-year programme of digitisation of the newspaper archives with commercial partner DC Thomson subsidiary Brightsolid began,[92][93] and the British Newspaper Archive was launched in November 2011.[94] A dedicated newspaper reading room opened at St Pancras in April 2014, including facilities for consulting microfilmed and digital materials, and, where no surrogate exists, hard-copy material retrieved from Boston Spa.[91][95]
Philatelic collections
The British Library Philatelic Collections are held at St Pancras. The collections were established in 1891 with the donation of the Tapling collection;[97] they steadily developed and now comprise over 25 major collections and a number of smaller ones, encompassing a wide range of disciplines. The collections include postage and revenue stamps, postal stationery, essays, proofs, covers and entries, "cinderella stamp" material, specimen issues, airmails, some postal history materials, official and private posts, etc., for almost all countries and periods.[98] Approximately 80,000 items on 6,000 sheets may be viewed in 1,000 display frames; 2,400 sheets are from the Tapling Collection. All other material, which covers the whole world, is available to students and researchers.[98]
Other projects
The British Library sponsors or co-sponsors many projects of national and international significance. These include:
BankesHomer, one of the longest and best preserved papyri of Homer's literary works surviving from antiquity, containing the bulk of the text of the final book of the Iliad (2nd century AD)
Egerton Gospel, one of the two earliest preserved papyrus witnesses to the Christian gospel tradition (2nd century AD)
Sixty-six Indian charters on copper plates, including those from Chamak and two similar groups of plates from Java,[102] (1st century BC – 13th century AD)
Sogdian Ancient Letters, the earliest substantial texts written in Sogdian, the language formerly spoken in the area around Samarkand in present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (313–314 AD)
Codex Sinaiticus, the major portion of the world's second-oldest manuscript of the Bible in koine Greek (330–360 AD)
Letters of Cyprian, three fragments from St Cyprian's epistles in uncial script, part of a Latin Codex from Carthage, north Africa (late 4th century AD)[104]
Codex Alexandrinus, early manuscript of the Greek Bible containing the majority of the Old Testament and New Testament and one of the four Great uncial codices (400–440 AD)
Jacob Manuscript, the second oldest extant Syriac manuscript and the oldest codex bearing a date in any language, handwritten by the scribe Jacob (411 AD)
Fragments of the Cotton Genesis, luxury illuminated manuscript copy of the Book of Genesis and one of the oldest illustrated biblical codices to survive to the modern period (4th to 5th centuries AD)
Leaf from the Codex Palatinus, Latin Gospel Book written on purple dyed vellum in gold and silver ink (5th century AD)
Maunggun gold plates, two gold strips found at Maunggun near Sri Ksetra, inscribed in the ancient Pyu script and among the earliest Buddhist texts discovered in Myanmar, donated by Sir Frederick Fryer, Lieutenant-Governor of Burma (5th century AD)[105]
Seven folios of a manuscript containing the Sanskrit text of the Lotus Sutra in Sharada script from Gilgit, the earliest paper manuscript from South Asia (5th–7th centuries AD)[106]
Earliest Syriac manuscript with the complete Peshitta text of the New Testament (5th–6th centuries AD)
Ceolfrid Bible, fragment of one of the three single-volume Bibles ordered by Ceolfrid and closely related to the Codex Amiatinus (late 7th – early 8th centuries)
One of the oldest and most complete surviving Qur’an codices in the world, produced in the Hijazi script in the Hijaz region of Arabia where the holy places of Mecca and Medina are. (8th century)[109]
800–1000 AD
Schuttern Gospels, an early illuminated gospel book produced in Baden, Germany (early 9th century)
Aethelstan Psalter, small book of psalms made near Reims, once owned by King Æthelstan of Wessex and given by him to Winchester Cathedral (early 9th century)
Tibetan Annals, two manuscripts written in Old Tibetan covering the period from 643 to 764 AD (800–840)
Harley Aratea, Carolingian copy of Phaenomena Aratea by the Greek poet Aratus, with 22 full-page representations of the constellations in text or scholia within the shapes, from Rheims, France (820)
Bible from Moutier-Grandval Abbey, one of three illustrated bibles containing the text of the Vulgate made at the scriptorium of Tours in the ninth century, France (840)
Lothair Psalter, sumptuous Carolingian manuscript with original binding furnishing a large silver-gilt medallion of the Emperor Lothair I (840–855)[110]
An early copy of the Qur’an in Kufic script, with beginnings of elements of Arabic illumination and decoration, possibly from al-Kufah, Iraq (850)
Anglo-Saxon copy of Orosius's Historiae Adversus Paganos with enlarged zoomorphic initials, produced at the scriptorium in Winchester Cathedral, England (892–925)[113]
Marmoutiers Gospel Book, illuminated manuscript mixing Insular and Carolingian styles produced in Brittany or Tours, western France (late 9th century)
Irq Bitig or Book of Omens from the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, China, the only known complete manuscript text written in the Old Turkic script (9th century)
Gospels of Elisha, Armenian gospels commissioned by Lord Elisha, one of the earliest gospels written in the Armenian language (c. 900)
Lei feng ta scroll, early printed document found walled up in the Leifeng Pagoda in Hangzhou, China (975)
Ramsey Psalter, Anglo-Saxon illuminated psalter made for use at the Benedictine monastery of Ramsey Abbey for its founder St Oswald (late 10th century)
Bosworth Psalter, oldest English manuscript that includes all of the important texts of the Benedictine Office, from Bosworth Hall, Leicestershire (late 10th century)[115]
The sole surviving manuscript copy of the poem Beowulf, one of four extant Anglo-Saxon poetry manuscripts (975–1025)[116]
Illustrated copy of Prudentius's Psychomachia or "Battle of the Soul", the first allegorical work in European literature (late 10th-early 11th centuries)
Seven of the nine surviving manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (10th–12th centuries)
Burney Gospels, illuminated copy of the Greek Gospels by the Kokkinobaphos Master, once owned by the imperial Comnenus family in Constantinople (10th-12th centuries)[117]
Grimbald Gospels, luxury gospel-book with gold initials and silver decoration made by Eadwig Basan, a monk at Christ Church, Canterbury, named after Grimbald of Saint-Bertin who was recommended in a letter that accompanied the volume to King Alfred the Great by Fulk, archbishop of Reims (1012–1023)
Harley Echternach Gospels and Egerton Echternach Gospels, two lavishly illuminated Gospel Books produced at the Benedictine Abbey of St Willibrord in Echternach, Luxembourg, (1025–1075)[118][119]
Préaux Gospels, luxury copy of the Four Gospels produced under the leadership of abbot Richard of Fourneaux, a student of Saint Anselm, at the Benedictine abbey of St Pierre in Préaux, Normandy (early 12th century)
Leaf from the Eadwine Psalter, one of the most decorated psalters from medieval England, named after the scribe Eadwine, a monk from Canterbury Cathedral (1155–1160)
Gospels of Simeon, gospels written in an early form of the Armenian script or Erkatagir by a monk named Simeon, collected by the traveller William B. Barker (1166)
Fragment of the luxurious Psalter of Henry the Lion with text written in gold on purple parchment and scenes of months and zodiac signs (1168–1189)
Annals of Egmond Abbey, the earliest manuscript copy in Latin of the annals from Egmond Abbey, a significant source for the early history of the Netherlands (late 12th/early 13th centuries)[124]
1200–1300 AD
Avag Vank Gospels, lavishly illuminated manuscript of the Four Gospels in the Armenian language, eastern Turkey (1200–01)
Two first edition copies of Magna Carta out of 4 remaining copies (1215)
Rochester Bestiary, richly illuminated manuscript of a medieval bestiary, a book describing the appearance and habits of familiar and exotic animals, both real and legendary, Rochester, Kent (1220–1230)
Mahzor Vitry, liturgical manuscript written in Ashkenazic script, unique compendium of Jewish prayers for the entire year according to the north French rite and a host of laws on everyday practices (1242)
Hispano-Moresque Haggadah, illuminated Passover Haggadah manuscript with 66 full-page illustrations depicting episodes from the Book of Exodus, made in Castile, Spain (1280)[128]
Copy of Sultan Walad's Ibtidānamah, said in a note by the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh to be an autograph copy (1298)
GospelLectionary of Sainte-Chapelle, illuminated collection of Gospel passages read during mass-produced for the Sainte-Chapelle, Paris (late 13th century)[129]
Fécamp Bible, largely intact illuminated bible originally from the Abbey of Fécamp, Normandy (late 13th century)
Copy of Abd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī's Kitāb Ṣuwar al-kawākib al-thābitah, an illustrated description of the 48 classical constellations in Ptolemy's Almagest (13th century)
Part 25 of the Qur’ān commissioned by the Ilkhanate ruler Sultan Öljaitü, written in a fine gold muhaqqaq script with illuminated frontispiece. Mosul, Iraq (1310–1311)
Original manuscript of the Ordinances of 1311, series of regulations imposed upon King Edward II by the nobility and clergy (1311)[130]
Stowe Breviary, illuminated manuscript breviary from England, providing divine office according to the Sarum Ordinal and calendar (1320–1330)
Taymouth Hours, illuminated Book of Hours produced in England with unusually rich decoration, named after Taymouth Castle in Scotland where it was kept for centuries (1325–1335)
Golden Haggadah, Barcelona Haggadah,[132] Sister Haggadah[133] and Brother Haggadah,[134] four illuminated manuscripts for the Jewish Passover from Catalonia (early 14th century)
Gorleston Psalter, illuminated manuscript containing early music instruction and humorous marginalia (early 14th century)
Maastricht Hours, book of hours made in Liège, remarkable for its large number of vibrant illuminations (early 14th century)
Kildare Poems, group of sixteen poems written in an Irish dialect of Middle English, one of the earliest manuscripts in Irish English, Kildare, Ireland (c. 1350)
London Manuscript, a medievalTuscan musical manuscript containing some of the earliest purely instrumental pieces in the Western musical tradition (c. 1400)
The Life and Acts of Lalibela, Ethiopian manuscript of the history of King Lalibela of Lasta (1400)
Hours of René of Anjou, illuminated manuscript made in Paris acquired by René, Duke of Anjou and King of Naples (1405–1410)
Great Bible, at over half metre long the largest manuscript of the Bible in the British Library's collection, once owned by Henry IV of England (early 15th century)
Codex Bellunensis, illustrated florilegia and botanical codex with 180 full-page painted drawings of plants from Belluno, northern Italy (early 15th century)[136]
One of the earliest copies of the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, perhaps the most influential literary text in Middle English (1410)
Book of the Queen, lavishly decorated collection of works by the poet Christine de Pizan presented to Queen Isabeau of France (1410–1414)
Beaufort/Beauchamp Hours, composite book of hours, the main part of which was most likely made for Margaret Beauchamp (1411–1443)
Tractatus de Herbis, illustrated treatise of medicinal plants, with nearly 500 representations of plants, animals and minerals, originally from Lombardy, northern Italy (1440)
Collected commentaries on the Spring and Autumn annals, printed document with early use of Kabin font moveable type under the Korean King Sejong, Seoul (1442)
Illuminated manuscript copy of Dante's Divine Comedy, produced for Alfonso V, king of Aragon, Naples and Sicily, Siena, Italy (1450)
Volume of Poems of Charles of Orleans, illuminated folio of poems written by Charles, Duke of Orléans during his imprisonment in England following the Battle of Agincourt (c. 1450)
Two Gutenberg or 42-line Bibles and a leaf from a third, copies of a Latin Bible printed at Mainz, Germany, the earliest major books printed using mass-produced movable metal type in Europe (1450–1455)
Mainz Psalter, the second work to be produced with movable type in Europe and the first to experiment with multi-coloured printing, one of 10 extant copies, Mainz, Germany (1457)
Copy of the Bamberg or 36-line Bible, the second moveable-type-printed edition of the Bible from Bamberg, Germany (c. 1458–60)
Rime and Trionfi by Petrarch, illuminated manuscript of poetry once owned by Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, northern Italy (1465)
Mentelin Bible, the first bible to be printed in any vernacular language, one of the first edition copies printed by Johann Mentelin in Strasbourg (1466)
SanaaPentateuch or Five Books of Moses, with stylised representations of mountains and fish swimming in the sea outlined in scriptural micrography, Yemen (1469)
Luxury illustrated copy of the Roman de la Rose, one of the last Flemish Master illuminated manuscripts, Bruges (1490–1500)
Two copies of the Khamsa of Nizami illustrated by Tīmurid artist Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād, the most famous of Persian miniature painters (late 15th century)
Ritson Choirbook, early manuscript source of English carols (late 15th century)
Križanić Breviary, liturgical manuscript written in Glagolitic script by the Croat monk Ivan Križanić, from the Erberg collection, Croatia (15th century)
Late medieval manuscript copy of the Jónsbók, code of laws promulgated in Iceland by Jón Einarsson in 1280, at the instigation of King Magnus VI of Norway, from the collection of Sir Joseph Banks (15th century)
One of only three extant copies of the first edition of the Tynedale New Testament, the first bible to be translated and mass-produced in English by William Tyndale (1526)[141]
Diminutive prayer books made for Anne Seymour, Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey; the latter two said to have been taken to the scaffold at their executions (1536–1544)[142][143][144]
Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the earliest notebook in the English language of any major poet that has survived (1530–1540)
Henry VIII's personal copy of the Great Bible, the first authorised version of the Bible in English (1540)
The Glorification of the Great Goddess, beautiful palm leaf manuscript of the Devimahatmya, copied in Nepal in Newari script during the reign of King Prana Malla of Bhaktapur (1547)
Yongle Encyclopedia, 24 volumes of the second edition of the encyclopedia commissioned by the Yongle Emperor, containing the most important texts available at that time, China (1562–1572)
Splendor Solis, medical and alchemical treatises attributed to Salomon Trismosin, meticulously painted and highlighted with gold in Germany (1582)
Imperial illuminated copy of the Dārāb-nāma in Nastaliq script by Abu Ṭahir Ṭarsusi, originally from the Mughal Library of Emperor Akbar (1585)[146]
KaifengTorah Scroll, sheepskin scroll with 239 columns of text in Hebrew, one of only seven complete scrolls to have survived from the Synagogue in Kaifeng, China (1643–1663)
Most volumes of the Mewar Ramayana, illustrated manuscript with 450 paintings of the Hindu Epic, commissioned by Acarya Jasvant for the library of Jagat Singh I of the Rajput kingdom of Mewar in Rajasthan (1649–1653)[150]
Menggu Ziyun, unique copy of a 14th-century rime dictionary of Chinese written in the 'Phags-pa script (18th century)
The Acts and Life of Saint Tekle Haymanot, profusely illustrated manuscript with the only known example of a metal cover with carvings of figures and the cross outside of Ethiopia (18th century AD)
Serat Selarasa, one of the earliest finely-illustrated Javanese manuscripts known, retelling the adventures of Selarasa, prince of Champa and his two brothers, originally owned by Colonel Colin Mackenzie (1804 AD)[151]
Anthology of poetry by the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (early 19th century AD)
Copy of Taj al-Salatin or The Crown of Kings, one of the finest illuminated Malay manuscripts known, Penang (1824)[152]
One of only 120 copies of The Birds of America by John James Audubon, containing illustrations of a wide variety of birds from the United States (1827–1838)
Rani Jindan's Prayer Book, luxurious manuscript written in the Gurmukhi script produced for Maharani Jind Kaur, Regent of the Sikh Empire (1828–1830)
Pageant of King Mindon manuscript, the finest example of Burmese manuscript art before it became influenced by Western artistic conventions, depicting the procession of King Mindon and his court to dedicate the Kyauk-daw-gyi Buddha image in Mandalay (1865)
Imperial manuscript copy of the Tale of Kiều, Vietnamese epic poem written in Sino-Vietnamese script illustrated with scenes from the story, once owned by the French orientalist Paul Pelliot,[153] (1894)
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") (1865)[156][157][158][159]
Collections of manuscripts
Foundation collections
The three foundation collections are those which were brought together to form the initial manuscript holdings of the British Museum in 1753:[160]
The Additional Manuscripts series covers manuscripts that are not part of the named collections, and contains all other manuscripts donated, purchased or bequeathed to the Library since 1756. The numbering begins at 4101, as the series was initially regarded as a continuation of the collection of Sloane manuscripts, which are numbered 1 to 4100.[161]
Chief executives and other employees
British Library employees undertake a wide variety of roles including curatorial, business and technology. Curatorial roles include or have included librarians, curators, digital preservationists, archivists and keepers.[162] In 2001 the senior management team was established and consisted of Lynne Brindley (chief executive), Ian Millar (director of finance and corporate resources), Natalie Ceeney (director of operations and services), Jill Finney (director of strategic marketing and communications) and Clive Field (director of scholarship and collections). This was so the problems of a complex structure, a mega hybrid library, global brand and investment in digital preservation could be managed better[163]
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^British Library
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^British Library
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^"Purchased by Eldridge Reeves Johnson, inventor of the Victor Talking Machine, the manuscript was exhibited at the Library of Congress from October 1929 to February 1930. After Johnson's death in 1945, the manuscript was purchased at auction by a group of Americans led by Lessing Rosenwald, A. S. W. Rosenbach and Librarian of Congress Luther Evans. On 13 Nov. 1948, Evans presented the manuscript to the British Museum as a gift to Great Britain from a group of anonymous Americans in gratitude for Britain's heroic efforts in holding Hitler at bay until the United States entered World War II."
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^Nickson, M.A.E. (1998). The British Library: Guide to the catalogues and indexes of the Department of Manuscripts (3rd ed.). London: British Library. p. 4. ISBN 0712306609.
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Further reading
Barker, Nicolas (1989) Treasures of the British Library; compiled by Nicolas Barker and the curatorial staff of the British Library. New York: Harry N. Abrams ISBN 0-8109-1653-3
Francis, Sir Frank, ed. (1971) Treasures of the British Museum. 360 pp. London: Thames & Hudson; ch. 6: manuscripts, by T. S, Patties; ch. 9: oriental printed books and manuscripts, by A. Gaur; ch. 12: printed books, by H. M. Nixon
Harris, Phil (1998). A History of the British Museum Library, 1753–1973. London: British Library. ISBN 0712345620.
Leapman, Michael (2012). The Book of the British Library. London: British Library. ISBN 978-0712358378.
Mandelbrote, Giles, and Barry Taylor (2009). Libraries Within the Library: The Origins of the British Library's Printed Collections. London: British Library. ISBN 978-0712350358.
Proctor, Robert (2010). A Critical Edition of the Private Diaries of Robert Proctor: The Life of a Librarian at the British Museum, edited by J. H. Bowman. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 0773436340.
Ritchie, Berry (1997). The Good Builder: The John Laing Story. James & James.[ISBN missing]
Explore the British Library Archived 16 July 2020 at the Wayback Machine (main catalogue; includes newspapers)
The King's Library Archived 24 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine contained within The British Library
The World's Earliest Dated Printed Book Archived 3 June 2010 at the Wayback Machine
The Business & IP Centre homepage
British Library Learning homepage
British Library newspapers 1800–1900 online
British Library building photos
Timelines: sources from history Archived 1 February 2010 at the Wayback Machine, an interactive history timeline that explores collection items chronologically, from medieval times to the present day
"British Library Journal", Electronic British Library Journal, ISSN 1478-0259, archived from the original on 17 February 2020, retrieved 1 December 2017 1975– .