British Library Visit

Image: a corner of the King's Library at the British Library

Today, we visited the British Library. The class was split into groups of about 10 and led by different guides; my tour was led by Heather Morley. As we learned yesterday on our tour of the British Museum's General Archive, the British Library used to share the same facilities as the British Museum. The current building opened in 1998, giving both institutions more space and allowing the British Library to include a few more collections, such as the Philatelic Society Collection and the Business & IP Reading room. The new facility also allowed them to better care for the items in their collections. The Library currently has three locations: the flagship site we were at, Colindale in north London, and the Document Supply Center in Boston Spa, Yorkshire.

Both the scale and architecture of the flagship St. Pancras location and the cultural significance of the objects in its collections, particularly the Treasures collection, are awe-inspiring. However, I was struck at how the British Library is a very different institution from the Barbican Library. Whereas the Barbican, as a public library, invests a significant amount of time learning what their patrons want and providing it for them, the British Library is a repository library, and its mission is to collect, preserve, and record the existence of books in the British National Bibliography. The result is that access to the British Library collections is extremely limited. As our tour guide noted, this dichotomy between access and preservation has been a quandary since the time of one of its founders, Sir Hans Sloane, who had several scores in his collection ruined by a buttered muffin brought in by Handel.

For me, the perfect metaphor for the British Library is the glass-encased King's Library running through its center (or centre, rather): so many books, beautiful, varied, rare, but all behind glass, and the only door to reach all those books is behind a gate marked Staff Only.

British Museum General Archive

Image source: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/research_facilities/archives.aspx

Today, a group of Library and Information Science students visited the British Museum's General Archive. I am not very familiar with archives, so every chance I get to visit one is a trip into a different world.

Stephanie Clarke, the Museum Archivist, and her assistant Bryony led our tour. There is only one other staff member in the Archive, a woman who worked in administration for many years and has been very valuable in applying her firsthand experience with the Museum to understanding the organizational processes that generated the papers now in the archive collection.

The Archive holds 6 record series. These include Finance Records, Staff Records, Trustee Records, Building Records, and Temporary Exhibitions records. Examples of objects in the General Archive collections include 8,000 photographs taken of the Museum and its collections, stereoscope images of objects in the collections, architectural drawings of the Museum buildings, minutes from meetings of the Board of Trustees, and successful job applications for Museum employees from the 19th century.

One of the major things that sets archives apart from libraries is that they inherit their collections from an outside entity. This means that their collections often reflect the organizational structure of the organization that created the records. Sometimes this arrangement appears quite sensible, other times it is quirky and unexpected. The General Archive is no exception: on one hand, I found it quite logical that, as Clarke explained, each Museum department has its own archival on material in its own permanent collections. On the other, I was very surprised to learn that the General Archive houses the reader's tickets from the British Library. This quirk in the collection is due to the history of the two institutions, Clarke explained. The British Library was originally housed on the British Museum campus, and when it moved to its new location, it left its archive of reader's tickets in the care of the General Archive.

Another surprising object in the collection was an exploded shell that had hit the Museum during Second World War. Clarke showed this to us along with photographs of the damage to the museum during the war. Most of the collections had been moved to underground storage when the war started, which was fortunate because the building was heavily damaged. I was very glad Clarke brought these things out for us; in the US, students learn in history class that London was heavily bombed during the War. Full stop. Period novels are a little better at illustrating the reality of what this entailed, but it wasn't really until I arrived here, and could see the entire Royal Festival Hall--built over an area bombed out in the war--and the entire Barbican, built over an area bombed out in the war--that I finally felt I understood what it meant for London to have been bombed.