The British Library Is Not A Lending Library

As a patron, you cannot take a book out of the British Library, you can only read the books in their collection in one of their 11 reading rooms. The British Library is huge; it has eight floors and thousands, maybe millions, of books on site. It has a basement storage area of four floors, each that two floor height. It's an absolutely amazing facility and anything in the library is available for view if you have a reader's card, even the items in the Treasures Collection.

But to get access to anything, you have to have a reader's card. Unlike a public library card, a reader's card is more than just access to the stacks -- its access with a purpose. When you register, you are asked to explain why you want to use the collection and which areas specifically you want to use. This creates a very specific patron pool that divides up into three groups, according to our tour guide: academic, personal and business. Academic is the largest, which is not surprising. Once you have a reader's card you find the book you need, ask the librarian and the librarian brings it to you. This is not a browse-able collection due to the unusual and variety of collection materials. So you get your book, sit there with your pen and paper or computer, read your book and then leave without the book. For most librarians, I think, this must seem like a good way to cut down on circulation -- isn't the point to get the information to the patrons? Well yes, but, the British Library isn't just a public library for people to find information but it also keeps and stores information. It only has one copy of every new book published. It is not a lending library, but it still gets the necessary information. But back to the circulation question, wouldn't the confines of the library decrease the usage. Surprisingly not; according to our tour guide, most rooms are filled between 96%-98% every single day the library is open. I can't imagine many libraries that have circulation statistics like that.

As a reader, you can get just about any book. You can even get the books on display in the Treasures Collection, selected fromTreasures in Full, which includes hand-written letters and stories of Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, first print editions of Shakespeare's works, original scores by the likes of Mozart, Beethoven and Handel. It is a truly amazing collection. While these items require very special clearance, a reader can check them out and study them if necessary. This is a working library.

All these books come from the stacks below the British Library or their storage facility out in Yorkshire. I was actually lucky enough to see the basement collections. Back at UW I work for the Iberoamerican Studies Bibliographer, Paloma, who was kind enough to put me in touch with a colleague at the British Library. I was given a tour of the storage collection, concentrating on Latin American Colonial and Spanish materials, by Aquiles Alencar Braynar. I was really surprised to see the stacks but it was amazing and completely overwhelming. Even when you see the model, its hard to imagine just how big and expansive the storage area really is. Also, you can definitely hear the tube. Dr. Alencar Braynar showed me the manuscripts area, the large collection of Don Quixote editions gifted to the library and part of the library of Maximillion. Maximillion was once put in power as the "Emperor of Mexico" but was executed in the late 19th century when the Mexican people revolted. One of his aids gave most of his library to the British Library around the start of the 20th century and most of the books are focused on the colonization and revolution in Mexico. A few of these books are being used in the Viva la Libertad! exhibit celebrating the independence of most of Latin America. Mexico's Bicentennial is coming up this fall, which is super exciting.

I'm not doing a very good job at explaining the stacks but it was amazing to see their stacking system which does not follow any specific standard system. They stack them according to size, collection owner, language and maybe, if you're lucky, subject. There are huge horizontal book sections where there are huge books, some of them maps, piled in there own cubbie hole type sections. While it doesn't make sense to the patron, it does make sense for the library and librarians. Since the librarians are the only ones retrieving books, the system doesn't have to be organized LCC or Dewey. This is a very flexible system to allow for all the new books that the British Library receives every year, like the Library of Congress does in the U.S.

Basically, this was the best afternoon ever. :D