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A research library is a library that contains an in-depth collection of material on one or several subjects. A research library will generally include an in-depth selection of materials on a particular topic or set of topics and contain primary sources as well as secondary sources . Research libraries are established to meet research needs and, as such, are stocked with authentic materials with quality content. Research libraries are typically attached to academic or research institutions that specialize in that topic and serve members of that institution. Large university libraries are considered research libraries, and often contain many specialized branch research libraries. The libraries provide research materials for students and staff of these organizations to use and can also publish and carry literature produced by these institutions and make them available to others. Research libraries could also be accessible to members of the public who wish to gain in-depth knowledge on that particular topic.

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100-542: 13,950,000 books 824,101 serial titles 351,116 manuscripts (single and volumes) 8,266,276 philatelic items 4,347,505 cartographic items 1,607,885 music scores The British Library is a research library in London that is the national library of the United Kingdom . It is one of the largest libraries in the world . It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As

200-954: A legal deposit library, the British Library receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland, including a significant proportion of overseas titles distributed in the United Kingdom. The Library is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport . The British Library is a major research library , with items in many languages 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, along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and items dating as far back as 2000 BC. The library maintains

300-412: A Mosque run by Hajie Mohammad Dollie who opened London's first Mosque previously at 97 Albert Street, Camden Town in 1895. The Midland Grand Hotel, fronting St Pancras station, was designed by George Gilbert Scott . It was built mainly with red bricks with a tower at one end and a spire at the other. It closed in 1935 and was repeatedly threatened with demolition until it was Grade I listed in 1967. It

400-399: 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. The majority of catalogue entries can be found on Explore the British Library,

500-495: A complex of two tower blocks with office shops and apartments, the Euston Tower. The tower attracted a number of significant tenants, including Inmarsat and the independent radio station Capital Radio . The ITV broadcaster Thames Television 's corporate headquarters were nearby at No. 306–316 Euston Road from 1971 to 1992 when the station closed. That building was demolished in 1994 and redeveloped when Thames, now

600-463: A few days to as short as a few hours. Patrons can also gain access to periodicals and journals that require paid subscriptions through their libraries which they can use to access primary research materials. A research library is often connected to the services of the university related to scholarly communication , such as support for open access journals run by the institution and the operation of an institutional repository , as well as support for

700-661: 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. 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, and there is a database of significant bookbindings . British Library Sounds provides free online access to over 60,000 sound recordings. The British Library's commercial secure electronic delivery service

800-522: A major road through Central London, at its junction with Marylebone Road and Great Portland Street . It meets the northern end of Tottenham Court Road at a large junction with an underpass , and it ends at King's Cross with Gray's Inn Road . The road ahead to Islington is Pentonville Road . The road is part of the London Inner Ring Road and on the edge of the London congestion charge zone. Drivers are not charged for travelling on

900-597: A million books, including more than 6,000 Sanskrit manuscripts and the largest collection of Hindi and Punjabi medical documents in Europe. Its objects were transferred on permanent loan to the Science Museum in 1976. The University College London Hospital's archives are at No 250 Euston Road. In late 1898, 189 Euston Road (Where the Wellcome Collection is at present) was the location of

1000-520: A million discs and 185,000 tapes. 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 and Listening and Viewing Service , which

1100-566: A new ring road around Central London called the 'A' Ring, but post-war budget constraints meant that a medley of existing routes were improved to form the ring road, including Euston Road. An underpass to avoid the junction with the Tottenham Court Road was proposed by the London County Council (LCC) in 1959, with construction beginning in 1964. The property developer Joe Levy was keen to develop buildings in

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1200-524: A production company, moved all operations to Teddington Studios . In the early-21st century, the Greater London Authority commissioned a plan to improve the road from the architectural firm, Terry Farrell and Partners . The original study proposed removing the underpass (which was subsequently cancelled) and providing a pedestrian crossing and removing the gyratory system connecting the Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street. The scheme

1300-619: A programme for content acquisition and adds some three million items each year occupying 9.6 kilometres (6 mi) of new shelf space. 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. There is an additional storage building and reading room in

1400-597: A room devoted solely to Magna Carta , as well as several Qur'ans and Asian items. In addition to the permanent exhibition, there are frequent thematic exhibitions which have covered maps, sacred texts, history of the English language, and law, including a celebration of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta . 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

1500-607: A secure network in constant communication automatically replicate, self-check, and repair data. 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)

1600-700: A shared technical infrastructure implementing the Digital Library System developed by the British Library. 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. Four storage nodes, located in London, Boston Spa , Aberystwyth , and Edinburgh , linked via

1700-752: 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 ,

1800-652: A third location in Leeds , potentially located in the Grade 1 listed Temple Works . In England, legal deposit can be traced back to at least 1610. 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:

1900-447: Is able to acquire and maintain materials that are not easily available through traditional acquisition methods. Research libraries can be either reference libraries , which do not lend their holdings, or lending libraries , which do lend all or some of their holdings. Some extremely large or traditional research libraries are entirely reference in this sense, lending none of their material; most academic research libraries , at least in

2000-493: Is available in hard copy and via online databases. Staff are trained to guide small and medium enterprises (SME) and entrepreneurs to use the full range of resources. 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. This service is run in partnership with Expert Impact. Stephen Fear

2100-689: Is based in the Rare Books & Music Reading Room. In 2006, the Library launched a new online resource, British Library Sounds , which makes 50,000 of the Sound Archive's recordings available online. 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. The three services, which for copyright reasons can only be accessed from terminals within

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2200-654: Is conducted by their librarians on their topics of choice. Libraries first appeared in Southwest Asia more than 5,000 years ago as repositories to store written resources for retrieval, often written on materials like bamboo, clay, and later papyrus . The most durable of these materials was clay, and tablets made of clay are the most common artifacts retrieved from ancient library sites. Many great civilizations built libraries which contained knowledge and information that were accumulated over years, sometimes centuries, and from across regions. The oldest known library in

2300-438: Is free of charge in hard copy and online via approximately 30 subscription databases. Registered readers can access the collection and the databases. 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

2400-508: Is no longer in use. The new library was designed specially for the purpose by the architect Colin St John Wilson in collaboration with his wife MJ Long , who came up with the plan that was subsequently developed and built. 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

2500-480: Is one of the largest and most well-known research libraries in the world. It is the United States Congress' official research library and is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country, having been founded in 1800. It contains more than 170 million items that cover a wide range of subjects from across the world and in 470 different languages. The library has offices abroad through which it

2600-495: Is that it enables greater automation of workflows within libraries which ensures that they become more streamlined. These increased efficiencies ensure libraries and their librarians are able to provide the highest quality service possible. Euston Road Euston Road is a road in Central London that runs from Marylebone Road to King's Cross . The route is part of the London Inner Ring Road and forms part of

2700-535: Is the largest public building constructed in the United Kingdom in the 20th century. 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. In December 2009 a new storage building at Boston Spa

2800-540: The .fr domain annually (62 TBs in 2015) since 2006. On 28 October 2023 the British Library's entire website went down due to a cyber attack, later confirmed as a ransomware attack attributed to ransomware group Rhysida . 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, with some disruption expected to persist for several months. As at January 2024,

2900-650: The Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections (APAC) which include the India Office Records and materials in the languages of Asia and of north and north-east Africa. 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. Historically, only those wishing to use specialised material unavailable in other public or academic libraries would be given

3000-693: 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,

3100-565: The London congestion charge zone boundary. It is named after Euston Hall , the family seat of the Dukes of Grafton , who had become major property owners in the area during the mid-19th century. The road was originally the central section of New Road from Paddington to Islington which opened in 1756 as London's first bypass . It provided a route along which to drive cattle to Smithfield Market avoiding central London. Traffic increased when major railway stations, including Euston , opened in

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3200-569: The West End districts a short distance south of the road. Euston Tower is a landmark on the road and The British Library is just to the west of St Pancras station. The old and new headquarters of the Wellcome Trust are on its south side. From west to east the road passes Regent's Park , Great Portland Street , Warren Street , Euston Square , Euston and King's Cross St Pancras tube stations. Bus routes 30 and 205 run along

3300-516: 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. As of 2022, Explore the British Library is the latest iteration of the online catalogue. It contains nearly 57 million records and may be used to search, view and order items from

3400-627: The 1970s, the estate came under threat from property developers who wanted to demolish it and build offices, which led to demonstrations and protests, including supporters from University College . The plans were cancelled, but the estate was still bulldozed and replaced by tower blocks . The area around the junction with the Tottenham Court Road suffered significant bomb damage during the Second World War . Patrick Abercrombie 's contemporary Greater London Plan called for

3500-878: The British Library continued to experience technology outages as a result of the cyber-attack. A number of books and manuscripts are on display to the public in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery which is open seven days a week at no charge. Some manuscripts in the exhibition include Beowulf , the Lindisfarne Gospels and St Cuthbert Gospel , a Gutenberg Bible , Geoffrey Chaucer 's Canterbury Tales , Thomas Malory 's Le Morte d'Arthur ( King Arthur ), Captain Cook 's journal, Jane Austen 's History of England , Charlotte Brontë 's Jane Eyre , Lewis Carroll 's Alice's Adventures Under Ground , Rudyard Kipling 's Just So Stories , Charles Dickens 's Nicholas Nickleby , Virginia Woolf 's Mrs Dalloway and

3600-407: 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. 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. This material

3700-560: The British Museum), Chancery Lane , Bayswater , and Holborn , with an interlibrary lending centre at Boston Spa , 2.5 miles (4 km) east of Wetherby in West Yorkshire (situated on Thorp Arch Trading Estate), and the newspaper library at Colindale , north-west London. Initial plans for the British Library required demolition of an integral part of Bloomsbury – a seven-acre swathe of streets immediately in front of

3800-543: The Business & IP Centre. The centre was opened in March 2006. 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

3900-532: The Document Supply Collection are held electronically and can be downloaded immediately. 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

4000-574: The Library absorbed the National Sound Archive , which holds many sound and video recordings, with over a million discs and thousands of tapes. 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", and they include the books and manuscripts: For many years its collections were dispersed in various buildings around central London , in places such as Bloomsbury (within

4100-502: The Library's BL Document Supply Service (BLDSS). 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. The British Library Sound Archive holds more than

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4200-669: The Library's main catalogue, which is based on Primo. 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

4300-608: 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 on a site at Euston Road next to St Pancras railway station . 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

4400-878: 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. 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

4500-658: The Reading Rooms at St Pancras or Boston Spa, are: 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,

4600-560: The Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers , is at Friends House , No. 173 Euston Road. It was built between 1925–7 and holds the society's library dating back to 1673, including George Fox 's journal covering the foundation of Pennsylvania . Euston Road School was opened at No. 314 in 1934 by William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers to encourage artwork in an atmosphere different from traditional art schools. The school struggled and closed by

4700-548: The St Pancras and Boston Spa sites. 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. The Library previously had a book storage depot in Woolwich , south-east London, which

4800-478: The U.S., now lend books, but not periodicals or other material. Books available in research libraries can include textbooks, journals and rare manuscripts. As the contents of research libraries are so focused, there can sometimes be a high demand for certain book titles. To ensure that as many patrons as possible can have access to the books they need, libraries have reserve collections, the books of which are only available for short-term loans. These loans can range from

4900-538: The advent of technology, this has evolved to include CDs, DVDs, Ebooks, audiobooks and online research catalogues. Research library collections are focused on one or more subjects or fields of study and the material available on those topics are typically more extensive and in-depth than that found in public lending libraries. Institutions such as universities may have multiple research libraries on campus, each dedicated to different faculties or subjects. Research libraries may also publish their own scholarly research which

5000-422: The appropriate databases or materials or in some cases obtaining these materials from external sources for them. With the changing role of libraries, research librarians' roles have evolved to include more than just selecting and maintaining the library's offerings and books, and helping patrons locate the items of their choice. Today, librarians must also be technologically savvy so they can teach users how to use

5100-470: The area and bought various properties. When the LCC refused planning permission because of the underpass development, Levy, who had outline planning permission, insisted the council pay him £1 million if they wanted to compulsorily purchase the site. Over the next four years, Levy bought properties along the north side of Euston Road, and an agreement was reached so that the council built the underpass and he built

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5200-752: The basis of historical research. Having a rare book in a library's collection is very prestigious and is often indicative of the library's high standards for materials. Libraries may also have archives of old photographs, films, musical scores and even artwork. They often also have archives of old newspapers and periodicals. Newspapers are often accessible through microfiche machines, which are used to view images of back issues of such publications. Research libraries also often provide patrons with basic technological equipment such as computers, scanners and printers to aid them in their work. These libraries frequently collaborate with one another to share resources through inter-library loans. This enables each library to meet

5300-496: 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. The British Library was created on 1 July 1973 as a result of the British Library Act 1972. Prior to this, the national library was part of the British Museum , which provided

5400-892: The bulk of the holdings of the new library, alongside smaller organisations which were folded in (such as the National Central Library , the National Lending Library for Science and Technology and the British National Bibliography ). 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. In 1983,

5500-836: The collections include the Thomason Tracts , comprising 7,200 seventeenth-century newspapers, and the Burney Collection , featuring nearly 1 million pages of newspapers from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. 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. The physical holdings are now divided between

5600-510: 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. A number of these are available for remote access to registered St Pancras Reader Pass holders. PhD theses are available via the E-Theses Online Service (EThOS). In 2012, the UK legal deposit libraries signed a memorandum of understanding to create

5700-503: The death of the hospital's founder, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson , the first woman in England to qualify as a doctor of medicine. The Euston Road premises closed in 1993, its services transferred to University College Hospital . The current hospital is at No. 235. The Wellcome Trust , a private medical research charity, was established in 1936 and has premises at No. 183 and No. 210 Euston Road. Its library holds about half

5800-460: The early 2010s and has been accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic when many libraries across the world were physically closed forcing patrons to rely solely on their electronic offerings. Libraries have had to update their technological infrastructure in order to keep up with the new demands of the public. The first step the average person takes when they conduct research is no longer visiting

5900-424: The end of that year the first of eleven new reading rooms had opened and the moving of stock was continuing. 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

6000-484: The entire extent of Euston Road from Great Portland Street to King's Cross. Before the 18th century, the land along which Euston Road runs was farmland and fields. Camden Town was a village retreat for Londoners working in the city. Euston Road was originally part of New Road, promoted by Charles FitzRoy, 2nd Duke of Grafton and enabled by an Act of Parliament passed in 1756. Construction began in May that year, and it

6100-418: The fronting Midland Grand Hotel following in 1873. The Euston station complex was controversially demolished in 1963 to accommodate British Rail 's facilities. The replacement building opened in 1968, and now serves 50 million passengers annually. Tolmers Village was in the tiny triangle (less than 2 hectares (4.9 acres)) on the north side of Euston Road between Hampstead Road and North Gower Street. It

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6200-608: The greatest ancient libraries in the world was the Library of Ashurbanipal , which was founded in the 7th century BC in Niveah, near present-day Iraq , by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal . The library contained around 30,000 cuneiform tablets written in multiple languages pertaining to scholarly texts, archival documents and religious materials along with some works of ancient literature. The king sent his scribes to other libraries in

6300-405: 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. 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

6400-464: The highest portico in London at 72 feet (22 m). The Great Hall opened in 1849 to improve accommodation for passengers, and a statue of Stephenson's father George was installed in 1852. The Dukes of Grafton had become the main property owners in the area, and in 1857 the central section of the road, between Osnaburgh Street and Kings Cross, was renamed Euston Road after Euston Hall , their country house. The eastern section became Pentonville Road,

6500-458: The increasing urban sprawl that threatened to reach places such as Camden Town. The Capper family, who lived on the south side of the proposed route, opposed its construction and complained their crops would be ruined by dust kicked up by cattle along the route. Capper Street, a side street off Tottenham Court Road , is named after the family. A clause in the 1756 Act stipulated that no buildings should be constructed within 50 feet (15 m) of

6600-418: The librarians affiliated with that institution. Digitization projects are often intensive and long-drawn. Librarians need to identify which materials should be digitized and the priority in which they should be digitized. They also need to ascertain what formats will be most suitable for the materials and the patrons, raise the necessary funds and obtain the rights to digitize the items. They then need to prepare

6700-415: The libraries. These resources are often of high quality and are from trusted sources and publishers. They also catalogue and organize the books and resources, maintain and repair books as required.  Librarians can also work with colleagues in other institutions to share resources and better the relationships between institutions. Librarians who work in research libraries often have in-depth knowledge of

6800-457: The library at its height had up to 400,000 scrolls, though there is uncertainty regarding the exact number and how many scrolls were original works, as some of these may have been copies. The works collected covered a wide range of topics including works by Homer , Herodotus , Plato , and Aristotle . The library drew scholars from across the world and led to Alexandria being known as a hub for knowledge and learning. The US Library of Congress

6900-404: The library but searching for information online. Patrons will obtain a basic understanding of their topic and identify the books or materials they need before ever setting foot in a library. They can also identify which libraries will provide them the most convenient access to these materials through online archives and catalogues. This is what makes effective digitization projects in libraries and

7000-617: The library has the materials they need and when and how these materials will be available for their use. Many libraries also have interlinked systems that enable patrons to reserve and borrow books from affiliated libraries, effectively increasing their collection size while keeping costs down. This can make it possible for libraries to offer resources that have a narrow appeal and a low demand but that could still be useful for patrons to access. Libraries are also required to be more efficient to meet both consumer demand and to keep up with continuing budget cuts. One benefit of increasing digitization

7100-520: 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 Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 extended United Kingdom legal deposit requirements to electronic documents, such as CD-ROMs and selected websites. The Library also holds

7200-470: The library's electronic systems. Many librarians conduct their own independent research on topics pertaining to a library's field or on the topic of libraries themselves. When the library is affiliated with an academic institution, librarians may even have quotas on how much research they must complete and how many papers they should publish. Oftentimes, these librarians have to meet their quotas in order to be eligible for promotions or even tenure positions at

7300-435: The library. Librarians' research can help to improve the level of service offered by the staff of the institution by increasing their knowledge of the investigative process. The research conducted may also support the operations of the library. Librarians also spearhead the digitization projects of any primary research sources that the library might have. These sources are typically the result of research projects conducted by

7400-571: The maintenance of accurate online catalogues crucial for libraries' continued survival. Libraries may also have functions on their websites which enable patrons to email librarians with questions directly to obtain answers in a quick and efficient manner and also ensure that questions will be addressed by the most qualified party. Libraries are now required to have extensive digital collections which comprise electronic journals, Ebooks and virtual reference services. They must also make their catalogues available online for users to quickly determine whether

7500-734: The mid-19th century and led to the road's renaming in 1857. Euston Road was widened in the 1960s to cater for the increasing demands of motor traffic, and the Euston Tower was built around that time. The road contains several significant buildings including the Wellcome Library , the British Library and the St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel . The road starts as a continuation of the A501,

7600-508: 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. The Euston Road building was Grade I listed on 1 August 2015. It has plans to open

7700-510: The needs of more patrons while keeping their costs down. Libraries may also collaborate to share the costs features such as licensing information sources. This is especially important today, with libraries being required to offer more services for their patrons with fewer resources. Librarians at research libraries are responsible for curating the library's collections. They identify the best books and resources by reading catalogues, publishers' announcements and book reviews, and acquire them for

7800-570: The newspaper library at Colindale, ahead of a later move to a similar facility on the same site. 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. 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

7900-464: The original documents, have them scanned or otherwise converted and ensure that all the necessary metadata is added. They then have to perform quality checks to ensure that the material is of the highest quality and fit to be released to the public. With the rapid advancement of technology and the advent of the digital age, consumers expectations are changing and libraries are being required to improve their digital infrastructure. This phenomenon began in

8000-623: The region to record their contents to create a register of contents. Probably the most renowned library in the ancient world was the Great Library of Alexandria , in Egypt . The library was part of the royal complex that included the research institution known as the Mouseion , and is believed to have been established during the reigns of Ptolemy I Soter (367–283 BC) and his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BC). There are report that

8100-455: The road but may be if they turn south into the zone during its hours of operation. King's Cross and St Pancras railway stations are at the eastern end of the road, and Euston railway station is further west. The position of these three railway termini on Euston Road, rather than in a more central position further south, is a result of the recommendations of the 1846 Royal Commission on Metropolitan Railway Termini that sought to protect

8200-488: The road, with the result that most of the houses along it lay behind substantial gardens. During the 19th century the law was increasingly ignored. Euston station opened on the north side of New Road in July 1837. It was planned by Robert Stephenson on the site of gardens called Euston Grove, and was the first mainline station to open in London. Its entrance, designed by Philip Hardwick , cost £35,000 (now 4,017,000) and had

8300-1098: 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). Research library Research libraries face a unique challenge of making research materials accessible and available to patrons. They also need to ensure there are no copyright-related issues with their materials, ensure that as many materials as possible are open access, and ensure all their materials are reliably sourced. Some specialized research libraries could include those affiliated to governmental organizations which may hold documents of historical, legal or political import, or music libraries which will have books and journals on music, as well as films and recordings for musicians to access. Research libraries will generally have materials that are typically non-fiction and scholarly. These traditionally included books, periodicals, journals, newspapers, manuscripts and cassette tapes. With

8400-502: The start of World War II. It was demolished in the early 1960s; the cover shot of the Beatles ' Twist and Shout EP was of its remains after demolition. The British Library moved to No. 96 Euston Road in 1999 into a new complex designed by Colin St John Wilson and opened by Queen Elizabeth II . It was built using more than ten million bricks and has a floor area of 112,000 square metres (1,210,000 sq ft). Although it

8500-441: The subjects that are the focus of the institutions in which they work. They are therefore able to answer more specific topical queries that patrons might have while also giving advice on the best resources to access for the necessary information. They conduct informational or reference interviews with patrons to ascertain what information they are looking for, and the purpose behind their research. This can help them to direct users to

8600-504: The theatre's front was removed but was subsequently reinstated after protests. The New Hospital for Women moved to No. 144 Euston Road in 1888, and was rebuilt by J.M. Brydon two years later. It housed 42 beds and was staffed entirely by women, which made it a comfortable environment for patients with gynaecological problems. It was renamed the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in 1918 following

8700-545: The usage of other institutions' repositories and open archives through discovery tools and academic search engines like BASE , CORE and Unpaywall . Rare books and manuscripts are often very valuable and can sometimes be fragile. These are often not available for loan, and can only be accessed within the library and sometimes under the supervision of the librarian. Rare books are those that were printed before 1850 and of which very few copies still exist today. They are highly valuable for research purposes as they often form

8800-481: The western Marylebone Road. The full length of Euston Road was dug up so that the Metropolitan Railway could be built beneath it using a cut-and-cover system and the road was then relaid to a much higher standard. The new Anglican church of St Luke's Church opened on Euston Road in 1861; it was shortly afterwards demolished and replaced by St Pancras railway station , which opened in 1867, with

8900-530: The world was excavated in Ebla in northern Syria. Excavation of the site of the ancient city began in 1964 and archeologists have since uncovered more than 20,000 clay tablets that documented the economic and cultural life of the city's residents. Archives dating back to 3000 BC were also discovered in 1975. The library also contained scientific records and observations on topics such as zoology , mineralogy , and information on Ebla's business and tax issues. One of

9000-505: Was used as offices until a major restoration in the early 1990s. The hotel reopened as the St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel in 2011. Camden Town Hall , formerly St Pancras Town Hall, opened in 1937. The Euston Theatre of Varieties was based at No. 37–43. It was renamed the Regent Theatre in 1922, and converted to a cinema in 1932. It was demolished in 1950 so that the town hall could be extended. The headquarters of

9100-734: Was approved by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone as "the start of changing the Marylebone to Euston road from a highway into a series of linked public spaces." The pedestrian crossing opened in March 2010. Livingstone's successor, Boris Johnson , favours keeping the Euston Road underpass and declared it to be a good place to test his nerves when cycling around London. In 2015, Transport for London announced its intention to close one lane in each direction on Euston Road between 2020 and 2026 to accommodate work on High Speed 2 . The decision

9200-531: Was built in the early 1860s over a former reservoir to provide affordable middle-class terraced housing but its proximity to a main road and the Euston Station complex meant it ultimately catered for the working classes. By 1871, around 5,000 residents were housed in a 12-acre (4.9 ha) area. The estate continued to expand throughout the early 20th century in a piecemeal fashion, and attracted Greek, Cypriot and Asian immigrants following World War II. In

9300-470: Was condemned by Camden Borough Council as it could affect business and cost more than £1 billion in lost revenue. The AA said the works were the largest ever proposed in London and would affect far more than local traffic due to its Inner Ring Road status. About halfway along Euston Road, at the junction with Upper Woburn Place , is St Pancras New Church , built in 1822. Designed by William and Henry Inwood and costing around £90,000 (now £10,359,000), it

9400-458: Was given a critical reception by architectural critics, visitors have enjoyed the welcoming entrance and praised its internal arrangements. Around 16,000 people visit each day. In Oscar Wilde 's The Picture of Dorian Gray , the characters Sibyl and James Vane live at a "shabby lodgings" on Euston Road. The street is a property in the United Kingdom edition of the board game Monopoly , which features famous London areas on its gameboard. It

9500-478: Was only available to readers in the US, and closed in May 2008. The scanned books are currently available via the British Library catalogue or Amazon . 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. In November 2011, four million newspaper pages from

9600-456: Was open to traffic by September. The road provided a new drovers' road for moving sheep and cattle to Smithfield Market avoiding Oxford Street and Holborn , and ended at St John's Street, Islington. It provided a quicker route for army units to reach the Essex coast when there was a threat of invasion, without passing through the cities of London and Westminster, and was a barrier between

9700-405: 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 from the 162.7 miles of temperature and humidity-controlled storage space. On Friday, 5 April 2013, the Library announced that it would begin saving all sites with the suffix .uk in a bid to preserve

9800-412: 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

9900-469: Was the British Library's Entrepreneur in Residence and Ambassador from 2012 to 2016. 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 II Royal Ordnance Factory , ROF Thorp Arch , which closed in 1957. When

10000-418: Was the most expensive religious building in London since St Paul's Cathedral , completed in the previous century. Almost opposite is Euston Road fire station, built 1901–2, in an Arts and Crafts style by Percy Nobbs . The Shaw Theatre opened at No. 100–110 in 1971, in honour of George Bernard Shaw . It was refurbished in 2000 as part of an adjacent Novotel development. The Keith Grant sculpture at

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