112-611: Tamil Heritage Foundation ( THF ) is a non-profit organization that collaborates with the British Library to collect, preserve and digitize documents of Tamil cultural heritage . Among activities around the world, the project activities are centered primarily in India , United Kingdom , Germany , Switzerland and South Korea . The purpose of the global effort is to make available hundreds of works, more than 100 years old, that had been collected during British colonial rule of
224-683: A London-based doctor and scientist from Ulster . During the course of his lifetime, and particularly after he married the widow of a wealthy Jamaican planter, Sloane gathered a large collection of curiosities , and not wishing to see his collection broken up after death, he bequeathed it to King George II , for the nation, for a sum of £20,000. At that time, Sloane's collection consisted of around 71,000 objects of all kinds including some 40,000 printed books, 7,000 manuscripts, extensive natural history specimens including 337 volumes of dried plants, prints and drawings including those by Albrecht Dürer and antiquities from Sudan , Egypt , Greece , Rome ,
336-465: 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,
448-453: A buildings committee was set up to plan for expansion of the museum, and further highlighted by the donation in 1822 of the King's Library , personal library of King George III's, comprising 65,000 volumes, 19,000 pamphlets , maps, charts and topographical drawings . The neoclassical architect, Sir Robert Smirke , was asked to draw up plans for an eastern extension to the museum "... for
560-760: 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 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
672-559: A display of objects from the South Seas brought back from the round-the-world voyages of Captain James Cook and the travels of other explorers fascinated visitors with a glimpse of previously unknown lands. The bequest of a collection of books, engraved gems , coins, prints and drawings by Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode in 1800 did much to raise the museum's reputation; but Montagu House became increasingly crowded and decrepit and it
784-665: 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
896-453: A location for the museum, which it bought from the Montagu family for £20,000. The trustees rejected Buckingham House, which was later converted into the present day Buckingham Palace , on the grounds of cost and the unsuitability of its location. With the acquisition of Montagu House, the first exhibition galleries and reading room for scholars opened on 15 January 1759. At this time,
1008-610: A major part of Sir John Evans 's coin collection, which was later sold to the museum by his son J. P. Morgan Jr. in 1915. In 1918, because of the threat of wartime bombing, some objects were evacuated via the London Post Office Railway to Holborn, the National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth) and a country house near Malvern . On the return of antiquities from wartime storage in 1919 some objects were found to have deteriorated. A conservation laboratory
1120-687: A million books, opened in 1857. Because of continued pressure on space the decision was taken to move natural history to a new building in South Kensington , which would later become the British Museum of Natural History . Roughly contemporary with the construction of the new building was the career of a man sometimes called the "second founder" of the British Museum, the Italian librarian Anthony Panizzi . Under his supervision,
1232-468: 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
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#17327724825231344-566: A number of recently discovered hoards which demonstrated the richness of what had been considered an unimportant part of the Roman Empire. The museum turned increasingly towards private funds for buildings, acquisitions and other purposes. In 2000, the British Museum was awarded National Heritage Museum of the Year . Today the museum no longer houses collections of natural history , and the books and manuscripts it once held now form part of
1456-558: 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
1568-602: 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
1680-608: 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)
1792-702: 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
1904-605: 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 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
2016-547: Is a characteristic building of Sir Robert Smirke , with 44 columns in the Ionic order 45 ft (14 m) high, closely based on those of the temple of Athena Polias at Priene in Asia Minor . The pediment over the main entrance is decorated by sculptures by Sir Richard Westmacott depicting The Progress of Civilisation , consisting of fifteen allegorical figures, installed in 1852. The construction commenced around
2128-480: 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. In the middle of the building is a six-storey glass tower inspired by a similar structure in the Beinecke Library , containing
2240-497: 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
2352-693: 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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#17327724825232464-439: 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
2576-505: Is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. Established in 1753, the British Museum was the first public national museum to cover all fields of knowledge. In 2023, the museum received 5,820,860 visitors, an increase of 42% from 2022. It was the most popular attraction in the United Kingdom according to the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA). At its beginning,
2688-596: 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),
2800-547: 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,
2912-763: The Ancient Near and Far East and the Americas . On 7 June 1753, King George II gave his royal assent to the Act of Parliament which established the British Museum. The British Museum Act 1753 also added two other libraries to the Sloane collection, namely the Cottonian Library , assembled by Sir Robert Cotton , dating back to Elizabethan times, and the Harleian Library , the collection of
3024-510: The Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo (1939) and late Roman silver tableware from Mildenhall , Suffolk (1946). The immediate post-war years were taken up with the return of the collections from protection and the restoration of the museum after the Blitz . Work also began on restoring the damaged Duveen Gallery. In 1953, the museum celebrated its bicentenary . Many changes followed:
3136-589: The Coins and Medals office suite, completely destroyed during the war, was rebuilt and re-opened, attention turned towards the gallery work with new tastes in design leading to the remodelling of Robert Smirke's Classical and Near Eastern galleries. In 1962 the Duveen Gallery was finally restored and the Parthenon Sculptures were moved back into it, once again at the heart of the museum. By
3248-532: The Duke of Blacas 's wide-ranging and valuable collection of antiquities. Overseas excavations continued and John Turtle Wood discovered the remains of the 4th century BC Temple of Artemis at Ephesos , another Wonder of the Ancient World . The natural history collections were an integral part of the British Museum until their removal to the new British Museum of Natural History in 1887, nowadays
3360-575: The Earls of Oxford . They were joined in 1757 by the "Old Royal Library", now the Royal manuscripts , assembled by various British monarchs . Together these four "foundation collections" included many of the most treasured books now in the British Library including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf . The British Museum was the first of a new kind of museum – national, belonging to neither church nor king, freely open to
3472-552: The HMSO Binderies became British Library responsibilities. 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. 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
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3584-412: 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 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
3696-538: The Natural History Museum in South Kensington . With the departure and the completion of the new White Wing (fronting Montague Street) in 1884, more space was available for antiquities and ethnography and the library could further expand. This was a time of innovation as electric lighting was introduced in the Reading Room and exhibition galleries. The William Burges collection of armoury
3808-624: The Natural History Museum in 1881. Some of its best-known acquisitions, such as the Greek Elgin Marbles and the Egyptian Rosetta Stone , are subject to long-term disputes and repatriation claims. In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the British Museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as
3920-706: The Oxus Treasure . In 1898 Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild bequeathed the Waddesdon Bequest , the glittering contents from his New Smoking Room at Waddesdon Manor . This consisted of almost 300 pieces of objets d'art et de vertu which included exquisite examples of jewellery, plate, enamel, carvings, glass and maiolica , among them the Holy Thorn Reliquary , probably created in the 1390s in Paris for John, Duke of Berry . The collection
4032-678: The Speaker of the House of Commons . The board was formed on the museum's inception to hold its collections in trust for the nation without actually owning them themselves, and now fulfil a mainly advisory role. Trustee appointments are governed by the regulatory framework set out in the code of practice on public appointments issued by the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments. The Greek Revival façade facing Great Russell Street
4144-723: The internet or on CD-ROM to the public free of charge. The categories of works include art, language, history and the sciences. Then, the project will be expanded to include several thousand Tamil books. The director of the project is Dr. Narayanan Kannan who was a founding member, in addition to Dr. Kuppusamy Kalyanasundaram and Ms. Subashini Kanagasundaram, who are located in South Korea, Switzerland and Germany, respectively. British Library 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
4256-399: 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 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
4368-518: 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
4480-503: The 1970s, the museum was again expanding. More services for the public were introduced; visitor numbers soared, with the temporary exhibition "Treasures of Tutankhamun " in 1972, attracting 1,694,117 visitors, the most successful in British history. In the same year the Act of Parliament establishing the British Library was passed, separating the collection of manuscripts and printed books from
4592-474: The American architect John Russell Pope , it was completed in 1938. The appearance of the exhibition galleries began to change as dark Victorian reds gave way to modern pastel shades. Following the retirement of George Francis Hill as Director and Principal Librarian in 1936, he was succeeded by John Forsdyke . As tensions with Nazi Germany developed and it appeared that war may be imminent Forsdyke came to
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4704-880: 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
4816-722: 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
4928-409: 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
5040-483: 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 on a site at Euston Road next to St Pancras railway station . Following
5152-709: The British Library to a new site at St Pancras, finally achieved in 1998, provided the space needed for the books. It also created the opportunity to redevelop the vacant space in Robert Smirke's 19th-century central quadrangle into the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court – the largest covered square in Europe – which opened in 2000. The ethnography collections, which had been housed in the short-lived Museum of Mankind at 6 Burlington Gardens from 1970, were returned to new purpose-built galleries in
5264-567: The British Museum . The British Museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport through a three-year funding agreement. Its head is the Director of the British Museum . The British Museum was run from its inception by a 'principal librarian' (when the book collections were still part of the museum), a role that was renamed 'director and principal librarian' in 1898, and 'director' in 1973 (on
5376-532: The British Museum Library (now part of the British Library ) quintupled in size and became a well-organised institution worthy of being called a national library, the largest library in the world after the National Library of Paris . The quadrangle at the centre of Smirke's design proved to be a waste of valuable space and was filled at Panizzi's request by a circular Reading Room of cast iron, designed by Smirke's brother, Sydney Smirke. Until
5488-433: The British Museum. This left the museum with antiquities; coins, medals and paper money; prints and drawings; and ethnography . A pressing problem was finding space for additions to the library which now required an extra 1 + 1 ⁄ 4 miles (2.0 km) of shelving each year. The Government suggested a site at St Pancras for the new British Library but the books did not leave the museum until 1997. The departure of
5600-545: 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
5712-533: 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
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#17327724825235824-484: 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. 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
5936-505: 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
6048-442: 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
6160-549: 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
6272-438: 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 the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections (APAC) which include the India Office Records and materials in
6384-595: 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,
6496-406: The South Wing with its great colonnade, initiated in 1843 and completed in 1847, when the Front Hall and Great Staircase were opened to the public. The museum is faced with Portland stone , but the perimeter walls and other parts of the building were built using Haytor granite from Dartmoor in South Devon, transported via the unique Haytor Granite Tramway . In 1846 Robert Smirke was replaced as
6608-503: The Tamil speaking people through online access to the digitized documents. Its motto is "to serve Tamil and Tamils across the world". The project allows the modern reader to tap into ancient wisdom about the scientific fields of astronomy , mathematics , medicine , chemistry , and engineering . Cultural life is told in manuscripts about the arts , music and literature . Pilot project The limited collection of ancient, rare books and palm-leaf manuscripts are digitally available on
6720-457: The UK. In 1816 these masterpieces of western art were acquired by the British Museum by Act of Parliament and deposited in the museum thereafter. The collections were supplemented by the Bassae frieze from Phigaleia , Greece in 1815. The Ancient Near Eastern collection also had its beginnings in 1825 with the purchase of Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities from Mary Mackintosh Rich, the widow of Assyriologist Claudius James Rich . In 1802
6832-580: 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
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#17327724825236944-415: The antiquities displays. After the defeat of the French campaign in the Battle of the Nile , in 1801, the British Museum acquired more Egyptian sculptures and in 1802 King George III presented the Rosetta Stone – key to the deciphering of hieroglyphs. Gifts and purchases from Henry Salt , British consul general in Egypt, beginning with the Colossal bust of Ramesses II in 1818, laid the foundations of
7056-549: The architect Sydney Smirke , opened in 1857. For almost 150 years researchers came here to consult the museum's vast library. The Reading Room closed in 1997 when the national library (the British Library) moved to a new building at St Pancras . Today it has been transformed into the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Centre. With the bookstacks in the central courtyard of the museum empty, the demolition for Lord Foster 's glass-roofed Great Court could begin. The Great Court, opened in 2000, while undoubtedly improving circulation around
7168-488: The block on which the museum stands. The architect Sir John James Burnet was petitioned to put forward ambitious long-term plans to extend the building on all three sides. Most of the houses in Montague Place were knocked down a few years after the sale. Of this grand plan only the Edward VII galleries in the centre of the North Front were ever constructed, these were built 1906–14 to the design by J.J. Burnet, and opened by King George V and Queen Mary in 1914. They now house
7280-462: The books and manuscripts: For many years its collections were dispersed in various buildings around central London , in places such as Bloomsbury (within 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
7392-427: 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
7504-400: 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
7616-411: 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. 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
7728-433: The collection occupies room 2a. By the last years of the 19th century, The British Museum's collections had increased to the extent that its building was no longer large enough. In 1895 the trustees purchased the 69 houses surrounding the museum with the intention of demolishing them and building around the west, north and east sides of the museum. The first stage was the construction of the northern wing beginning 1906. All
7840-425: The collection of Egyptian Monumental Sculpture. Many Greek sculptures followed, notably the first purpose-built exhibition space, the Charles Towneley collection , much of it Roman sculpture, in 1805. In 1806, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin , ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803 removed the large collection of marble sculptures from the Parthenon , on the Acropolis in Athens and transferred them to
7952-593: 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
8064-513: 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
8176-659: The courtyard with the East Wing ( The King's Library ) in 1823–1828, followed by the North Wing in 1833–1838, which originally housed among other galleries a reading room, now the Wellcome Gallery. Work was also progressing on the northern half of the West Wing (The Egyptian Sculpture Gallery) 1826–1831, with Montagu House demolished in 1842 to make room for the final part of the West Wing, completed in 1846, and
8288-607: 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 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
8400-568: The few years after its foundation the British Museum received several further gifts, including the Thomason Collection of Civil War Tracts and David Garrick 's library of 1,000 printed plays. The predominance of natural history, books and manuscripts began to lessen when in 1772 the museum acquired for £8,410 its first significant antiquities in Sir William Hamilton 's "first" collection of Greek vases . From 1778,
8512-479: The first full-time in-house designer and publications officer were appointed in 1964, the Friends organisation was set up in 1968, an Education Service established in 1970 and publishing house in 1973. In 1963, a new Act of Parliament introduced administrative reforms. It became easier to lend objects, the constitution of the board of trustees changed and the Natural History Museum became fully independent. By 1959
8624-482: 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
8736-414: The independent British Library . The museum nevertheless preserves its universality in its collections of artefacts representing the cultures of the world, ancient and modern. The original 1753 collection has grown to over 13 million objects at the British Museum, 70 million at the Natural History Museum and 150 million at the British Library. The Round Reading Room , which was designed by
8848-423: 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
8960-422: The largest parts of collection were the library, which took up the majority of the rooms on the ground floor of Montagu House, and the natural history objects, which took up an entire wing on the second state storey of the building. In 1763, the trustees of the British Museum, under the influence of Peter Collinson and William Watson , employed the former student of Carl Linnaeus , Daniel Solander , to reclassify
9072-438: The mid-19th century, the museum's collections were relatively circumscribed but, in 1851, with the appointment to the staff of Augustus Wollaston Franks to curate the collections, the museum began for the first time to collect British and European medieval antiquities, prehistory , branching out into Asia and diversifying its holdings of ethnography . A real coup for the museum was the purchase in 1867, over French objections, of
9184-474: The museum became a construction site. The King's Library , on the ground floor of the East Wing, was handed over in 1827, and was described as one of the finest rooms in London. Although it was not fully open to the general public until 1857, special openings were arranged during The Great Exhibition of 1851. In 1840, the museum became involved in its first overseas excavations , Charles Fellows 's expedition to Xanthos , in Asia Minor , whence came remains of
9296-492: The museum in 2000. The museum again readjusted its collecting policies as interest in "modern" objects: prints, drawings, medals and the decorative arts reawakened. Ethnographical fieldwork was carried out in places as diverse as New Guinea , Madagascar , Romania , Guatemala and Indonesia and there were excavations in the Near East , Egypt, Sudan and the UK. The Weston Gallery of Roman Britain, opened in 1997, displayed
9408-458: The museum trustees a loan of £200,000 to purchase from the Duke of Bedford all 69 houses which backed onto the museum building in the five surrounding streets – Great Russell Street, Montague Street, Montague Place, Bedford Square and Bloomsbury Street. The trustees planned to demolish these houses and to build around the west, north and east sides of the museum new galleries that would completely fill
9520-526: The museum until 1997. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport . Like all UK national museums, it charges no admission fee except for loan exhibitions. Although today principally a museum of cultural art objects and antiquities , the British Museum was founded as a "universal museum". Its foundations lie in the will of the Anglo-Irish physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753),
9632-522: The museum was largely based on the collections of the Anglo-Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane . It opened to the public in 1759, in Montagu House , on the site of the current building. The museum's expansion over the following 250 years was largely a result of British colonisation and resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, or independent spin-offs, the first being
9744-710: The museum's architect by his brother Sydney Smirke , whose major addition was the Round Reading Room 1854–1857; at 140 feet (43 m) in diameter it was then the second widest dome in the world, the Pantheon in Rome being slightly wider. The next major addition was the White Wing 1882–1884 added behind the eastern end of the South Front, the architect being Sir John Taylor . In 1895, Parliament gave
9856-667: The museum, dated 31 January 1784, refers to the Hamilton bequest of a "Colossal Foot of an Apollo in Marble". It was one of two antiquities of Hamilton's collection drawn for him by Francesco Progenie, a pupil of Pietro Fabris , who also contributed a number of drawings of Mount Vesuvius sent by Hamilton to the Royal Society in London. In the early 19th century the foundations for the extensive collection of sculpture began to be laid and Greek, Roman and Egyptian artefacts dominated
9968-612: The museum, was criticised for having a lack of exhibition space at a time when the museum was in serious financial difficulties and many galleries were closed to the public. At the same time the African collections that had been temporarily housed in 6 Burlington Gardens were given a new gallery in the North Wing funded by the Sainsbury family – with the donation valued at £25 million. The museum's online database had nearly 4,500,000 individual object entries in 2,000,000 records at
10080-470: The natural history collection according to the Linnaean system , thereby making the museum a public centre of learning accessible to the full range of European natural historians. In 1823, King George IV gave the King's Library assembled by George III, and Parliament gave the right to a copy of every book published in the country, thereby ensuring that the museum's library would expand indefinitely. During
10192-565: 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 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
10304-747: 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
10416-469: The proposed Picture Gallery was no longer needed, and the space on the upper floor was given over to the Natural history collections. The first Synopsis of the British Museum was published in 1808. This described the contents of the museum, and the display of objects room by room, and updated editions were published every few years. As Sir Robert Smirke 's grand neo-classical building gradually arose,
10528-481: The public and aiming to collect everything. Sloane's collection, while including a vast miscellany of objects, tended to reflect his scientific interests. The addition of the Cotton and Harley manuscripts introduced a literary and antiquarian element, and meant that the British Museum now became both National Museum and library. The body of trustees decided on a converted 17th-century mansion, Montagu House , as
10640-526: The reception of the Royal Library , and a Picture Gallery over it ..." and put forward plans for today's quadrangular building, much of which can be seen today. The dilapidated Old Montagu House was demolished and work on the King's Library Gallery began in 1823. The extension, the East Wing, was completed by 1831. However, following the founding of the National Gallery , London in 1824,
10752-730: The separation of the British Library). A board of 25 trustees (with the director as their accounting officer for the purposes of reporting to Government) is responsible for the general management and control of the museum, in accordance with the British Museum Act 1963 and the Museums and Galleries Act 1992 . Prior to the 1963 Act, it was chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury , the Lord Chancellor and
10864-534: 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). British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history , art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works
10976-482: The start of 2023. In 2022–23 there were 27 million visits to the website. This compares with 19.5 millions website visits in 2013. There were 5,820,860 visits to the museum in 2023, a 42% increase on 2022. The museum was the most visited tourist attraction in Britain in 2023. The number of visits, however, has not recovered to the level reached before the Covid pandemic. A number of films have been shot at
11088-572: The tombs of the rulers of ancient Lycia , among them the Nereid and Payava monuments. In 1857, Charles Newton was to discover the 4th-century BC Mausoleum of Halikarnassos , one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World . In the 1840s and 1850s the museum supported excavations in Assyria by A.H. Layard and others at sites such as Nimrud and Nineveh . Of particular interest to curators
11200-510: The view that with the likelihood of far worse air-raids than that experienced in World War I that the museum had to make preparations to remove its most valuable items to secure locations. Following the Munich crisis Forsdyke ordered 3,300 No-Nail Boxes and stored them in the basement of Duveen Gallery. At the same time he began identifying and securing suitable locations. As a result, the museum
11312-615: The while, the collections kept growing. Emil Torday collected in Central Africa, Aurel Stein in Central Asia, D. G. Hogarth , Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence excavated at Carchemish . Around this time, the American collector and philanthropist J. Pierpont Morgan donated a substantial number of objects to the museum, including William Greenwell 's collection of prehistoric artefacts from across Europe which he had purchased for £10,000 in 1908. Morgan had also acquired
11424-640: Was a room originally intended for manuscripts, between the Front Entrance Hall and the Manuscript Saloon. The books remained here until the British Library moved to St Pancras in 1998. The opening of the forecourt in 1852 marked the completion of Robert Smirke 's 1823 plan, but already adjustments were having to be made to cope with the unforeseen growth of the collections. Infill galleries were constructed for Assyrian sculptures and Sydney Smirke 's Round Reading Room , with space for
11536-523: Was able to quickly commence relocating selected items on 24 August 1939, (a mere day after the Home Secretary advised them to do so), to secure basements, country houses , Aldwych Underground station and the National Library of Wales . Many items were relocated in early 1942 from their initial dispersal locations to a newly developed facility at Westwood Quarry in Wiltshire . The evacuation
11648-416: Was apparent that it would be unable to cope with further expansion. The museum's first notable addition towards its collection of antiquities, since its foundation, was by Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803), British Ambassador to Naples , who sold his collection of Greek and Roman artefacts to the museum in 1784 together with a number of other antiquities and natural history specimens. A list of donations to
11760-683: Was bequeathed to the museum in 1881. In 1882, the museum was involved in the establishment of the independent Egypt Exploration Fund (now Society) the first British body to carry out research in Egypt. A bequest from Miss Emma Turner in 1892 financed excavations in Cyprus. In 1897 the death of the great collector and curator, A. W. Franks , was followed by an immense bequest of 3,300 finger rings , 153 drinking vessels, 512 pieces of continental porcelain, 1,500 netsuke , 850 inro , over 30,000 bookplates and miscellaneous items of jewellery and plate, among them
11872-633: Was in the tradition of a Schatzkammer such as those formed by the Renaissance princes of Europe. Baron Ferdinand's will was most specific, and failure to observe the terms would make it void, the collection should be placed in a special room to be called the Waddesdon Bequest Room separate and apart from the other contents of the Museum and thenceforth for ever thereafter, keep the same in such room or in some other room to be substituted for it. These terms are still observed, and
11984-530: 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
12096-468: Was set up in May 1920 and became a permanent department in 1931. It is today the oldest in continuous existence. In 1923, the British Museum welcomed over one million visitors. New mezzanine floors were constructed and book stacks rebuilt in an attempt to cope with the flood of books. In 1931, the art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen offered funds to build a gallery for the Parthenon sculptures . Designed by
12208-412: 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
12320-547: 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
12432-478: Was the eventual discovery of Ashurbanipal 's great library of cuneiform tablets , which helped to make the museum a focus for Assyrian studies . Sir Thomas Grenville (1755–1846), a trustee of the British Museum from 1830, assembled a library of 20,240 volumes, which he left to the museum in his will. The books arrived in January 1847 in twenty-one horse-drawn vans. The only vacant space for this large library
12544-576: Was timely, for in 1940 the Duveen Gallery was severely damaged by bombing. Meanwhile, prior to the war, the Nazis had sent a researcher to the British Museum for several years with the aim of "compiling an anti-Semitic history of Anglo-Jewry". After the war, the museum continued to collect from all countries and all centuries: among the most spectacular additions were the 2600 BC Mesopotamian treasure from Ur , discovered during Leonard Woolley 's 1922–34 excavations. Gold, silver and garnet grave goods from
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