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73-708: The largest union catalog ever printed is the American National Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints (NUC), completed in 1981. This achievement has since been superseded by the creation of union catalogs in the form of electronic databases, of which the largest is OCLC 's WorldCat . Other examples include K10plus in Germany, Library Hub Discover (formerly COPAC ) provided by Research Libraries UK and AMICUS, provided by Library and Archives Canada . For academic publications, several academic search engines exist to combine

146-453: 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

219-559: 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

292-453: 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,

365-610: 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

438-687: 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,

511-532: A number of libraries around the country. Eventually the cards for all materials catalogued by the cooperating libraries were reproduced and issued serially in printed volumes as the National Union Catalog, supplementing the Library of Congress Catalog of Printed Books. Monthly NUC catalogs were cumulated quarterly, annually, and multi-annually. In an effort to simplify research, it was decided in

584-566: 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

657-547: 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

730-460: Is a massive bibliography compiled during the period from 1968 to 1981. It contains photocopies of printed catalog cards from major American and Canadian libraries, arranged alphabetically by author's last name, or by title for books that have no author, such as the Bible . The NUC of Pre-1956 Imprints was an important resource for verifying bibliographic information and finding copies of books before

803-599: Is a printed catalog of books catalogued by the Library of Congress and other American and Canadian libraries, issued beginning in the 1950s. The National Union Catalog is divided into two series: the Pre-1956 Imprints is a 754-volume set containing all older records in a consolidated alphabetical format, while post-1955 volumes continue to be published serially. Since 1983, the NUC has been issued on microfiche . It

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876-546: Is not related to the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC). The National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints, a set of 754 volumes, largely superseded the older Library of Congress Catalog of printed books, and included printed works published before 1956 which are held by major American and Canadian libraries . It is sometimes referred to as the Mansell , after its publisher. This set

949-534: Is published in 754 volumes, containing over 528,000 pages. The set takes up approximately 130 feet (40 m) of shelf space. It weighs three tons. The Library of Congress began its union catalog project in 1901 in an attempt to locate and note the location of a copy of every important book in the United States . With financial assistance from John D. Rockefeller Jr. , the collection grew to over 11 million cards. Copies of these cards were distributed to

1022-767: 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 the Earls of Oxford . They were joined in 1757 by

1095-510: 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:

1168-589: 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

1241-532: 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

1314-538: 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

1387-706: 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

1460-678: 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

1533-508: The open data provided by open archives through OAI-PMH , as well as records from publishers deposited in CrossRef and other sources. They include BASE , CORE and Unpaywall, which indexes over 20 million open access publications as of 2020. This article relating to library science or information science is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . National Union Catalog The National Union Catalog (NUC)

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1606-607: 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

1679-417: The 1960s to collect and publish all of the references to pre-1956 imprints in a single alphabetical listing. Mansell Information/Publishing Ltd. , the company which created the British Museum library catalog, won the contract to publish the proposed union catalog. Over the next 14 years, about five 600-page volumes were published each month until the NUC of Pre-1956 Imprints was completed, largely superseding

1752-568: 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

1825-474: 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

1898-709: 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

1971-567: 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

2044-532: 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

2117-545: 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), 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

2190-433: 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

2263-584: 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

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2336-557: 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

2409-512: The advent of large electronic bibliographic databases, such as WorldCat ; the massive size and weight of the set make it less useful now. However, given that approximately 27% of the books listed in the NUC Pre-1956 Imprints were not in listed WorldCat as of 2005 (25% in 2008 ), it remains an extremely valuable tool for researchers. The complete title of this work describes its purpose and scope: The NUC of Pre-1956 Imprints

2482-739: 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

2555-667: 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

2628-671: 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

2701-433: 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

2774-719: 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

2847-659: 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

2920-568: 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,

2993-479: 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

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3066-644: 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 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

3139-414: 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

3212-422: 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

3285-450: 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 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 ,

3358-438: 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

3431-527: 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

3504-492: 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

3577-690: 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, 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

3650-407: 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

3723-417: 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

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3796-496: 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

3869-501: 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

3942-403: 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 , the Ancient Near and Far East and

4015-415: 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

4088-438: The older Library of Congress Catalog of Printed Books. As librarians moved to online catalogs retaining the National Union Catalog has been studied. Abbott and Scherlent note, "The story of the NUC is a fascinating part of twentieth-century library history, central to the story of libraries’ transition from the analog to digital. It represented a monolithic achievement in the ongoing quest by libraries to streamline access to

4161-415: 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,

4234-429: 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

4307-398: 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,

4380-421: 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

4453-430: 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

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4526-404: 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

4599-400: 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

4672-490: 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

4745-463: The world’s literature." 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 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,

4818-501: 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

4891-403: 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

4964-416: 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

5037-578: 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

5110-499: 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

5183-412: 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

5256-478: 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

5329-576: 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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