A very special and rare tour...
Books & Much More!
When I was a child, I wanted to be a librarian, but then I found out they didn’t just get to sit and read the books all day and so I changed my mind! Lending Library for Science and Technology; with twenty miles of shelving, 125 miles of microfilm and 125 staff. At this time it became home to the ‘legal deposit’. An idea which can be traced back to around 1610 and which was enshrined in law by the Copyright Act of 1911. Put simply, it means that the British Library is one of six libraries in Great Britain and Ireland that is entitled to receive a free copy of everything published within the country. Everything means everything - including Causeway! The difference between the British Library and the other legal deposit libraries is that it must automatically receive these copies, whereas the other libraries have to request the publications. Later acts of parliament extended this requirement to include electronic documents and websites.
As an adult, I find libraries both soothing and stressful, all those books make me aware of my own mortality. I cannot possibly hope to read them all in my lifetime, or even several lifetimes; according to the British Library website, if I viewed 5 items a day, it would take me 80,000 years to view the whole collection. Although I had a vague idea that libraries are about more than borrowing the latest bestseller, I did not appreciate just how much more there is to them until I went on a tour of the British Library just before the first lockdown. Having visited, the difficulty now is knowing where to start with my description! As many Causeway readers will already know, the site was originally a munitions factory. Royal Ordnance Factory Thorp Arch (filling factory number eight) to be precise. In 1961 when the Thorp Arch site was opened, it was the National
In 1970 the National Central Library moved to Thorp Arch and it became the British Library Lending Division. And in 1973 the British Library Act led to the combining of a number of smaller 24
