Books and More

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!

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 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.

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

organisations into the British Library. In 2008 the decision was made to move the newspaper archives and low use items to Thorp Arch. By 2015 approximately two-thirds of the entire British Library collection was stored at the Thorp Arch site.

However, the collection does not just include books and newspapers, there are also; manuscripts, journals, magazines, photographs and slides, sound and music recordings, videos, play-scripts, patents, databases, software, computers, maps, stamps, prints, drawings...alongside many other things I am sure I have missed from this list.

In order to prevent future obsolescence, the library has begun the Digital Preservation Scheme. It was fascinating to walk into a room which contains the very early computers, including the BBC Micro and Sinclair ZX80 models my friends and I used at school. The purpose of these is not to exhibit or simply preserve the very early computers, but to be able to access and use the software, games, demos and floppy discs of the times. Many books and magazines included complimentary floppy discs, diskettes or CDs containing software and extra features, which today would be accessed through websites. In order to be able to read these in the future the library collects both hardware and software. They also work alongside specialists who write ‘emulator’ programmes; software which allows older content to be read and used on modern machines. If you are unsure of what this means, think of playing Pong on your MacBook. Our next stop was at the other end of the extreme; the Additional Storage Building, is almost entirely computerised. Here the items are stored in crates, each container is barcoded, with the barcode including information about the stock in the container, weighed and measured before being stored in tall, narrow stacks. If an item is recalled, it is found via the barcode, one of the seven robotic cranes is then sent in to retrieve the container and return it to the human operator who removes the requested item. Around 600 Reading Room requests are processed in this way every day and around 2,000 items per week are added into the long-term storage. In order to preserve these items the building is maintained at a constant temperature of 16ºC, 52% humidity and 15% oxygen. This low oxygen environment decreases the likelihood of fire as well as preserving the stock, but means that in the event of breakdown engineers work in pairs, with breathing equipment if they are likely to be in there for more than 20 minutes. Standing on the viewing platform, watching the cranes zip up and down the aisles was an extremely surreal experience. About as far from my cosy childhood image of a library as could be! As well as all of this the library also began digitising the material it holds around ten years ago. The aim of this is to make as much of the collection available online as possible. The success of this is evident in the decline of Reading Room requests, from 4 million per year, to 500,000 in 2016. Despite this every weekday more than 1,000 items travel between the Thorp Arch and St Pancras sites. Touring the library has given me a very different perspective on the purpose and scope of the library. The original 20 miles of shelving has become more than 460 miles and their Endangered Archive Programme has preserved over a million items and includes such treasures as the Magna Carta, Beethoven’s tuning fork and Leonardo DaVinci’s notebook. All of which is really impressive, but what really blows my mind is that the library is open to anyone who can show they have a genuine need to view the items in the collection. We are truly blessed to live so close to such a facility. VICTORIA