23 Facts About British Library

British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world.

The British Library is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

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 British Library's collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and items dating as far back as 2000 BC.

The British Library is located in a building purpose-built on the disused site of Midland Railway's Somers Town Goods Yard and Potato Market, on the north side of Euston Road in Somers Town, London, and has an additional storage building and reading room near Boston Spa, near Wetherby in West Yorkshire.

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British Library was created on 1 July 1973 as a result of the British Library Act 1972.

In 1983, the British Library absorbed the National Sound Archive, which holds many sound and video recordings, with over a million discs and thousands of tapes.

In July 2008 the British 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.

The British Library previously had a book storage depot in Woolwich, south-east London, which is no longer in use.

On Friday, 5 April 2013, the British Library announced that it would begin saving all sites with the suffix.

The British 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 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, a task done centrally by the Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries.

Further, under the terms of Irish copyright law, 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.

British Library holds the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections which include the India Office Records and materials in the languages of Asia and of north and north-east Africa.

British Library is open to everyone who has a genuine need to use its collections.

The British Library has been criticised for admitting numbers of undergraduate students, who have access to their own university libraries, to the reading rooms.

The British Library replied that it has always admitted undergraduates as long as they have a legitimate personal, work-related or academic research purpose.

British Library Reader Pass holders are able to view the Document Supply Collection in the Reading Room at the Library's site in Boston Spa in Yorkshire as well as the hard-copy newspaper collection from 29 September 2014.

British Library makes a number of images of items within its collections available online.

In line with a government directive that the British Library must cover a percentage of its operating costs, a fee is charged to the user.

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.

In October 2010 the British Library launched its Management and business studies portal.

British Library employees undertake a wide variety of roles including curatorial, business and technology.