The British Library

My day began on a very full, very quiet tube this morning when suddenly a random British dude drew everyone's attention by pointing at me from across the car and crowd of people and shouting, "You! You have a lovely look! A lovely look!" My day was made, but honestly it only got better from there.

Today I cozied up to the British Library all day long, and what a treat it was! Yes, the one that is home to the King's Library--but more on that later.

King's Library

The British Library is huge. They are legally obliged to keep everything that is published in the UK (from 1830 on), from IKEA catalogs to first edition manuscripts. They get in 8,000 items a day and have to store them all. There are about 200 million items in the British Library--which makes it one of the largest libraries, the only other comparable library would be the Library of Congress in the U.S. If you read 5 books a day from the British Library, it would take 80,000 years to finish everything (except you wouldn't be finished because 8,000 books come in each day, so you would have to catch up on all the new stuff). A unique thing about this library is that they are not a browsing or borrowing library--you have to know and request what you want, and you can use it in their reading rooms. Some other fun facts: They have two copies of every newspaper in the world. They also have the second largest collection of pornography in the world (even more fun fact: the largest collection is at the Vatican because of confiscations).

I spent the morning learning about the digitization of their archives as well as their conservation projects, thanks to this special visitor pass.

I learned about the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership. The goal of this is to make material on the history of the Gulf and on Arabic Science accessible digitally online to a range of audiences in the UK, Qatar, and the wider world.

For any digitization to occur, it goes through these steps:

Selection content to digitize. This can be anything from maps, manuscripts, sound recordings, drawings, photographs...
Retrieval from storage areas. All of the items live at the British Library already, they just have to pull them out!
Conservation. Finding damage, stabilizing items to work with.
Foliation. This means numbering each page, etc., to keep them in order and organized.
Cataloguing. Descriptions of the items are entered into their cataloguing system.
Imaging. They take photographs of the items, using 3 cameras and 3 scanners!
Quality Assurance. This means looking over the photographs and deciding if the resolution is good enough.
Translation. They translate everything into both English and Modern Standard Arabic.
qSIP generation (Submission Information Package). Everything (all images, all pages, etc.) are packed into one item together and that is uploaded to their database.
Return to basement. The Item is re-accessed for condition and returned.

We got to look at a very cool manuscript in Persian, which presented particular challenges because it was the first item they'd encountered that was not written in Arabic. It was pretty priceless, especially since it had notes in the margins made by the original scholar.

17th Century Persian Medieval text

The binding presented a challenge because it was very tight and prevented reading of the text in the gutters. This was removed and replaced with a more flexible binding. As well, someone had covered every picture in the book with a Japanese paper. It was taped in (gasp!). That was removed gently with a little bit of water to loosen it up.

Pre-conservation. Taped in paper covering the images!

We then moved on to Conservation. Some of the goals of conservation are minimal intervention and reversibility. The last one is controversial because nothing is truly reversible, not all marks on items can be removed. There are also questions around authenticity versus use. If a book is salvaged from an explosion--is the dirt and soot on the object part of the life of the object that should be kept? Or should it be cleaned up so that it can be used? Conservators ask these questions everyday.

Specifically we got to learn about a project that the textile conservator Liz Rose is working on. It's a flag from around 1777-1779 that was sitting in the archives wrapped up and black, covered in dirt and degrading away. She has been working on it for over a year now, and here was what it looked like today (which is still incomplete!) She has put in about 400 hours on it and her process was amazing!

I spent the lunch hour getting myself a reader's pass! Now I 1) have an international library card, how cool is that?!?! and 2) can use the library for my studies! Woo!

40% of the membership for the British Library comes from abroad patrons--just like me!

The afternoon was filled with a more general tour of the space which was lovely (and how I learned a lot of my facts about the space).

"Sitting on History"-- Books lock in information!

Penny Black Printing Press

Did you know Great Britain was the first country to have stamps? The Penny Black Printing Press actually made a lot of them! Before stamps, the receiver of the letter paid for it (which is so silly). Because the UK was the first with stamps, they earned the right to not have to state themselves on any stamps. They just have images, they never list which country they are (I plan to double check this myself when I send out postcards in the next few days). The British Library has tons and tons of stamps. A man named Thomas Tapling collected every stamp from every country in the world from the years 1840 to 1890. When he died, he donated the collection.

When a user requests a book, there is very little automation involved. Human hands go retrieve it from the shelf and bring it to this little piece of automation (featured above), which transfers it from wherever in the stacks it lives to the user. Another fun fact: all the books here are shelved by SIZE. That's all. Not author, not subject or genre, not title. Every book is shelved when it is received based on its size, to save space, given a number to locate it, and that is where it lives. It makes sense, considering how many items they have to store. It makes space a top commodity. But still, it kind of blows my mind!

That brings me to the King's Library. This is King George III's personal library. One-fifth of his entire wealth went into buying books (sounds like my kind of dude!). He owned 85,000 books in total, all from the 15th - 18th century. When he died, the next king (George IV) inherited them. He did not want them and instead donated them to the country with two conditions: 1) The collection must be kept together and 2) it must remain on display in its entirety. That's why it's in this glass encasing and all four sides can be seen. This collection is a working collection too, meaning books can be pulled from it for the public. In fact, 98-99% of the entire collection in the British Library is working (minus the very rare books). It was a pretty spectacular adventure to go on today!

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for. My Tourist Pictures.

Tonight, I went on the London Eye. Cliche and classic. I am only going to post a few pictures that I took on my phone (aka selfies and glamour shots)--more of the real stuff will come from my camera shortly.