Robots in Yorkshire fetch books for the British Library's 200 million items
The British Library adds some three million items a year, needing nearly 10 kilometres of new shelving. Most of what it owns, about 70%, sits not in London but in Yorkshire, where robots pull bar-coded crates from climate-controlled stacks and a daily shuttle carries requests south to the reading rooms.
The library as an independent body dates only from 1 July 1973, created by an act of 1972. Before that the national library was part of the British Museum, and its core still rests on 18th-century 'foundation collections': the books and manuscripts of Sir Hans Sloane, whose bequest launched the museum; the Harleian library, bought for 10,000 pounds; and Sir Robert Cotton's collection. Royal libraries from George II and George III followed. Later it absorbed the India Office Library and, in 1983, the National Sound Archive.
For decades the collections were scattered across London sites, from Bloomsbury to a newspaper library at Colindale. An early plan would have razed seven acres of Bloomsbury streets opposite the museum; a campaign led by George Wagner stopped it. The new building, designed by Colin St John Wilson with his wife MJ Long, rose beside St Pancras station and was opened by Elizabeth II on 25 June 1998, the largest public building erected in the UK in the 20th century. At its heart a six-storey glass tower, inspired by Yale's Beinecke Library, holds George III's 65,000 printed volumes.
Its right to everything rests on legal deposit, which in England goes back to at least 1610 and was set on its modern footing by the Copyright Act 1911. The British Library alone automatically receives every item published in Britain; five other libraries, including the Bodleian and Cambridge, must request copies. The Boston Spa storage building, opened in 2009 at a cost of 26 million pounds, holds up to seven million items in over 140,000 containers along more than 160 miles of storage.
Legal deposit now covers the internet. Since 2013 the library has crawled every .uk website annually, a project that began with about 4.8 million sites and a billion pages, mirrored across nodes in London, Boston Spa, Aberystwyth and Edinburgh. That digital resilience was tested in October 2023, when a ransomware attack attributed to the Rhysida group knocked out catalogues and ordering for months.
Source: British Library
