text: The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom[6] and the largest library in the world by number of items catalogued. It is estimated to contain 170–200 million-plus[7][8][3][4] items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British Library receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland, including a significant proportion of overseas titles distributed in the UK. The Library is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
  The British Library is a major research library, with items in many languages[9] 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 Library's collections include around 14 million books,[10] along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 2000 BC. In addition to receiving a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland (approximately 8,000 per day), the Library has a programme for content acquisitions. The Library adds some three million items every year occupying 9.6 kilometres (6 mi) of new shelf space.[11] There is space in the library for over 1,200 readers.[12]
  Prior to 1973, the Library was part of the British Museum. The British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as the museum until 1997. The Library is now located in a purpose-built building on the north side of Euston Road in St Pancras, London (between Euston railway station and St Pancras railway station), and has a document storage centre and reading room near Boston Spa, near Wetherby in West Yorkshire. The St Pancras building was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 25 June 1998, and is classified as a Grade I listed building "of exceptional interest" for its architecture and history.[13]
  The Library has plans to open a second location in Leeds[34], potentially located in the Grade 1 listed Temple Works.[35]
  In England, legal deposit can be traced back to at least 1610.[36] The Copyright Act 1911 established the principle of the legal deposit, ensuring that the British Library and five other libraries in Great Britain and Ireland are entitled to receive a free copy of every item published or distributed in Britain. The other five libraries are: the Bodleian Library at Oxford; the University Library at Cambridge; the Trinity College Library at Dublin; and the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales. 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.
  The British Library Sound Archive holds more than a million discs and 185,000 tapes.[72] The collections come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound from music, drama and literature to oral history and wildlife sounds, stretching back over more than 100 years. The Sound Archive's online catalogue is updated daily.
  In 2006 the Library launched a new online resource British Library Sounds which makes 50,000 of the Sound Archive's recordings available online.[75][76]
  The Library holds an almost complete collection of British and Irish newspapers since 1840. This is partly because of the legal deposit legislation of 1869, which required newspapers to supply a copy of each edition of a newspaper to the library. London editions of national daily and Sunday newspapers are complete back to 1801. In total, the collection consists of 660,000 bound volumes and 370,000 reels of microfilm containing tens of millions of newspapers with 52,000 titles on 45 km of shelves. From earlier dates, the collections include the Thomason Tracts, comprising 7,200 seventeenth-century newspapers,[citation needed] and the Burney Collection, featuring nearly 1 million pages of newspapers from the late 18th and early 19th centuries.[78] The section also holds extensive collections of non-British newspapers, in numerous languages.
  The Newspapers section was based in Colindale in North London until 2013, when the buildings, which were considered to provide inadequate storage conditions and to be beyond improvement, were closed and sold for redevelopment.[79][80] The physical holdings are now divided between the sites at St Pancras (some high-use periodicals, and rare items such as the Thomason Tracts and Burney collections) and Boston Spa (the bulk of the collections, stored in a new purpose-built facility).[80]
  A significant and growing proportion of the collection is now made available to readers as surrogate facsimiles, either on microfilm, or, more recently, in digitised form. In 2010 a ten-year programme of digitisation of the newspaper archives with commercial partner DC Thomson subsidiary Brightsolid began,[81][82] and the British Newspaper Archive was launched in November 2011.[83] A dedicated newspaper reading room opened at St Pancras in April 2014, including facilities for consulting microfilmed and digital materials, and, where no surrogate exists, hard-copy material retrieved from Boston Spa.[80][84]
  The British Library Philatelic Collections are held at St Pancras. The collections were established in 1891 with the donation of the Tapling collection;[85] they steadily developed and now comprise over 25 major collections and a number of smaller ones, encompassing a wide range of disciplines. The collections include postage and revenue stamps, postal stationery, essays, proofs, covers and entries, "cinderella stamp" material, specimen issues, airmails, some postal history materials, official and private posts, etc., for almost all countries and periods.[86]
  An extensive display of material from the collections is on exhibit, which may be the best permanent display of diverse classic stamps and philatelic material in the world. Approximately 80,000 items on 6,000 sheets may be viewed in 1,000 display frames; 2,400 sheets are from the Tapling Collection. All other material, which covers the whole world, is available to students and researchers.[86] As well as these collections, the library actively acquires literature on the subject. This makes the British Library one of the world's prime philatelic research centres. The Head Curator of the Philatelic Collections is Paul Skinner.
  Highlights, some of which were selected by the British Library, include:[87]
  Diamond Sutra, the world's earliest-dated printed book[88] printed in 868 during the Tang dynasty
  Codex Sinaiticus, the major portion of the world's second-oldest manuscript of the Bible in koine Greek (4th century)[89]
  The sole surviving manuscript copy of the poem Beowulf[90]
  Bedford Hours, a richly illustrated late-medieval book of hours once owned by the Duke of Bedford
  Gospels of Tsar Ivan Alexander, 1355–56, the most important medieval Bulgarian manuscript
  William Tyndale's 1534 English translation New Testament, the personal copy of Anne Boleyn[91]
  Manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll (given to the British Library by a consortium of American bibliophiles "in recognition of Britain's courage in facing Hitler before America came into the war")[92][93][94][95]
  The three foundation collections are those which were brought together to form the initial manuscript holdings of the British Museum in 1753:[96]
  The Additional Manuscripts series covers manuscripts that are not part of the named collections, and contains all other manuscripts donated, purchased or bequeathed to the Library since 1756. The numbering begins at 4101, as the series was initially regarded as a continuation of the collection of Sloane manuscripts, which are numbered 1 to 4100.[97]
  British library employees undertake a wide variety of roles including curatorial, business and technology. Curatorial roles include or have included librarians, curators, digital preservationists, archivists and keepers.[98]
  from September 2018: Liz Jolly[99]
  ^ "BL Accounts 2019" (PDF). bl.uk. Retrieved 22 July 2019.
  ^ Wight, Colin. "Facts and figures". bl.uk. Retrieved 1 April 2018.
  ^ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-47693835
  ^ https://www.thebusinessdesk.com/yorkshire/news/2053294-historic-city-landmark-explored-as-potential-home-for-british-library-north?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Yorkshire_12th_Mar_2020_Breaking
  ^ Alice's Adventures Under Ground', the original manuscript version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland – The British Library
  ^ "Purchased by Eldridge Reeves Johnson, inventor of the Victor Talking Machine, the manuscript was exhibited at the Library of Congress from October 1929 to February 1930. After Johnson's death in 1945, the manuscript was purchased at auction by a group of Americans led by Lessing Rosenwald, A.S.W. Rosenbach and Librarian of Congress Luther Evans. On 13 Nov. 1948, Evans presented the manuscript to the British Museum as a gift to Great Britain from a group of anonymous Americans in gratitude for Britain's heroic efforts in holding Hitler at bay until the United States entered World War II."
  Phil Harris: A History of the British Museum Library, 1753–1973, British Library, London, 1998, ISBN 0-71234-562-0.