Recently, I wrote about The British Library and the online publisher brightsolid launching the Web site British Newspaper Archive. The past couple of years have been very busy for The British Library.
On June 2, 2010, The British Library announced it had acquired a medieval prayer roll that had belonged to the apostate King Henry VIII (lived 1491-1547, reigned 1509-1547). It bears one of only three surviving examples of his handwriting from before his coronation in 1509. According to The British Library, “It is a rare example of a late medieval prayer roll, for, unlike medieval obituary rolls (of which there are hundreds), very few prayer rolls survived the Reformation.”
On June 21, 2010, The British Library and Google announced a partnership to digitize 250,000 out-of-copyright books from The British Library’s collections. Google had already partnered with more than forty libraries around the world.
The plan is to digitize up to 40,000,000 pages published between 1700 and 1870, “from the French Revolution to the end of slavery, opening up access to one of the greatest collections of books in the world.” This effort is part of The British Library’s “commitment, as stated in its 2020 Vision, to increase access to anyone who wants to do research.”
The books are selected by The British Library staff and digitized by Google staff. This “content” (as they are calling book texts in this case) will be provided free to the public through Google Books (http://books.google.co.uk) and The British Library’s Web site (www.bl.uk). Google will pay all of the digitization costs.
On July 30 2010, to coincide with Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to India, The British Library announced it, The British Museum, and The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) had outlined plans for cooperation with cultural institutions in India. More than a month earlier, on June 9, 2010, Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of The British Library, Neil MacGregor, Director of The British Museum, and Sir Mark Jones, Director of the V&A, signed an agreement called the Memorandum of Understanding with Shri Jawhar Sircar, Secretary to the Government of India, for the Indian Ministry of Culture (on behalf of five Indian cultural institutions).
The five Indian cultural institutions were the National Museum in New Delhi, the National Library in Kolkata, the Archaeological Survey of India in New Delhi, the Central Secretariat Library in New Delhi, and the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. The British Library, British Museum, and the V&A already worked together as members of the UK World Collections Programme, which, according to The British Library, was founded to “establish two-way partnerships with institutions in Asia to increase access to collections and expertise.”
During Prime Minister Cameron’s visit to India, Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, announced the launch of Digital Knowledge Exchange, a new initiative to unlock a critical mass of British and Indian content in British and Indian libraries, archives, museums and other cultural bodies. Dame Lynne said, “Using technology to inspire creativity and stimulate international research, Digital Knowledge Exchange will strengthen the cultural industries in both countries and supports the Country to Country MoU through digitisation, knowledge exchange and skill sharing. It will make the shared history and cultures of India and the UK available to researchers and the wider public worldwide through the digitisation of historic and contemporary materials from both countries and stimulate new research and collaboration.”
The British Library also announced a touring exhibition, South Asians Making Britain,1858-1950 which would highlight key elements of India’s political and military contributions to Great Britain prior to the Independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. The exhibition opened in the U.K. in September of 2010, and was scheduled to tour selected Indian venues in 2011. The British Library stated, “It will focus on a wide range of other Indian-British networks and interactions, including resistance and activism, contributions to sport, the arts, cultural and intellectual life as well as global politics.”
On September 16, 2010, The British Library opened its newly refurbished and expanded Learning Centre. This project was funded entirely through private donations. The Harry M Weinrebe Learning Centre will offer teachers and students “cutting-edge facilities to support digital literacy skills as well as first-hand encounters with historic manuscripts, sound recordings, maps and letters.”
Minister of State for Schools Nicolas John “Nick” Gibb, MP (Member of Parliament), officially opened the Harry M Weinrebe Learning Centre which The British Library stated, “will provide a bright, spacious and inspiring space in which young learners will be able to explore the Library’s collections and develop their digital research skills.” The construction and refurbishment work for the £500,000 project “took place during the summer with minimal disruption to the Learning programme.”
The education minister said, “The British Library has for centuries been the vault for all that has been written and thought in our culture. This new Learning Centre will add to that tradition by helping spread that knowledge and literature to thousands of students across the country. From the outreach activities for schools to the after-school projects for young people, I am delighted that the Library’s Learning Centre will be able to develop and make the most of the British Library’s historic and fascinating collections of books, newspapers, manuscripts and maps.”
Approximately 17,000 students and 3,000 teachers, adult learners, and family groups take part in The British Library’s Learning Programme every year. It is aimed mainly at secondary school pupils (ages eleven to nineteen) but also caters to younger children and to adults, as well.
Through workshops, curator talks, and tours, learners explore primary sources such as historic newspapers, diaries, manuscripts, sound recordings, and maps, “developing their research skills in subjects ranging from History and English Language to Citizenship and Religious Education.” (See: www.bl.uk/learning)
The British Library stated, “The Learning Centre is fully digitally-enabled, with laptops for every pupil, electronic whiteboards, state of the art audio-visual facilities and – for the first time – video-conferencing facilities and remote viewing equipment, which will allow workshops and curator talks using collection items to be offered to similarly-equipped schools anywhere in the country.”
Roger Walshe, The British Library’s Head of Learning, said, “We’re tremendously excited about the facilities we can now offer pupils and teachers through the Harry M Weinrebe Learning Centre. The previous Education Room was a well-used facility but was not ideal for larger groups or longer sessions; by removing some walls and expanding the facility into neighbouring areas we’ve created a very versatile and inspiring space – the feedback we’ve had from the teachers and pupils who have seen it has been terrific.
“The new Learning Centre enables us to provide a much richer learning experience – particularly in relation to digital research skills, which is one of the key areas of expertise that the Library wishes to develop – both for pupils and teachers. Over the past decade, the British Library has digitised millions of historic items from our collections. The challenge now is to demonstrate to pupils and their teachers how these primary materials can be used to add depth and richness to their studies – whether it’s a newspaper report of the Battle of Waterloo or a handwritten draft of a Wilfred Owen poem from the First World War.”
Frances Brindle, the British Library’s Director of Strategic Marketing and Communications, said: “The young learners of today become the professional and postgraduate researchers of tomorrow, so we’re delighted to be able to offer this much-improved facility for school groups, which will offer them the best possible introduction to and gateway into the British Library’s unparalleled collections. We’re particularly pleased that we were able to fund the Learning Centre thanks to the generosity of the Dorset Foundation, the Wolfson Foundation, John Lyon’s Charity, British Library Patrons and others, without having to draw upon the public purse.”
On 6 September 2010, an audio archive charting modern women MPs representation in Westminster opened to the public at The British Library. As I have explained before, Westminster, not London, is the capital of the United Kingdom. Westminster is part of Greater London.
The British Library stated that in the eighty-two interviews, female MPs from all political parties “were asked what they thought of changes in the sitting hours of the Commons, all-women short-lists, the Suffragettes, how poorly the media treated them (commenting on their clothes and hair styles) and what they thought of being called ‘Blair’s Babes’. The archive, totaling 100 hours, allows many women MPs to tell their own story and set the record straight.”
The British Library stated, “Charting the stories of women MPs, most of whom entered the House of Commons at the 1997 general election, the interviews were conducted a year before the 2005 general election. This was a sensitive time for all MPs, whatever party they were in, when Labour was suffering from the consequences of the Iraq war, struggling with contentious issues such as tuition fees and didn’t know if it could secure a third-term in government.”
Five broadcast journalists – Linda Fairbrother, Angela Lawrence, Deborah McGurran, Dr. Eva Simmons, and Boni Sones, OBE – conducted the interviews, accessible at The British Library for the first time, between May and October of 2004, as part of the research for the Orwell Prize- nominated book, Women in Parliament: The New Suffragettes. Politico's Publishing Ltd. published the book by Boni Sones, OBE, Professor Joni Lovenduski, and Margaret Moran, MP in October of 2005.
Dr. Rob Perks, Lead Curator of Oral History at the British Library, said, “This archive charts the experiences of women MPs from both sides of the House and is an important corrective to the predominantly male narratives we have of the political process. The 1997 intake of 120 women MPs was the largest ever and this important collection of interviews, now available at the British Library, documents this new political generation in their own words.”
Boni Sones OBE, who donated the audio archive to The British Library, said: “I am extremely grateful to the British Library for finding a home for this important audio archive and to the women MPs themselves across party who signed the permission forms to allow access to their audio to chart women’s modern representation in the Commons.”
“We discovered that some of the Conservative Party’s male MPs in the mid-1980s still called all women ‘Betty’ and some made gestures across the Chamber that demoralised the Labour women of 1997, but there were heartening stories too. Both Harriet Harman MP and Gillian Shephard warmly greeted other women MPs even if they weren’t from the same party. This archive is therefore named after both of them.”
The British Library Sound Archive (www.bl.uk/soundarchive) is one of the largest sound archives in the world. It holds over 1,000,000 discs, 200,000 tapes, and many other sound and video recordings.
According to The British Library, “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. Collection material comes in every conceivable format, from wax cylinder and wire recordings to CD and DVD, and from a wide variety of private, commercial and broadcast sources.”
Between Friday, May 20, 2011 and Sunday, September 25, 2011, the British Library had its first science fiction exhibition. It was called Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it, and covered “literature, film, illustration and sound.” It was in The British Library’s PACCAR Gallery.
The guest curator was Andy Sawyer, Science Fiction Collections Librarian at the University of Liverpool. The exhibition examined “how science fiction is distinct from other related genres such as fantasy and horror.” It traced the development of the genre from True History by Lucian of Samosata written in the 2nd century A.D. to the recent writings of Cory Doctorow and China Miéville, and “how science fiction has turned from a niche into a global phenomenon.”
The exhibition was an “interactive space based on ‘other worlds’ presented by science fiction.” These included “Alien Worlds; Future Worlds; Parallel Worlds; Virtual Worlds; the End of the World and the Perfect World. Each area will draw on a variety of exhibits, multi-media interactives, film and sound to experience new surroundings and ask questions such as: ‘who are we?’, ‘why are we here?’, ‘what is reality?’ and ‘what does the future hold?’”
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