History of the British Library:
The British Library is, as national libraries go, relatively young. Its roots lie in the report of the National Libraries Committee under the Chairmanship of the late Lord Dainton issued in 1969. This was followed in 1971 by a White Paper recommending the setting up of a national library for the UK ('the British Library').
In 1972 The British Library Act was passed by Parliament, bringing the Library into operation with effect from 1 July 1973.
Under the Act the following institutions were administratively combined to form the British Library: the library departments of the British Museum (which included the National Reference Library of Science and Invention), the National Central Library, and the National Lending Library for Science and Technology (the centre for interlibrary lending, located at Boston Spa in Yorkshire). In 1974 the British National Bibliography and the Office for Scientific and Technical Information joined the UK's new national library.
Two additional institutions subsequently became part of the Library increasing the breadth of its collections: the India Office Library and Records (1982) and the British Institute of Recorded Sound (1983).
The British Library at St Pancras:
The 1971 White Paper recognised that the constituent bodies of the proposed British Library (principally the British Museum Library) were seriously short of space and that rehousing the collections was a priority. However, legislation setting up the British Library made no reference to this nor to the geographical location of the new institution.
Shortage of storage space for the collections was not new. As early as the 1910s it was clear that the Museum's library was suffering from a lack of space as the ceaseless intake of books, periodicals and other materials continued without interruption. (By this time newspapers had been transferred from Bloomsbury to premises originally outside London, now the British Library Newspapers at Colindale. The Museum building and collections sustained a number of direct hits by German bombers in the early 1940s which caused some of the original bookstacks to be rebuilt after 1945. By now lack of space was a major problem, and solution to this - leasing storage space in the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich in the early 1960s - was a short-term expedient. In the 1960s the Museum considered extending its library premises in Bloomsbury, abandoned in 1967.
The initial plan at the time of the Library's formation was that lending activities would be concentrated at Boston Spa, and reference, research, and bibliographic services would be united and rehoused in a second complex, adjacent to the British Museum in London. The Library's first annual report for 1973-74 stated "A new building on the Bloomsbury site is the British Library's most urgent need".
Colin St John Wilson, an architect who had previously worked on the 1960s scheme for extending the library of the British Museum, produced a plan for a new building adjacent to the Museum. However, in 1974, in response to local opposition to a building of that size being constructed in an historic area of central London, the Government abandoned the idea of housing the Library in Bloomsbury. The nearest vacant site to the environs of the Museum (where much of the Library's large collection of books and other material was kept) capable of housing so many items, staff and services was a derelict goods yard immediately to the west of St Pancras station.
The history of the Library's new building is described in The British Library and the St Pancras Building by Sir Anthony Kenny, Chairman of the British Library Board, 1993-1996. An outline follows:
In December 1974 the Library's Board agreed to examine with the Government the feasibility of siting a building on this site fronting on to Euston Road; the following year the Government paid £6 million for this to be the site of the new British Library.
By the end of 1977 an elaborate scheme had been prepared by Colin St John Wilson for the Library's new home.
The site was bounded to the south by Euston Road, the east by Midland Road, the north by Brill Place and Ossulston Street to the west. The shape of the site was angular which the architect emphasised in the public areas linking the two wings containing reading areas. The plan of the building resembled something akin to an inverted letter A, in technical terms a rhomboid, being shortest to the south (Euston Road) with sides tapering outward towards the longer end approaching Brill Place in the direction of Camden Town.
At the southern apex on Euston Road, the reader would cross an open Piazza to enter public areas including an exhibition hall, and find on the eastern side a block of open-access science Reading Rooms with rooms for lectures and seminars, and on the western side a block of closed-access humanities and rare books rooms. Books were to be stored underneath the building in a temperature controlled environment. A catalogue hall, subsequently changed to the Kings Library (Library of King George III), and public facilities including restaurants were to occupy the cross-piece of the A. The Library hoped that the completed building would enable it to unite all its London reference collections under one roof and would provide room for future growth of the collections.
As might be expected of such a large construction project, the British Library building became the victim of delays and rising costs. In 1988 the Conservative government then in power indicated that it would provide enough funding for a building approximately two thirds the size of the original plan.
The British Library was formally opened by HM The Queen in June 1998. Since then it has become firmly established as a major addition to London's library, intellectual and cultural scene.
The website
The website adopted the use of frames when these became popular in the late 1990s. They were abandoned when a full redesign of the site, with improved navigation and accessibility, was completed in 2001. The average number of page requests per day trebled between 1998 and 2004.