The British Library is a
legal deposit library. 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;
Trinity College Library in
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. Under the terms of
Irish copyright law (most recently the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000), the British Library is entitled to automatically receive a free copy of every book published in Ireland, alongside the
National Library of Ireland, Trinity College Library in Dublin, the library of the
University of Limerick, the library of
Dublin City University and the libraries of the four constituent universities of the
National University of Ireland. The Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, and the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales are also entitled to copies of material published in Ireland, but again must formally make requests. The British Library Document Supply Service (BLDSS) and the Library's Document Supply Collection and its
Secure Electronic Delivery is based at the Library's site in Boston Spa. Collections housed in Yorkshire, comprising low-use material and the newspaper and Document Supply collections, make up around 70% of the total material the library holds. The Library also holds the
Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections (APAC) which include the
India Office Records and materials in the languages of Asia and of north and north-east Africa.
Manuscripts Foundation collections The three foundation collections are those which were brought together to form the initial manuscript holdings of the British Museum in 1753: •
Cotton manuscripts •
Harley manuscripts •
Sloane manuscripts Other named collections Other "named" collections of manuscripts include (but are not limited to) the following: •
Arundel Manuscripts •
Egerton manuscripts •
King's manuscripts •
Lansdowne manuscripts •
Royal manuscripts •
Stefan Zweig Collection •
Stowe manuscripts •
Yates Thompson manuscripts Other collections, not necessarily manuscripts: •
Lawrence Durrell Collection Additional manuscripts 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.
Newspapers 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 of shelves. From earlier dates, the collections include the
Thomason Tracts, comprising 7,200 seventeenth-century newspapers, and the
Burney Collection, featuring nearly 1 million pages of newspapers from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. 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. 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). and the
British Newspaper Archive was launched in November 2011. 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.
Online, electronic and digital resources The British Library makes a number of images of items within its collections available online. Its
Online Gallery gives access to 30,000 images from various medieval books, together with a handful of exhibition-style items in a proprietary format, such as the
Lindisfarne Gospels. This includes the facility to "turn the virtual pages" of a few documents, such as
Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. Catalogue entries for many of the
illuminated manuscript collections are available online, with selected images of pages or miniatures from a growing number of them, and there is a database of significant
bookbindings. The British Library's commercial
secure electronic delivery service was started in 2003 at a cost of £6 million. This offers more than 100 million items (including 280,000 journal titles, 50 million patents, 5 million reports, 476,000 US dissertations and 433,000 conference proceedings) for researchers and library patrons worldwide which were previously unavailable outside the Library because of
copyright restrictions. In line with a government directive that the British Library must cover a percentage of its operating costs, a fee is charged to the user. However, this service is no longer profitable and has led to a series of restructures to try to prevent further losses. When Google Books started, the British Library signed an agreement with
Microsoft to digitise a number of books from the British Library for its
Live Search Books project. This material was only available to readers in the US, and closed in May 2008. The scanned books are currently available via the British Library catalogue or
Amazon. In October 2010 the British Library launched its Management and business studies portal. This website is designed to allow digital access to management research reports, consulting reports, working papers and articles. In November 2011, four million newspaper pages from the 18th and 19th centuries were made available online as the
British Newspaper Archive. The project planned to scan up to 40 million pages over the next 10 years. The archive is free to search, but there is a charge for accessing the pages themselves. As of 2022,
Explore the British Library is the latest iteration of the online catalogue. It contains nearly 57 million records and may be used to search, view and order items from the collections or search the contents of the Library's website. The Library's electronic collections include over 40,000 ejournals, 800 databases and other electronic resources. A number of these are available for remote access to registered St Pancras Reader Pass holders. PhD theses are currently not available via the
E-Theses Online Service (EThOS) since the
cyberattack but work to restore the collection will start later in 2026.
Philatelic collections and
Lida Lopes Cardozo Kindersley) The
British Library Philatelic Collections are held at St Pancras. The collections were established in 1891 with the donation of the
Tapling collection; 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. 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. == Facilities ==