British Library, London

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and the second largest library in the world in terms of items in its catalogue. The British Library owns over 150 million items. With this vast collection of materials from many different nations, the British Library serves as a major research institution. It offers information in print and digital formats, including books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, videos, play-scripts, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, and drawings. It has about 14 million books, and adds around three million items each year. The new acquisitions alone require 9.6 kilometres or six miles of added shelf space annually. Until the early 1970s, the British Library was considered part of the British Museum.

The Library’s historical collections were donated by many noted English book collectors over the centuries, featuring books and manuscripts acquired by and for Sir Robert Cotton, Sir Hans Sloane, Robert Harley, King George II, and King George III. The British Library has long been respected and used as a cultural center and academic resource. Already in the year 1819, the American author Washington Irving wrote in praise of it:

The great British Library — an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or “pure English, undefiled” wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.

Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon.

The TU Library owns a number of books by and about Washington Irving.

Modern innovations

After much debate and controversy, a new building was opened on Euston Road, central London, by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998. The opening occurred over 20 years after the project was first approved. For students and ajarns far from London, the British Library’s Online Gallery may be of interest. It offers access to thousands of images from old and rare books we might not ordinarily see, such as the Diamond Sutra, the earliest complete survival of a dated printed book, made in China in the year 868 CE, or over one thousand years ago. The Thammasat University Library owns books containing translations of the Diamond Sutra.

The Diamond Sutra is considered one of the first open access books, because it is clearly printed in the book that it is intended for universal free distribution. Originally written in Sanskrit, the Diamond Sutra is one of the most influential Mahayana sutras in East Asia. Its purpose is the perfection of wisdom through Buddhist understanding. The name Diamond Sutra refers to the mentions in the original title and text of cutting like a thunderbolt or a diamond through illusions to get to ultimate reality. For students of Western culture, there is also a chance to look at the handwriting of Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks in the British Library’s Online Gallery.

Students at the Thammasat Business School may be interested in the British Library’s Business and Management Portal. High quality digital reports and other publications from the British Library’s collections are made available to business and management researchers who register for the service. Content may be downloaded to mobile devices or PCs.

The British Library Sound Collection also provides free access to over tens of thousands of sound recordings of different materials. British Library Sounds. For students of sociology and education, recordings posted online of English Dialects from recordings made between 1951 and 1974 may be of interest. The recordings are arranged by region of the UK where the recordings of accents and dialects were made. Among other public collections that may be listened to in Thailand and are of possible research interest to TU students for theses and term papers in the fields of language, law, anthropology, history, sociology, nature, science, journalism, education, and political science include:

• R. Gregory Kenyan bird recordings: Recordings from the most comprehensive personal archive of wildlife sounds from East Africa

• Amphibians: A comprehensive collection of vocalisations from around the world

• Architecture: Oral history interviews with British architects and those in associated professions

• Arnold Adriaan Bake South Asian Music Collection: Religious and folk music, ritual and dance from India, Nepal and Sri Lanka

• Art: Life story oral history interviews with people involved in British art

• Arthur Morris Jones Africa Collection: Recordings from one of the pioneers of African music studies

• Banking and finance: Life story interviews that explore changes in Britain’s banking and finance industries in the second half of the 20th century

• Berliner Lautarchiv British and Commonwealth recordings: Recordings of WW1 British prisoners of war held in Germany

• Between Two Worlds: Poetry and Translation: A wide range of poets who are bilingual or have English as a second language

• Branding & design: Life story oral history interviews with people involved in British branding, fashion and design industries

• Carol Tingey Nepal Collection: Folk and ritual music of Nepal

• Charity and social welfare: Memories and experiences of key figures in welfare and charitable work

• Colin Huehns Asia Collection: Music from Pakistan, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan

• Crafts: Oral histories that record in-depth life stories of Britain’s craftspeople, exploring both their personal and their working lives

• Disability Voices: Interviews that chart the experiences of disabled people

• Early wildlife recordings: Pioneering wildlife sound recordings from the first half of the 20th century

• Endangered Micronesian recordings: Music from the islands of Micronesia

• Ethnographic wax cylinders: Music, songs and speech from around the world, captured between 1898 and 1915

• Evolving English VoiceBank: A selection of English accents captured at the British Library

• Evolving English WordBank: Words and phrases contributed by visitors to the British Library’s Evolving English exhibition in 2010/11

• Fashion: Life story interviews with people whose lives have been spent in the fashion industry

• Food: Interviews that document the history of Britain through attitudes to food and food production

• Industry: water, steel and energy: Oral history interviews documenting the lives and careers of those who worked in the UK electricity, water, steel, oil and gas industries

• Jewish survivors of the Holocaust: Powerful personal accounts of the Holocaust from Jewish survivors living in Britain

• John Brearley Botswana Collection: Includes recordings from a range of Bushmen groups

• John Low East Africa Collection: Includes field recordings made in Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania

• Kenneth Gourlay Uganda Collection: Recordings from Nigeria and northeast Uganda

• Klaus Wachsmann Uganda Collection: Indigenous music recorded by the pioneering scholar

• Law: Life story interviews with prominent barristers, judges and lawyers that document the history of the legal profession in Britain

• Opie collection of children’s games and songs: Singing games, skipping and clapping songs, and discussions of informal play

• Oral historians:Life story interviews with oral historians and others who have practiced oral history

• Oral history curator’s choice: Edited extracts from National Life Stories projects archived at the British Library

• Percy Grainger ethnographic wax cylinders: Recordings made by Percy Grainger in England, 1906–1908.

• Pioneering women: Oral histories documenting the lives of pioneering women in Britain, each of whom pursued a successful career in their respective fields long before it was the norm for women to do so

• Politics: Life story interviews with current and former Members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords

• Press and media: An Oral History of the British Press

• Sound effects: From Victorian street scenes to the sounds of World War Two

• Sport: Oral history interviews documenting the lives and careers of British sportsmen and women throughout the 20th century

• Vanishing voices from Russia and Eastern Europe: Folk, traditional and ritual songs and stories from Udmurtia and other areas of Russia

• Water: Field recordings of various bodies of water from around the world

• Weather: Field recordings of meteorological phenomena

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)