The British Library

A Message from Lord Pickles and Lord Blunkett, followed by The British Library's best practice article

The ability to listen and learn from one another has always been vital in parliament, in business and in most aspects of daily life. But at this particular moment in time, as national and global events continue to reiterate, it is uncommonly crucial that we forge new channels of communication and reinforce existing ones. The following article from The British Library is an attempt to do just that. We would welcome your thoughts on this or any other Parliamentary Review article.

Rt Hon The Lord David Blunkett

Rt Hon The Lord Eric Pickles

www.bl.uk

THE PARLIAMENTARY REVIEW

Highlighting best practice

THE PARLIAMENTARY REVIEW

Highlighting best practice

16 | THE BRITISH LIBRARY

CEO Roly Keating

The busy Reading Rooms

at St Pancras

As a legal deposit library, the British Library has a duty to

collect all material published in the UK. Combined with

remarkable historical archives, the national collection

now exceeds 170 million items. With landmark sites in London

and Boston Spa in West Yorkshire, they work to share this

remarkable collection across the UK and around the world,

showcasing iconic treasures from

Romeo and Juliet

Harry

Potter

. CEO Roly Keating tells

The Parliamentary Review

more.

It’s nearly five decades since the British Library was established through an Act of

Parliament as part of the nation’s great post-war institution building effort. The

Library has been in the service of research, knowledge and innovation ever since,

combining a timeless responsibility for caring for the national collection of written

and published content with services that provide access to knowledge for people of

all backgrounds across the UK.

Our legal deposit mandate gives us a duty to collect the whole of the UK’s

published output, from books, magazines and research-level journals to local,

regional and national newspapers. Since 2013, this remit has expanded to create a

complementary digital system, collecting electronic publications, ejournals and the

entire .uk webdomain.

An evolving national collection

The constant growth of legal deposit content, allied to remarkable historical collections

dating back thousands of years, means the Library’s collection now exceeds 170

million physical items, including maps, manuscripts, prints, drawings and sound

FACTS ABOUT

THE BRITISH LIBRARY

»CEO: Roly Keating

»Established in 1973

»Based in London and Boston

Spa, West Yorkshire

»Services: Custodianship,

research, business, learning

and international

»No. of employees: 1,600

»www.bl.uk

The British Library

17THE BRITISH LIBRARY |

DIGITAL, CULTURE, MEDIA & SPORT

recordings. Digital holdings encompass

more than 500 terabytes of web pages,

in addition to around 300,000 ebooks

and over six million ejournal articles.

We also acquire written and published

works of particular significance to the

nation’s heritage. A notable recent

example, through the government’s

Acceptance in Lieu scheme, is the

personal and political archive of Tony

Benn. This is an extraordinary record

of post-war politics and activism and

one that is set to benefit uniquely from

the Library’s custodianship skills: from

the preservation of fragile manuscripts

to the cataloguing of diaries and the

digitisation of sound recordings in

now-obsolete technological formats.

The archive will take its place alongside

other significant political archives,

such as those of Lord Balfour and

WilliamGladstone.

This custodianship underpins the

use of the extraordinary collection

by audiences at the Library’s sites in

Boston Spa, Yorkshire, and St Pancras,

London, as well as all across the UK

and around the world. Last year,

there were over 424,000 visits to our

Reading Rooms at St Pancras and

Boston Spa, with readers requesting

some 1.52 million items and a further

3.95 million objects consulted online.

There were 26 million visits to our

website, including over eight million

visitors to our online learning resources

for teachers and students. Hundreds

of thousands enjoy a vibrant cultural

programme of world-class events

and exhibitions, and our Business

& Intellectual Property Centre in St

Pancras is visited nearly 100,000 times

a year by entrepreneurs looking to

start and grow their businesses.

Growing our reach through

national and global networks

The model of our Business & Intellectual

Property Centre has now been adopted

by public libraries in 13 cities from Exeter

to Glasgow, providing entrepreneurs

and SMEs with information and support

from the first spark of inspiration

to taking their ideas successfully to

market. Over the past year, we have

welcomed new centres in Glasgow,

Nottingham and Peterborough.

Our pioneering work leading the

Living Knowledge Network of 22 city

libraries, together with our colleagues

in the National Libraries of Scotland

and Wales, moved this year to a new

sustainable funding model following

a grant-supported pilot. The network

delivers a growing programme of skills

and knowledge exchange, alongside a

hugely popular series of live-streamed

events and collaborative exhibitions.

In 2017-18, our blockbuster exhibition

Harry Potter: A History of Magic

reached

Engaging Chinese

audiences with iconic

Library treasures

Harry Potter: A History

of Magic

enchanted

audiences across the UK

A timeless

responsibility

for caring for

the national

collection of

written and

published

content

“

BEST PRACTICE REPRESENTATIVE 2019

THE PARLIAMENTARY REVIEW

Highlighting best practice

16 | THE BRITISH LIBRARY

CEO Roly Keating

The busy Reading Rooms

at St Pancras

As a legal deposit library, the British Library has a duty to

collect all material published in the UK. Combined with

remarkable historical archives, the national collection

now exceeds 170 million items. With landmark sites in London

and Boston Spa in West Yorkshire, they work to share this

remarkable collection across the UK and around the world,

showcasing iconic treasures from

Romeo and Juliet

Harry

Potter

. CEO Roly Keating tells

The Parliamentary Review

more.

It’s nearly five decades since the British Library was established through an Act of

Parliament as part of the nation’s great post-war institution building effort. The

Library has been in the service of research, knowledge and innovation ever since,

combining a timeless responsibility for caring for the national collection of written

and published content with services that provide access to knowledge for people of

all backgrounds across the UK.

Our legal deposit mandate gives us a duty to collect the whole of the UK’s

published output, from books, magazines and research-level journals to local,

regional and national newspapers. Since 2013, this remit has expanded to create a

complementary digital system, collecting electronic publications, ejournals and the

entire .uk webdomain.

An evolving national collection

The constant growth of legal deposit content, allied to remarkable historical collections

dating back thousands of years, means the Library’s collection now exceeds 170

million physical items, including maps, manuscripts, prints, drawings and sound

FACTS ABOUT

THE BRITISH LIBRARY

»CEO: Roly Keating

»Established in 1973

»Based in London and Boston

Spa, West Yorkshire

»Services: Custodianship,

research, business, learning

and international

»No. of employees: 1,600

»www.bl.uk

The British Library

17THE BRITISH LIBRARY |

DIGITAL, CULTURE, MEDIA & SPORT

recordings. Digital holdings encompass

more than 500 terabytes of web pages,

in addition to around 300,000 ebooks

and over six million ejournal articles.

We also acquire written and published

works of particular significance to the

nation’s heritage. A notable recent

example, through the government’s

Acceptance in Lieu scheme, is the

personal and political archive of Tony

Benn. This is an extraordinary record

of post-war politics and activism and

one that is set to benefit uniquely from

the Library’s custodianship skills: from

the preservation of fragile manuscripts

to the cataloguing of diaries and the

digitisation of sound recordings in

now-obsolete technological formats.

The archive will take its place alongside

other significant political archives,

such as those of Lord Balfour and

WilliamGladstone.

This custodianship underpins the

use of the extraordinary collection

by audiences at the Library’s sites in

Boston Spa, Yorkshire, and St Pancras,

London, as well as all across the UK

and around the world. Last year,

there were over 424,000 visits to our

Reading Rooms at St Pancras and

Boston Spa, with readers requesting

some 1.52 million items and a further

3.95 million objects consulted online.

There were 26 million visits to our

website, including over eight million

visitors to our online learning resources

for teachers and students. Hundreds

of thousands enjoy a vibrant cultural

programme of world-class events

and exhibitions, and our Business

& Intellectual Property Centre in St

Pancras is visited nearly 100,000 times

a year by entrepreneurs looking to

start and grow their businesses.

Growing our reach through

national and global networks

The model of our Business & Intellectual

Property Centre has now been adopted

by public libraries in 13 cities from Exeter

to Glasgow, providing entrepreneurs

and SMEs with information and support

from the first spark of inspiration

to taking their ideas successfully to

market. Over the past year, we have

welcomed new centres in Glasgow,

Nottingham and Peterborough.

Our pioneering work leading the

Living Knowledge Network of 22 city

libraries, together with our colleagues

in the National Libraries of Scotland

and Wales, moved this year to a new

sustainable funding model following

a grant-supported pilot. The network

delivers a growing programme of skills

and knowledge exchange, alongside a

hugely popular series of live-streamed

events and collaborative exhibitions.

In 2017-18, our blockbuster exhibition

Harry Potter: A History of Magic

reached

Engaging Chinese

audiences with iconic

Library treasures

Harry Potter: A History

of Magic

enchanted

audiences across the UK

A timeless

responsibility

for caring for

the national

collection of

written and

published

content

“

THE PARLIAMENTARY REVIEW

Highlighting best practice

THE PARLIAMENTARY REVIEW

Highlighting best practice

18 | THE BRITISH LIBRARY

not just 170,000 visitors to the London

exhibition but also – through the

Living Knowledge Network – a further

750,000 people with linked exhibitions

in more than 40 public libraries in the

UK. The exhibition has since toured to

New York and travels onward to Japan

in autumn 2019, illustrating the Library’s

flourishing work on the global stage.

This is a powerful example of how the

UK’s extraordinary cultural sector works

with partners all around the world

through the advancement of culture,

knowledge and mutual understanding.

Over the last two years, our HM

Treasury-funded programme “The

British Library in China: connecting

through learning and culture” staged

exhibitions and events in Beijing,

Wuzhen, Shanghai and Hong Kong,

thrilling more than 100,000 visitors with

original manuscripts and early editions

of Dickens, Conan Doyle and the

Brontës. We also made more than 200

such treasures available online through

our first ever Chinese-language website.

Working closely with partners in India,

we have digitised 1.3 million pages

from early Bengali printed books,

while our partnership with the Qatar

Foundation – which this year entered

a third phase – has digitised and

made available online more than a

million pages of documents relating

to Gulf history and Arabic scientific

manuscripts. The Library’s Endangered

Archives Programme, which has

worked with over 350 projects in

over 90 countries since 2004, recently

entered a second phase with generous

funding from the Arcadia Foundation.

The programme works with local

partners and people to digitise and

protect archives at risk of damage.

Securing our future

Funding for such initiatives, and the

work we do more broadly, comes from

a diverse range of sources, and we

make use of innovative funding models

wherever possible. The recent signing

in February 2019 of a development

agreement with commercial partners

to develop a 2.8-acre site to the north

of our St Pancras estate is a powerful

demonstration of this. At no additional

cost to the exchequer, the Library will

be able to deliver 100,000 square

feet of new spaces to grow its offer

across our public purposes, as well as a

new headquarters for the Alan Turing

Institute, the UK’s national centre for

data science and artificial intelligence.

Fundamentally, though, the nature

of our underpinning legislation,

and the range of public purposes it

ascribes to us, requires continuing

levels of grant- in-aid investment.

These purposes are set out in our

Living Knowledge: The British Library

2015-23

strategy, articulating an

overarching vision to become the

most open, creative and innovative

institution of its kind anywhere in

the world. These are times of historic

disruption, change and opportunity

in how knowledge is created, shared

and utilised. The year 2019 marks the

halfway point in our strategic journey,

and if you have never stepped into the

British Library – whether in London

or Yorkshire – I warmly invite you to

come and experience the remarkable

ways our collections continue to inspire

creativity, innovation and enjoyment.

Hundreds of

thousands

enjoy a vibrant

cultural

programme of

world-class

events and

exhibitions and

our Business &

Intellectual

Property

Centre in St

Pancras is

visited nearly

100,000 times

a year

“

Online learning

resources were used

over 8 million times last

year

19THE NATIONAL HOLOCAUST CENTRE AND MUSEUM |

DIGITAL, CULTURE, MEDIA & SPORT

CEO Phil Lyons

Our main entrance – open to all and

currently attracting 30,000 visitors

The National Holocaust Centre and Museum, based in

Laxton, Nottinghamshire, are committed to promoting an

understanding of the roots of discrimination and prejudice

and the development of ethical values to try and improve society

as a whole. Using the history of genocide as a model, they strive

to ensure that future generations learn from these tragedies.

Comprising two permanent exhibitions and a memorial garden,

they educate those of all ages, from school children to adults.

CEO Phil Lyons MBE tells

The Parliamentary Review

more.

The Holocaust: the single most important set of events in history and one that

confirms the fragility of civilised society and the consequences of unfettered

prejudice and hatred.

Before and after the Holocaust, history has shown that when some people are

excluded from the life of a nation, it is a small step to exclude them physically, by

forced deportation or even mass murder.

It is probably the most researched and documented period of modern history

and with the benefit of 75 years of enquiry and reflection, we have a clear sense

of those incremental steps that ultimately led to atrocity on a massive scale. You

would think its salutary lesson would last forever.

But what of today?

How do we help young people lay down the sort of values that will fashion

communities of the future?

FACTS ABOUT

THE NATIONAL HOLOCAUST

CENTRE AND MUSEUM

»CEO: Phil Lyons MBE

»Established in 1995

»Based in Laxton, Newark,

Nottinghamshire

»Services: Holocaust museum

and education centre

»No. of employees: 30

»30,000 visitors a year, mainly

from the Midlands and the

North

»www.holocaust.org.uk

The National Holocaust

Centre and Museum

www.bl.uk

This article was sponsored by The British Library. The Parliamentary Review is wholly funded by the representatives who write for it. The publication in which this article originally appeared contained the following foreword from Rt Hon Michael Gove.

Rt Hon Michael Gove's Foreword For The Parliamentary Review

By Rt Hon Michael Gove

This year's Parliamentary Review comes at a momentous time for parliament, as we collectively determine the destiny of the United Kingdom.

On October 31, the UK will leave the European Union. The successful implementation of this process is this government's number-one priority.

Three years after a historic referendum vote, we will deliver on the decisive mandate from the British people. Trust in our democracy depends on it. Until that final hour, we will work determinedly and diligently to negotiate a deal, one that abolishes the backstop and upholds the warm and close relationship we share with our friends, allies and neighbours in the EU. But in the event that the EU refuses to meet us at the table, we must be prepared to leave without a deal.

As the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, it is my job to lead on this government's approach, should that scenario happen. Preparing for Brexit is my department's driving mission. But while I am leading this turbocharged effort, the whole of government is committed to this endeavour.

Ministers across Whitehall are working together to ensure that every possibility is considered, every plan is scrutinised and every provision is made. A daily drumbeat of meetings means that we are holding departments accountable, so that preparations are completed on time.

The chancellor has confirmed that all necessary funding will be made available. And we have mobilised thecivil service, assigning 15,000 of our most talented civil servants to manage our exit from the EU.

We will make sure that on November 1, there is as little disruption to national life as possible. Our trade relationships will continue to thrive, thanks to agreements with countries around the world worth £70 billion. Our country will remain secure, thanks to nearly 1,000 new officers posted at our borders. And the 3.2 million EU nationals now living and working among us can remain confident, with absolute certainty, of their right to remain in the UK.

Above all, our goal is to be transparent. Soon, we will launch a public information campaign so that citizens, communities and businesses are ready and reassured about what will happen in the event of “no deal”.

In my first few weeks in this role, I have travelled to ports and tarmacs, borders and bridges, all across the UK –from the seaside of Dover to the rolling green hills of County Armagh. I have heard from business owners and border officials, farmers and hauliers. They are ready to put an end to uncertainty. And they are ready to embrace the opportunities ahead.

Our departure from the EU will be a once in a lifetime chance to chart a new course for the United Kingdom. Preparing for that new course will be a herculean effort. But this country has made astounding efforts before. We can do it again.

Rt Hon Michael Gove
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster