Who'd be a scientist? (British Library)

Member Name: MykReeve

Product:	British Library
Date:	15/05/01 (90 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent resource; a lot of the books here aren't available elsewhere, Nice comfortable reading rooms, Helpful staff

Disadvantages: Costly photocopying, Off-site perodicals take ages to arrive

If you're a scientist, working in London who needs to get hold of an older scientific paper from an obscure journal, then the easiest way to get it is to pop along to the British Library. Or is it? The British Library is the UK's national library, it’s funded by the government to be the custodian of every book in print in the United Kingdom, and every issue of every periodical printed here (and many printed abroad).

As a potential source of information, it's incomparable. The library has an exceptional collection of books, periodicals, manuscripts, stamps, patents, sound recordings, printed music and maps... but how easy is it to actually get at them? How easy is it to become a reader at the British Library, and even if you are a reader, how easy is it to actually find the information you want?

BECOMING A READER

The British Library is not a public library, it is a research library, so in order to use the library, you have to become a reader. This is no easy task, as a prospective reader will have to prove that they have "reached a point in their research where no other library can adequately supply all the information required, or who can demonstrate a legitimate need to use items in the collection to further their research." In my case, I was allowed to use the collection, because in the course of my research (doing a PhD in evolutionary genetics), I occasionally needed to get papers from obscure journals, which weren't available elsewhere.

To become a reader, you have to take a (usually very brief) interview, to prove that the material you require isn't available elsewhere, or that your studies require the facilities that only a library the size of the British Library can provide. A lot of applicants are refused because their needs can be better served by a specialist library in the area.

Applicants have to complete a registration form, and provide proof of identity. If you're a s
tudent, you're best advised to bring along proof of your status and, if possible, a letter from your institution confirming that you need to use the library's facilities. If you're carrying out personal research, you'll need to provide proof that other libraries cannot provide the specific journals and books that you need.

READING ROOMS

To the west side of the British Library complex are the Humanities reading rooms, and to the east side are the Science and Technology reading rooms. Fundamental to Sir Colin St John Wilson's design is that the lighting is different in the two areas.

The Humanities reading rooms have been carefully designed so that sunlight doesn't fall directly onto the books, and the room is illuminated indirectly by light reflected down from the ceiling. In the Science reading rooms it doesn't matter so much if the books are hit by direct sunlight, as they won't sit on the shelf for as long. Periodicals in the Science and Technology reading rooms only sit on the shelf for at most ten years, and less than that if they're foreign-language publications. So, the Science and Technology reading rooms have large banks of windows along their length. All of the reading rooms are also lit by neon tubes, which ensure that the rooms remain adequately lit at all hours of the day.

This isn't the only difference between the reading rooms though. The colours are different too – the Science and Technology reading rooms have green leather inlays in the desks, where the Humanities rooms have red. Desks generally have been designed with the documents that will be perused at them in mind. The map room, for example, has large desks, ideal for opening large maps on.

Desks in general are nicely designed. Each has its own light and a power outlet for plugging in your laptop. There's also a light on the desk panel, which is illuminated to inform readers that any books that they&#
39;ve ordered have arrived at the reading room.

All of the reading rooms have a small number of carrels: booths available for individuals to study in, without being distracted by the sounds of others. While reading rooms are supposed to be silent, there is inevitably a constant sussurus of whispers, accompanied by the tapping of laptop keyboards. An area of the Humanities reading rooms is given over to desks where use of personal computers is not permitted.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY READING ROOMS

As a postgraduate student studying evolutionary biology, this is inevitably the area of the Library that I use the most. It consists of five separate reading rooms; Science 1 South, which deals with UK and European patents and trademarks; Science 1 North, which deals with foreign patents; Science 2 South, Life Sciences, Medicine and Chemistry; Science 2 North, engineering and social sciences; and Science 3, physical and earth sciences and computing. Of these, it is Science 2 South that I have visited most often. The Science reading rooms consist almost entirely of periodicals, arranged on enormous banks of shelves, the length of the reading rooms.

Periodicals supposedly sit on the shelves of the reading rooms for ten years, though in my experience, a few journals are only kept on the shelves for about five or six. Periodicals in languages other than English are only kept on the shelves for about twelve months. If you want periodicals any older than this, as I frequently do, they have to be ordered in from the British Library's collection.

Unfortunately, this is where the Library begins to fall down. The science journal collection of the British Library isn't stored on-site, as are Humanities books and periodicals, but over at their off-site storage site in Aldwych. This means that you have to order the periodicals, and wait for them to be delivered. This can take several hours, and unless you order them at the very beginning
of the day, they are unlikely to reach the reading room that same day.

It would be useful if you could order the periodicals to be delivered to a specific reading room over the Internet the day before you want to use it from elsewhere. But no, requests can only be made from terminals in the British Library itself, which means making two trips to the Library on consecutive days. Not very helpful.

As a test, to see how easy the library is to negotiate, I decided to look up a recent journal that I knew would be on the shelves in the Science reading rooms – the September 2000 issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, which was where my first paper got printed. To find the journal, I used one of the many on-line catalogue terminals (there really are lots of them in the British Library, in all of the reading rooms, which is good) to look up its shelfmark. (P) CH 10 E6, in case you're interested. It was then just a simple matter of going to the periodical section in Science 2 South, walking along the shelves until I came to the one containing CH journals, and then looking on the bottom shelf.

Yes, the notation for the periodicals' locations are cumbersome, and you need to sit at the terminal with pen and paper to stand a hope in hell of finding anything, but it's relatively easy to find the information you want, considering the millions of periodicals in the library.

The next problem with the Science reading rooms is if you want to photocopy a paper. Photocopying in the Science reading rooms has to be carried out in Science 1 South, near the patents. Now, it's a little known fact that you can't alter the content of a patent when duplicating it, which means that you can't photoreduce them. Unfortunately, since the periodical reading rooms share photocopiers with the patent room, this means that the British Library has disabled the photoreduce feature of the photocopiers. This is annoying if, like me, you
photoreduce when photocopying, so you don't have to do so many copies... and, more importantly, so that it costs less.

Which brings me to the next complaint, photocopies in the British Library cost 20p per sheet. What a rip-off, especially when you're photocopying something that you had no choice but to retrieve from the British Library! Of course, if you don't want to do the photocopying yourself, there's always the option of getting the staff to photocopy it for you, for the princely sum of 32p per sheet (for patents), 37p per sheet (for books).

HUMANITIES

So, today, in the interests of dooyoo opinion-writing, I decided to make my first foray into the Humanities reading rooms. There are five Humanities reading rooms in the British Library; Humanities 1, which holds a wide variety of books; Humanities 2, which holds the National Sound Archives along with more books; the Map Room; the Rare Books and Music Reading Room; and the Oriental and India Office Collections Reading Room.

The Humanities reading rooms have considerably fewer bookshelves than do the Science and Technology reading rooms. This is probably the first thing that you notice in comparing the two. This is because the majority of readers in the Humanities reading rooms request very specific items from the (on-site) collection, located in the basement beneath the library. Books are transported up to the reading room, upon request, on conveyor belts, so generally arrive within a few hours of having been ordered.

In order to investigate how easy the books are to find in the Humanities reading rooms, I used the on-line catalogue terminals to look up a book on the shelves – a translation of the Domesday Book for Hertfordshire, so that I could look up "(North) Mimms", the nearest town to Potters Bar mentioned in the book. Within a couple of seconds, I had found the shelfmark, HLR 333.322. (The Humanities rooms use the semi-logical De
wey Decimal Classification scheme). The shelfmark was easy enough to track down, and I managed to find the book within minutes.

The Humanities rooms seemed busier than the Science reading rooms, in general, and the volume of background noise was a little greater. Also, in the Humanities reading rooms, photocopying must be carried out by Library staff, so visitors would do better to copy out the information they need, rather than using the photocopying service... unless money's not an object, of course!

USING THE LIBRARY IN GENERAL

Using the library is not as convenient as it could be. For a start, you're not allowed to take coats or bags into the reading room – they have to be left in the cloakroom in the main lobby. If you take your own books into a reading room, be prepared to have them thoroughly examined when you try to leave.

The on-line catalogue terminals are easy to use, once you get used to their idiosyncrasies, and instructions are provided so that you can ensure that any books and periodicals you order end up in the right place!

Staff throughout the Library are friendly and, in my experience, keen to help you to use it, so if you do have any problems then they're well worth approaching. Unfortunately, they can't hurry along books ordered from off-site locations, or help you pay for exorbitantly-priced photocopying!

CONCLUSIONS

The British Library is a great resource, containing a lot of information that isn't available anywhere else in the country, if not the world.

However, it's nothing like as easy to get into as it really should be. Photocopying is far too expensive, especially considering that there is often no alternative to doing the photocopying in the library itself. Staff are universally friendly and helpful, and getting hold of books that you want is reasonably easy – even if it sometimes takes longer than you'd like.

Now, as
a tourist attraction, it's very good... but that's a whole other opinion...

Summary: