Getting Started: The British Library

I recommend, for several reasons, starting your research at the British Library, if you have identified that institution as one with materials you need.  The procedures for using this library are similar to many of the research collections you will use in London.  Most of the materials are in closed stacks and you must identify and request the items you want.  A limited number of items may be requested at a time or per day, which will require you to prioritize your needs.  And, finally, as you start working in this new type of environment, there are helpful reference librarians at the British Library to ask should you need assistance or advice.  The skills you develop here will be transferable to other, smaller libraries where a limited number of staff are available to provide help and to retrieve materials. 

The Admissions office at the BL is very efficient.  Bring your letter of introduction, your passport, and your local address and telephone number information to the Admissions office, which is on the main floor in the British Library.  (I forgot to take my local phone number and could not remember the postal code.  Fortunately, the gentleman at the Admissions office was able to locate both for me, so this slight bump was easily overcome, but do not depend upon the kindness of strangers to right all your omissions.)  Once admitted, a pictured reader’s ticket will be issued which allows access to the reading rooms, to the online catalog, and is necessary for requesting materials.  Without it you can go only to the exhibits, the cafes, and the bookstore.  My reader’s ticket is good for five years.  Once you have been through the Admissions procedures in one place, it does not seem so intimidating elsewhere.  After you finish registering in the Admissions office, keep the letter of introduction because you may need it again at some point in your research within the British Library. 

Next I recommend signing up for one of the Reader Education Service sessions at the British Library.  In this one hour session you will be taught how to use the online catalog and how to use it to request materials.  These sessions are not offered every day, so contact the library to find out when they are offered.  I found it very valuable because it demystified the system.  Even with this session I needed to consult the reference librarians about search strategies, but it provided me with a foundation for navigating the online system.  Other libraries may provide similar educational sessions, or a tour of the facilities.  For example, at the moment, the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum holds one hour sessions on Tuesday mornings to introduce new users to their set-up.  If a group of you plan to use a particular library, inquire at the library whether a special instructional session, which includes an introduction to the online catalog and/or a tour of the library, can be arranged.   

Using The Reading Rooms and Requesting Materials:  An Illustration Using a Humanities Research Project Example

Most humanities researchers will use one or all of these four parts of the British Library:  Humanities 1, Humanities 2, Rare Books, and Manuscripts.  Very roughly, use Humanities 1 and 2 for materials published after 1850, Rare Books for printed materials published prior to 1850, and Manuscripts for ‘handwritten’ materials (‘handwritten’ can mean manuscripts written by a playwright on a computer disk).  However, some periodicals that were published prior to 1850 may be used in Humanities as well as in Rare Books, but those only available in Rare Books can be used only there.  You can discover which reading room to use when you request the materials online, for you must indicate the room to which you want the materials sent.  Manuscripts has their own online catalog and their own policies and procedures.  At the moment, requests for materials available through Manuscripts are submitted using printed forms.  

Start your research in Humanities 1 or 2 (there is a staircase connecting the two rooms inside the reading rooms).  Select a vacant desk and note its number.  (For an impressive view of both levels, walk all the way to the far corner of the room and look up.)  If noise bothers you, select a desk away from the service points (Inquiries Desk and Issues Desk).   Leave something of no value on the desk to reserve it, then go to the online catalogs and start to request materials.

Some desks have electrical outlets for laptops, but there are no internet connections from the desks.  If you need to use the web, computers have been set aside for this purpose.  Ask at the Inquiries Desk.  However, do not use the computers here (or in any library where it is specifically prohibited), to read your email. 

To use the online catalog, type in your reader's ticket number.  During the request process, you will be prompted to specify a reading room and a desk number.  If you are in Humanities 1 or 2, and some of the materials you need are only in Rare Books, then write down the shelfmark for those items.  Later, when you go to the Rare Books room, select a desk, note its number, and search for the items you want to request by the shelfmark number.  Once you have identified the items you want, the shelfmark is the easiest way to re-locate those records.  If you are working on a pre-1850 topic, the Rare Books room may be the place to start.

There are several handouts and pamphlets written by the British Library librarians to help you search the collections.  The online catalog can be very challenging to use because many records identifying parts of a run of books or periodicals may exist, and you must find the one you want.  Subject searches are possible only for items cataloged after 1975.  Prior to 1975, keyword searches are possible, but for subject access use the print subject catalog in Humanities 2 (search volumes year by year) and/or subject bibliographies to identify materials you want, then search the specific titles in the online catalog to request them.  If the official title of a periodical has "the" as part of the title, you must type "the" when searching by "whole title:"  The Edinburgh Review, The Augustan Review, The British Critic.  Should the title be generic, the more you know about the publication the better your chances for finding the correct record:  when did the periodical start and end publication?  who were some of the editors?  where was it published?  One publication I wanted was called Champion, but I could not figure out which one I wanted from the information I had.  In the end, I returned to the bibliography in which I found the original citation, read the introduction, and found that Champion was a newspaper, which meant it would not be available in the main British Library.  In Humanities 2, I looked in the card catalog for the Colindale Newspaper Library and found a record for it.  A trip to north London would be necessary to retrieve that article.  

Periodical records in the online catalog do not necessarily tell you exactly what the library owns, but may give only a starting date with a dash or a date indicating when the publication ceased.  At the moment, the BL online catalog is divided by dates:  pre-1975 and post-1975.  If you are looking for a journal published in 2000, but the publication started prior to and was cataloged before 1975, you need to use the pre-1975 online catalog.  In the case of early periodicals, you have to request the volumes you want, then wait to see if the volumes are held by the library.  There is no short cut.  Notes online can be hard to interpret.  For example, in 1997 all American periodical subscriptions, to any American periodical, be it scholarly or popular, were cancelled by the main British Library in London but retained by the British Library Delivery Service Centre located in Yorkshire.  The record needed to request the periodical states" Not Available See Reference Inquiries."  Reference Inquiries will then send you to the Book Delivery Inquiry Desk to order (this cannot be done online).  It takes about two days for items to be sent from the Yorkshire centre, so, if you need an issue of an American periodical after 1996, it may be easier to use other London libraries.  Remember, if you  use the proxy server to access the Penrose Library homepage, and the journal subscription is online, you may be able to retrieve the article via Peak: The Library Catalog or via one of the E-Resources databases.  To identify which E-Resources databases have fulltext of specific titles, use JAKE.

I know you know this, but it bears repeating.  Use the online catalog to find materials that have been cataloged within a library.  You cannot find articles within periodicals by using the British Library online catalog:  you must use indexes or bibliographies containing references to articles.  At the moment, the British Library and Senate House have many of the same online and print article indexes found in Penrose Library and CU-Boulder.  Other research libraries in London have more limited access to online resources.  You can generally find out the most current information about online searching via the web site for the library.  And, again, remember you can use the proxy server to access web-based databases available to DU students.

It takes about 90 minutes for the materials to be retrieved.  When they arrive, a light will appear at your desk advising you to go to the Issues Desk.  If no light appears after about two hours, there may be a problem:  ask at the Issues Desk.  During the time you are waiting for the materials to come you can continue to research your topic or have a cup of tea in the cafe near Humanities 1.  Once the materials arrive, you will need to concentrate on those, so you might want to take this moment early in the day to relax before everything arrives.

I worked on a project to go through the process, concentrating on periodical articles and  manuscripts.  Using xxx and yyy (both available in Penrose Library), I found several references to early 19th century book reviews of Jane Austen's "Emma" and decided to find these, as well as 'reviews' by her family and friends. The former were all published in periodicals from the time, and the latter was a manuscript written in her own hand.

Periodicals:

 Identifying the correct journals in the online catalog was the first challenge because the titles were generic; "Monthly Review," "Quarterly Review," and "Champion" were the most difficult. Eventually, I was able to request all the titles I needed (7 altogether - it turned out the "Champion" is a newspaper and located in the Colindale Newspaper Library, not the main BL). Of those, I was able to get 4 right away (about 2 hours wait), but the others were problems for various reasons. In the end, the staff couldn't find two of the titles (the BL was bombed during WW2 and some of the periodicals were wiped out, but the staff don't know which ones, so these may have been destroyed), and the last one was a problem because the online record had a bug in it and wouldn't work.  To order a book or periodical, you have to find the correct record online and request it online - because of the bug, I couldn't request it, and so had to wait until the next day for the problem to be cleared up. I could have ordered it manually, but by then I was tired and thought I would just wait until the next day, since I had to go back to the library anyway to see if the 2 titles that were never found had been located, and to see the manuscript.

Manuscripts

The manuscript, which I discovered after I began my research at the British Library, turned out to be a restricted one, and I needed my letter of introduction from my dean to prove I needed it for my project (so make sure you hold on to the letter which you showed in Admissions).  Had my letter stated I needed only specific items, I may not have been able to use the related materials discovered en route.  

The Manuscripts division has developed an online catalog, searchable over the web.  This is currently one of the largest databases for any manuscript collection, and describes about 80-85% of their holdings.  All parts of the records are searchable so that, while the print reference volume to find locations for Austen manuscripts helped me to locate the specific item I needed, I could use the online catalog to find manuscripts by Austen as well as records for items by individuals who have been identified as having a relationship with her (friends and family).  The librarians in the manuscripts reading room are excited how the web catalog has opened up the contents of their collections in unexpected ways.  Patrons can search by the Descriptive Adjunct feature, often used to describe the author's occupation, rank, or even relationship with another individual.  Therefore friends and relations of Jane Austen may be identified using this feature.  Should a researcher want to find materials written by engineers who worked in India or Bombay in the 19th century, this too is possible.  Prior to the online catalog, such research would have been nearly impossible or very difficult.

But, as always, remember that the online catalog is often only a starting point.  The introduction to the web catalog on the Manuscripts site describes its scope and limitations.  The manuscripts department houses many print catalogs to their collections.  A published guide, The British Library: Guide to the catalogues and indexes of the Department of Manuscripts, describes the various finding aids.  In addition to the materials the division actually owns, they also house manuscripts on loan, which are not cataloged at all at this moment.  For example, they preserve the Harold Pinter archive.  This information may not be published in any directories.  To discover such treasures, talk with experts in the field who may know locations of such collections, and talk with reference librarians within the reading rooms who may have such knowledge.