British Library to Abandon
Its Collect-Everything Policy
The British Library, in the latest step in its struggle to conserve space, announced June 13 that it is planning to abandon its policy of collecting every book published in Britain as part of its legal copyright deposit function. Instead, the library will focus on keeping works in some subject areas and leave others to specialized universities and institutions.
With 150 million items in its collection already, the library expects to run out of storage space by 2006.
The library’s June 13 New Strategic Directions report called the policy change “a major reshaping of Britain’s library services.” But patron Charles Peyton’s view was that it would be “the end of what the British Library has been known for,” according to the June 14 London Times.
The report was issued just weeks after it was revealed that the BL’s newspaper library in North London had been conducting a series of sales and less then a year after the library came under fire for large-scale weeding of books and newspapers.
“We have to make hard economic choices,” a library spokesman said. “We can’t do everything.”
Posted June 18, 2001.
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