The last year has been a momentous one for the British Library in all sorts of ways. From the 800^th anniversary of Magna Carta to our 20 millionth reading room delivery, readers of this blog will know that we’ve passed a lot of landmarks over the last 12 months.

We’ve now published our 2014/15 Annual Report, reporting back on the Library’s recent accomplishments, and measuring how we’re performing as an organisation.

We do this as part of our obligations to Parliament and the public, because of the funding we receive from the UK government. The Library was set up by an Act of Parliament in the 1970s, and as part of the Act it’s our responsibility to publish information on what we’re doing and how we spend our budget. The accounts we publish in the Annual Report are used to calculate the accounts of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and in turn, the Whole of Government Accounts. At 91 pages, the full report is pretty substantial, so that we can be as transparent as possible on spending, income, pay and performance.

The report’s summary of our achievements over the last year is a fairly long read in itself. The launch of our Living Knowledge vision in January encapsulated a whole series of projects that demonstrate the Library’s central role in preserving our heritage and sharing knowledge around the world. We opened the National Newspaper Building, one of the most advanced storage facilities ever built; we brought city libraries across England together to support businesses and entrepreneurs; we launched the Qatar Digital Library to transform the study of Gulf history; we set up Discovering Literature to help students experience our greatest writers in a new way; we welcomed the Alan Turing Institute for data science; and of course we’re celebrating one of our greatest exports, Magna Carta, to name a few.

But the Annual Report tells another story, too. Because at a very challenging time for all publicly-funded organisations, the Library has managed to balance its books over the last year, while making sure all those achievements were still possible. That’s due to careful management, and to our innovative partnerships to deliver projects with other organisations who share our goals. But it also was helped by a strong commercial performance; our commercial income increased by £1.4m this year, thanks to great work by our publishing team and our online and on-site shops.

Financial good health goes hand-in-hand with good performance, and the Report also includes our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the year. These figures show that the Library is serving a bigger audience than ever; in the last two years, combined visits to our on-site facilities and our website has risen by 28%. There has been particularly rapid growth in the number of people using our Learning website (up 75% on last year) and taking part in learning sessions at our St Pancras building (up 50% in two years). Satisfaction levels are also very high, with 94% of Reading Room users and 96% of exhibition visitors feeling happy with their experience. Satisfaction ratings for our website are also growing, as its redevelopment continues to improve people’s experience of the Library online.

Of course, the British Library never stands still. Our collections are growing rapidly, in both print and digital form, with a massive 827,895 items added – a 10% increase on the previous year. And with some profound changes happening at the Library, and happening all around us, we will keep reporting back on what we do, for our users and for the whole of the UK.

Mick Wilkin

Chief Accountant

 

The British Library at Boston Spa – two miles outside Wetherby in West Yorkshire – is a landmark perhaps more driven past than actually visited. However, for researchers in the north of England it offers a gateway to vast research collections that include journals of the sciences, arts and humanities, millions of monograph titles and the UK national newspaper collection.

For many years, Boston Spa has offered access to our Document Supply collection – a wide range of material that is the equivalent to a first rate university library: 3 million research level books, 210,000 journal titles, 400,000 conference proceedings and 130,000 music scores. We also offer access to 3 million sound recordings via our Sound and Moving Image service.

Last year, the Reading Room underwent major refurbishment and we introduced full Reader registration for the first time at Boston Spa. This meant that we were able to extend much further the range of material that could be accessed by Readers in Yorkshire.

From September 2014 we made print newspapers available to view at Boston Spa, and in May this year we extended access to include microfilmed newspapers. Both formats can be requested to Boston Spa for viewing within 48 hours. In addition 11 million pages of digitised, fully searchable newspapers are available via the British Newspaper Archive, which can be used for free in any of our Reading Rooms.

Photo © Kippa Matthews.

The availability of these different formats of newspapers means that the vast majority of the national newspaper collection is now accessible to Readers in Yorkshire, as well as those in the Newsroom at St Pancras. This is a massive benefit to our users in Yorkshire, and across the north of England – one of the world’s greatest newspaper archives available to use at a facility in the heart of the region.

This month, we increased the extent of collections available to Readers in the north further still. You can now request legal deposit books and serials held at the Boston Spa site – including some seven million items held in the Additional Storage Building. As with print newspapers and microfilm, these items should be ordered 48 hours in advance; you can track the progress of your order via My Reading Room Requests and you’ll be able to see when your items are available for viewing.

This is the latest phase of an ongoing project to pilot extended access to collection items at Boston Spa, and we are closely monitoring both demand and our ability to meet that demand, with a view to extending access to other collections in future.

For now, please pass on the message about the breadth and richness of the collections that can now be accessed in Yorkshire. If you’ve never used us before, please pre-register online. Once you’ve registered, you can begin to request items and, within 48 hours, make your first visit to Boston Spa to obtain your Reader pass (which is also valid for our St Pancras Reading Rooms) and start exploring our collections.

The Reading Room has free wifi and the site offers parking (also free) and a canteen available to Readers as well as staff. If you’d like to find out more, please don’t hesitate to contact our team via email [email protected] or phone 01937 546060.

To whet your appetite, this recent TV news report includes a look behind the scenes at both the Boston Spa Reading Room and the National Newspaper Building. If you live in the north, it’s an amazing resource to have on our doorstep – and available to use for free. If you know anyone else who might find it useful, please let them know!

Jerry Shillito

Head of Reader and Reference Services

 

 

Hot on the heels of the 20 millionth item ordered into our Reading Rooms, this week @BritishLibrary gained 1 million Twitter followers, which puts us in the illustrious company of @Telegraph (1.07m), @NHM_London (1.08m) and @David_Cameron (1.1m) with only 72m more to go to overtake @katyperry.

Actually, it’s a pretty satisfying milestone as we push to “make our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone” because the media landscape is changing so rapidly, you feel that you have to run fast just to keep up. We’ve been working hard behind the scenes to get the Library into a position where it can capitalise on changes in the media environment, particularly the shift from paid media (TV, press, outdoor) to owned (website, email, on-site) and earned media (word-of-mouth, Twitter, Facebook) in the last few years. This shift is part of a broader trend away from what’s sometimes called ‘interruption marketing’ where advertisers shout louder and louder to attract the audience attention and it suits a brand like the British Library down to the ground.

The British Library is never going to shout its way to marketing success, but even if we did have the deep pockets of the major brand advertisers it’s not the right thing for us to do.

Our strengths are our collection, our expertise and our storytelling, all of which come through particularly strongly through hugely popular team blogs on topics ranging from manuscripts to Collection Care to Asian and African studies. We therefore need a marketing team with the skills to capitalise on those strengths as well as pulling off some good old fashioned (and still effective) above-the-line advertising when needed. That’s why we’ve created our new Content and Community team – to maximise the impact of this content across all our media channels so we can achieve audience reach and engagement levels that would cost millions to achieve via paid media.

Compelling content on our blogs has helped boost the Library's social media following.

The Twitter landmark is exciting not just because it extends the Library’s reach but because it shows that the team are getting really good at the ‘Community’ part of Content and Community. A year ago, our Follows were outstripping our Unfollows but since the team started getting to grips with things in September that gap has widened considerably. More people are joining our Twitter community and fewer people are leaving, which makes me really positive about the quality of the conversation we’re having with our audiences.

Stats showing the steady growth in @britishlibrary's following over the past two years.

There’s a lively discussion in marketing and media circles about the importance of follower counts (or lack of). But the whole quality vs. quantity debate only gets you so far before you run into the reality that you can’t control who follows you or who follows your followers, so the best thing you can do is focus on being interesting enough to get followed in the first place.

Graham MacFadyen

Head of Digital and Marketing Operations