Last month we sold our family home of 33 years - a beautiful 1840s Victorian terraced house based in the south-side of Dublin, on a leafy main road, within walking distance of the centre of town.  The memories of leaving a house that you grew up in are complex – some beautiful and warm, some more complicated, some difficult, some uplifting.

Perhaps harder however are the things you leave with.  My father, one of Ireland’s leading lights of Irish theatre and television from the 1950s until he died last year, filled his treasured house with his work archive.  Stacks of scripts, scrap books, accounts, photographs, slides, books, records and later, reel-to-reel film, video and audio cassettes, CDs, computers, flash drives and emails filled various rooms from floor to ceiling. Nothing was thrown away, everything had a place, if not exactly organised.

Earlier this year Trinity College, Dublin agreed to accept the archive of my father’s work. A real honour, especially as he was a graduate of Trinity and my mother also lectured there for many years.  During the small reception that was held to mark a display of the archive in Trinity’s wonderful Long Room Library, I noticed the surprising clash between my work and personal life.

Video cassettes in the archive of Louis Lentin, prior to being transferred to the library of Trinity College, Dublin.

I’ve worked at the British Library for nearly seven years and have seen the Library accept some incredible literary archives, from luminaries such as JG Ballard, Hanif Kureishi and Virginia Woolf to name a few. But now I was on the other side – donating an archive of immense research importance to a national institution.  It also reminded me of the importance of archiving and giving access to historical material.  Not everything is found online and part of the joy of today’s modern researcher is that libraries offer the chance of serendipity when studying the physical and digital side by side.

As I leafed through the final books, photographs and slides as the furniture was being moved out of our home, I was heartened that someone else will now live in this wonderful space and that the memories will filter to others through the personal archives now in the public’s possession.

Miki Lentin

Head of Corporate Affairs

 

“The Library is amazing; physically, visually, intellectually. But it doesn’t translate to the website – it’s stuffy and unappealing.” – postgrad researcher, 2011

The disappointment this user felt with an organisation they love is almost tangible. They’re virtually pleading with us to do a better job of showing the world how great we are. But the truth was, four years ago we faced major shortcomings with the British Library’s online customer experience resulting from the fragmentation of our online estate.

The diagnosis was harsh:

• visual and interaction design guidelines that would create a consistent user experience and support a strong brand identity were lacking
• digital content had been developed in silos which limit opportunities for lateral linking and horizontal user journeys
• content creation was often driven by tactical opportunities rather than the Library’s Content Strategy or our audience needs
• the technical infrastructure was dependent on legacy systems that had limited flexibility

Nowhere was all of this truer than Help for Researchers which earned the handle Hindrance for Researchers within the team.

Our researcher audience needed better guidance on how to use our collections most effectively so we set about trying to reduce the complexity and depth of Help for Researchers, trying to make it clear who the section is aimed at and what information can be found there.

The result is our new Subjects pages covering: Americas, Business and patents, Classics, Germanic Studies, Maps, Middle East, Music, National and international government publications, News media, Science, Slavonic studies, Sound, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Visual arts with a further 16 to come in the next few months. They are housed together at this hub page.

These pages were designed to be aggregation points for collections, catalogues, projects, events, staff profiles and blogs. Another aim is to make navigation of British Library content and services more intuitive.

But what they are also helping to do is cement the Library’s role in the global knowledge network by adding our unique assets – our authority, our primary sources, and our expert curation – to the cause of making our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone, for research, inspiration and enjoyment.

And there’s no better place to get a feeling for our primary sources than www.bl.uk/collection-guides.

This is fast becoming my favourite page on the British Library website - surely one of the few places on the web where you’ll find The British Newspaper Archive sitting happily alongside Classical Latin manuscripts, Ordnance survey mapping, Pop music recordings, Russian and Soviet posters and postcards, UK electoral registers, Europe PubMed Central. Nowhere else can you start to appreciate the dazzling diversity of the Library’s collections and it has only been possible with some outstanding collaboration between our curatorial, web and content teams.

And it’s growing. From just five collection guides a few months ago to 106 today, as our experts seize the opportunity provided by a standard, flexible toolkit to engage our users online with minimum marketing or IT intervention.

I’d like to go back to that postgrad researcher from 2011 and ask if we’ve managed to meet their expectations. I hope the answer would be: “yes” and “no” because as far as we’ve come, we can’t stop here.

Graham MacFadyen

Head of Digital and Marketing Operations

 

 

This morning I hosted our annual press preview event at St Pancras, where we offer the media a taste of the cultural highlights we have coming up over the next year. It’s always exciting for me to finally be able to tell the world what we have been busily planning for months – and in some cases, years!

To give journalists a behind-the-scenes flavour, we always have a range of collection items available to view at the preview. Today these included a diary entry revealing a fascinating glimpse into the private life of Shakespeare (as part of our exhibition commemorating 400 years since his death, Shakespeare in Ten Acts), Ministry of Defence maps that haven’t been seen in public before (part of our major Autumn exhibition, 20^th Century through Maps) and extracts from the recently acquired personal diaries and letters of Kenneth Williams. I still think it’s an amazing privilege to be able to see the physical items in advance and it’s always a popular element of the preview.

Ira Aldridge depicted as Othello, the Moor of Venice by James Northcote, 1826 (Manchester Art Gallery, Bridgeman Images)

Shakespeare in Ten Acts (15 April – 6 September) is our contribution to a year of celebrations commemorating the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 1616. The exhibition will focus on ten significant performances of his plays, from the 1600s to the 21^st century, and will explore the story of how Shakespeare became ‘the Bard’ we know today.

In a packed year of Shakespeare-related events, we believe our exhibition will really stand out as we cast an appraising, occasionally critical, look at the man himself and how he has become an almost mythical figure over the centuries. One section will look at the career of the famed actor Ira Aldridge – the first black actor to perform Shakespeare – and his battle to overcome racial prejudice to become one of the most celebrated Shakespearean actors of the early 19^th century.

20^th Century through Maps (4 November – 1 March 2017) will take us through the tumultuous events of the previous century, viewed through the development and commodification of maps. I was especially intrigued this morning by some ‘fictional’ maps designed by the Ministry of Defence, on show to the public for the first time in this exhibition, which were created for training examinations in the 1950s and 60s – one shows the potential fall-out from a nuclear incident in Scotland. It’s fascinating to see just how much maps reflect the politics and preoccupations of their eras.

In 2016 we’re building on the success of our free online learning resource Discovering Literature by adding material relating to Shakespeare and 20^th century writers including Angela Carter, Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot. Since the launch in May last year the site has received over 1.2 million unique visits, which demonstrates how much of a valued resource it has become. Making such a varied selection of material freely available online is hugely important to us, as part of our commitment to inspire and support learners of all ages.

Kathryn Johnson, Curator of Theatrical Archives and Manuscripts, exploring the Kenneth Williams archive.

You can find full details on our cultural programme for 2016 in the press release we published today. Other highlights include our acquisition of the personal letters and diaries of Carry On films star Kenneth Williams, giving us a new insight into the era of light entertainment and revue, an exhibition in the Entrance Hall Gallery celebrating of punk, and new displays in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery showcasing the work of great Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu and a closer look at Cervantes’ Don Quixote – who both, like Shakespeare, died in 1616.

One of our core Living Knowledge purposes is to engage everyone with memorable cultural experiences and what we have planned for 2016 really shows us at our best – I can’t wait for audiences to see for themselves what we have in store.

Roly Keating

Chief Executive