Records of the Department of Printed Books

Records relating to all aspects of the Department of Printed Books and its operations in a variety of formats.

• British Library Corporate Archives, 1973-1973
• British Museum, Department of Printed Books, 1753-1973

The Department of Printed Books (DPB) was one of three founding departments which made up the British Museum when it was created by the British Museum Act 1753. Together with the Department of Manuscripts - and later the Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts - it formed what has generally been called the British Museum Library.

In 1850 DPB took over responsibility for the deposit of books under the Copyright Act 1842 and formed the Copyright Office, later renamed the Copyright Receipt Office (CRO).

In 1867 a new library department - the Department of Maps, Charts, Plans and Topographical Drawings - was set up; but it existed as a separate department only until 1880 when it was re-incorporated into DPB and the manuscript maps were transferred to the Department of Manuscripts. Another new library department - Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts was created in 1892, incorporating the previously formed sub-department of Oriental Manuscripts and the oriental book collections of DPB.In the 1950s and 60s the British Museum developed plans for the National Reference Library of Science and Invention (NRLSI), which was to be based largely on the Patent Office Library (POL), founded in 1855. Responsibility for POL was transferred to the British Museum in 1966 and NRLSI was incorporated into DPB.

Shortage of space - for collections, readers and staff - has been a recurrent theme in the history of DPB. Efforts to overcome the problem led to (Sir) Anthony Panizzi's Round Reading Room and Iron Library - opened in 1857 - and in 1905 to the building at Colindale of the Newspaper Repository. The building of King Edward VII's Galleries - opened in 1914 - provided some additional space but in 1928 the Royal Commission on National Museums and Galleries, chaired by Viscount d'Abernon, reported serious overcrowding and recommended that the accommodation should be expanded as a matter of urgency. The recommendation was not implemented.

During the Second World War the King's Library and main reading room of the British Museum were both damaged, albeit only slightly. More extensive was the damage to part of the adjacent book stacks and to the newspaper storage at Colindale. The accommodation lost was only gradually replaced over the next two decades and only a partial replacement of destroyed books and newspapers was possible. The post-war County of London Development Plan designated a new site for a national library and in 1955, three years after a public enquiry on this proposal, the Minister of Housing approved it. In 1964 the government gave approval in principle to outline plans for the building on a site in Bloomsbury, south of Great Russell Street, which had been drawn up by the architects Sir Leslie Martin and (Sir) Colin St John Wilson.

Following the reversal in 1967 of the government's acceptance of the Bloomsbury site, a Committee was appointed under Dr Frederick - later Baron - Dainton. Its recommendations for the establishment of a national library separate from the British Museum, though modified by a white paper of 1971, were broadly those enacted by the British Library Act 1972. In July 1973 the British Library formally came into being and the bulk of DPB became a department in the British Library Reference Division. NRLSI - renamed the Science Reference Library - became a separate department within the Reference Division and CRO was transferred to the Bibliographic Services Division.