This library has every book ever published.

(you can find contact details and social links there too)

[shyguypro]

I have mad respect for archivists. It's such insanely important work but so under appreciated.

[YTRingoster]

"We have to collect everything, because we don't know what will be important"
This x100. We don't get to write our own history, but we DO get to decide what is preserved and what is forgotten! Huge respect for these people

[jamesmnguyen]

CGP Grey taught me how important tracking down old articles and books are to proving/disproving myths.

[guyanomaly]

I’m an academic library worker and I also work in archives, and it makes me so happy to see this. Most of our books are really esoteric but some of them happen to be the one surviving record of, like, a reproduction of an obscure painting or salamander populations in 1950-1970 or a zine a teenager handed out to his friends 40 years ago, and that detail turns out to be incredibly important to a researcher decades later.

[catwithshades]

The modern Library of Alexandria.

Huge props to everyone involved in this project! This is crazy!

[kjw]

One paragraph in a tiny community newspaper from the mid-1800s helped me answer a family mystery of decades. It was just a social column, but I’m so glad someone preserved it over the years, just in case future me would need it. It was the key to finding a whole branch of our family during the civil war era! (Canadian here). Thank you archivists and librarians!

[tthaas]

This reminds me of my days at university; I was in Houston, Texas, and needed some information published in an obscure book about computer programming. The only existent copy available at a lending library in the US was in Fairbanks, Alaska (at U Alaska Fairbanks), almost 4, 000 miles (~6, 400 km) away, or an almost 10 hour flight. If it wasn't there, my only other option would have been the Library of Congress in Washington DC, the equivalent of the British Library in the US, but it isn't a lending library so I'd have had to travel to DC to peruse the material.

My librarian put in for an inter-library loan on a Tuesday, and I had the book in my hands the next Monday. I read what I needed Monday night (and I'll neither confirm nor deny going to Kinko's to make copies of the relevant chapters for later review as needed), and had it back on the way to Alaska on Tuesday. Modern libraries are, in a very real sense, truly amazing. A simple (free!) request, and a book makes a cross-continental journey.

[Taracinablue]

Now I'm picturing a dystopian book/movie in which the characters have to somehow scale those massive shelves, maneuver past the dusty, dead robots, and find the knowledge they need for the story

[TomScottGo]

There are actually six legal deposit libraries for the UK: the others are in Edinburgh, Aberystwyth, Cambridge, Oxford, plus the Trinity College Library in Ireland. But while the others can ask for works, the BL is the only one that doesn't (and can't) pick and choose what it takes. So for modern works, there's usually more than one backup copy somewhere, just in case!

[Stephen_Lafferty]

I'm a librarian and a BL card holder - I love seeing the automation behind the scenes of such a national institution!

[ben]

The importance of this was really hammered home when Tom said this is the raw text of history as it happened in response to Linda saying we can’t decide today what is important in 50 years’ time. The sheer scale of this archiving is amazing

[astronemir]

This should be something the public of the UK should be proud of. Learning from history and Preserving the world’s (UK’s) literature. This is extremely long sighted. I’m super impressed

[Hexagonaldonut]

This kind of thing is insanely cool, and the thing I massively agree with is that one point: We can't decide *now* what'll be important 50 years in the future. We literally *cannot know.* This is relevant in a *lot* of contexts, not just archival, and it's always nice to hear someone stress it like that.

[ramachandra]

Legal deposit . Collecting all the literary material no matter how obscure, to preserve for posterity is really a gargantuan task . Thanks for the information. This was really useful to know .

[ezekiel]

I'm not British but it makes me proud as a human that we have archives. I have high respects for archivers.

[Jasonwolf]

As someone who works in a museum and has been in our archives, I'm glad we have oh so much random "junk". Maybe that advertisement for 2 for 1 deal on potatoes meant nothing to you at the time, but for us we have a well made pamphlet showing local business names, family names, prices, and commodities that were important in the 1800s.

Edit: spelling.

[DestructivelyPhased]

So, the question is, has Tom deposited his weekly newsletter with the British library for the UKWA?

[cfpss]

So pleased to see this! We are a small charity that publishes four editions of our journals each year, plus one or two books annually too - and they're all stored in this building. They are very proactive too - if you forget to send them a copy of a periodical, they are aware and will contact you. It's fascinating to see what it looks like inside!

[tfrowlett]

The oldest book I’ve seen is the atlas coelestis by John Flamsteed, published 1729. It wasn’t published fully until after his death, as he was a perfectionist and wanted it to be perfect. Other astronomers got annoyed at the delays, most notably Issac Newton. Someone broke into Flamsteeds’ office and stole his notes and published the book without his knowledge of consent. When he found out he tried to find every copy and destroy them, he missed about a hundred.

[lars__]

Oddly satifying that institutions like this exist