Visitors get exciting insight into world of British Library at Thorp Arch
WETHERBY councillors and local business people enjoyed a behind-the-scenes tour of one of the district's largest local employers last week.
The British Library at Thorp Arch, which employs 1,000 people and is home to the UK national library's document supply, digitisation and long-term storage facilities, opened its doors for an evening to let the public enjoy its new exhibition, Digital Britain – Capturing the Nation's Digital Memory.
The invited group of parish, town and city councillors were shown the library's new additional storage building as well as its large-scale digitisation studio.
The library has been at Thorp Arch for more than 40 years and guests heard Director of Finance and Corporate Services Steve Morris explain how the it plays a central role in the British Library's long-term future.
"We were delighted to welcome a range of local representatives into the library and to share with them our exciting vision for the Boston Spa site," said Mr Morris.
"Although we are a big employer around here we have a comparatively low profile in the local community and we are keen to address this," he added.
The Library has exciting plans ahead which include moving the bulk of its newspaper collection from its current location at Colindale, North London, to a planned newspaper storage building at Thorp Arch.
The British Library's Newspaper Collection is one of the world's finest, covering more than two centuries of UK and overseas newspapers and including an estimated 750 million newspaper pages.
The new newspaper storage facility at Thorp Arch will store the national newspaper collection in low-oxygen, temperature- and humidity-controlled conditions which will extend the lifespan of fragile newsprint and protect this remarkable resource for future generations of researchers.
The digitisation facilities at Thorp Arch will also help the library achieve its goal of making millions of historic newspapers available online.
Earlier this month the library launched its 19th Century British Newspapers website featuring more than two million pages from 49 local and national newspapers from 1800-1900.
The website has already proven tremendously popular and the library plans to offer access to many more of its collections in this way.
The British Library's other sites are the main building at St Pancras in central London, which is home to priceless treasures such as Magna Carta and Shakespeare's First Folio, and the Newspaper Library at Colindale, North London.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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