Success Stories

How have trusts and foundations helped?

Thanks to the ongoing generous support of charitable trusts and foundations, the British Library has succeeded in:

• Acquisition campaigns for heritage collection items such as the Canning Family Archive, the Mystère de la Vengeance, My Ladye Nevell’s Book, and the 7th-century St Cuthbert Gospel, the oldest surviving fully intact European book. 
• Major capital development projects, such as the Centre for Conservation and the Harry M Weinrebe Learning Centre.
• The digitisation of rare items from our collections to open up access to them and ensure their long term preservation, such as the project to make our collection of Greek Manuscripts available online. 

British Library Labs
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, British Library Labs was launched in March 2013 to support digital scholarship at the Library. The project aims to open up our digital content and data to researchers, and create an environment where scholars can research entire collections at scale rather than just individual items. One of the most exciting developments was the release of one million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose, and the images have been viewed 170 million times so far. The project has also organised two competitions to find innovative digital scholarship ideas and bring them to life through collaboration between competition winners and Library experts. The next phase of the project will follow directly on from the first phase when it is completed in December this year. The second phase, running from Jan 2015 to Dec 2016, will see more of such competitions and even more initiatives to engage researchers.

The After School Book Club
During the 2013-14 school year, our After School Book Club project has been providing an intensive supported reading programme at the Library that has helped young people in Camden who are struggling with literacy learn how to read for pleasure. We have worked with three local schools to deliver an after-school book club to 15 year 7/8 students, engaging them creatively with children’s authors in a small group, and exploring books in a focused way that aims to bring books to life and help improve their attainment.

We are very grateful for the support of Ernest Cook Trust for this project.

Conservation internship bursaries
Thanks to the support of The Mercers’ Company, we were able to continue our successful book conservation internship programme in 2013. Trainee book conservator, Sarah Noble, has been working on a variety of paper and book conservation projects since starting her internship in December 2013, including a significant contribution towards our Beautiful Science exhibition.

Harry M Weinrebe Learning Centre
The British Library has had an education room at St Pancras for more than 10 years, but the facilities were too small to accommodate a full class, had little IT support and no facilities for young people to engage directly with collection items or do creative work.In autumn 2010, we were able to open the Harry M Weinrebe Learning Centre, thanks to the support of the Dorset Foundation, the Wolfson Foundation, John Lyon’s Charity, British Library Patrons and others.

The Learning Centre offers a bright, spacious and inspirational environment for learners of all ages. It Centre provides pupils and teachers with cutting-edge facilities to support digital literacy skills as well as first-hand encounters with historic manuscripts, sound recordings, maps and letters. Since it opened, over 5,000 school groups have been booked into workshops at the Learning Centre.