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British Library
National library and legal deposit library. At Euston Road, London, and Boston Spa, Yorkshire. Formerly part of British Museum. Most online catalogues and other web services are currently unavailable because of a cyber attack in October 2023.
Basic data
| Instance of: | GLAM |
|---|---|
| Official website: | http://www.bl.uk/ |
| Wikidata ID: | Q23308 |
| ARCHON code: | 58 |
| Main subject: | None |
Contents
| Description | |
|---|---|
| British Library, Thomason Tracts | Printed pamphlets and broadsides collected by George Thomason. Contents not currently represented here because individual printed copies are out of scope. |
| British Library, Western Manuscripts | Collections of western manuscripts. |
Any other information
Often abbreviated to BL but this is not used here as it can easily be confused with the Bodleian Library.
The library was formerly known as the British Museum Reading Room. Older secondary works may reference manuscripts with the prefix BM instead of BL.
Interim catalogues and finding aids
Because of the cyber attack in October 2023, most online catalogues and other resources are unavailable, although the London reading rooms are still open and material stored on site can be ordered manually. These resources can help to locate material:
- Main Catalogue: read-only snapshot from April 2023. Cannot be used to order items. Old permalinks to UINs will not work. Now includes theses from EThOS.
- Print & Probability: English Short Title Catalogue Search
- TNA Discovery catalogue page for British Library: includes lists and indexes of manuscript collections.
- Shared Research Repository: Open Access publications and reusable datasets, including:
- EThOS Thesis data, November 2023. Around 600 theses relevant to the British Civil Wars from the 2021 version of the data have been imported here. See Category:Theses. Many of these link to copies at institutional repositories.
- Printed catalogues of manuscripts give a description of every manuscript volume and in many cases an itemised list of contents. Catalogues are on open shelves in the Manuscript Room. University libraries may have copies. Scans of many catalogue volumes are available at the Internet Archive. Where these have been found, they are linked to from the pages for named collections in British Library, Western Manuscripts#Contents.
- British Library Medieval Manuscripts blog lists links to printed catalogues at the Internet Archive.
