When second-year English Language and Communication student Nina Wilson told us that she was going to visit the British Library, we asked her if she would write about it for the library blog. Here is her story.

On Monday 28th March, 12 students studying the Roots and Routes module visited the British Library. The module, which is part of the BA in English Language and Communication traces the development of the English Language in Britain from Anglo Saxon times to the present day and looks at many of the demographic, social, economic and technological influences that make the English language so rich and varied. A visit to the British Library is always a highlight of the year, as students can relate maps, documents, illustrations, and books to the things they have learned in class.

What is the British Library?

The British Library is one of the six legal deposit libraries in the United Kingdom. The others are the National Library of Scotland, the Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, Trinity College, Dublin and the National Library of Wales. Deposit libraries can request and receive free of charge a copy of everything published in the United Kingdom, providing they make a request in writing within a year of the date of publication. This means that the British Library is one of the largest libraries in the world.

The Library’s collections contain over 190 million items from several different countries, in over 400 languages. These collections include books, magazines, journals, maps, manuscripts, letters, religious texts, musical scores, posters, prints and drawings, patents, and even sound recordings– which, in itself, has over 6.5 million recordings that range from pop or classical music to audio of interviews.

What we did

The visit to the British Library focused on one of the first floor galleries, which is free and open to the public. It’s a gallery displaying ever-changing original artefacts. 

 Our favourite discoveries in the library were: 

• Two copies of the Magna Carta as well as a copy of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales printed in the mid-1470s.
   
• An 800-year-old map of Europe where Iva and Anna could just about work out where their homes in Slovakia were located.
    
• Most people loved the hand-crafted paper books designed in a variety of shapes and forms.  
  
• Nadia was interested in documents and notes by the late Andrea Levy, author of Small Island and also by the Women in Shakespeare, a section on actresses who performed Shakespearian plays. 
  
• Stelina was able to explain some details from a hand-painted Coptic Bible.  
  
  
• A series of children’s reading books were also on display including The Little Nippers by Beryl Gilroy. As one of the first black headteachers in this country, Beryl designed these books to better reflect the lives of black children in Britain.  

Digital Collections

The Library’s digital collections contain a wide range of materials that have been scanned and are available to be accessed online. These collections include digitised manuscripts, over 95,000 sound recordings, doctoral theses awarded by UK HE institutions, and virtual books, which are carefully scanned e-book versions of the library’s rarest texts. Many of these virtual books are accompanied by a guide that you can read or listen to so you can observe the finest details of a book. Some digital collections can only be accessed on-site at the British Library.

Many of the online resources are created with students and researchers in mind, and a number of the learning resources are put together to support undergraduate study.

Why you should visit the British Library

The British Library is an excellent place to study and access primary material that relates to your chosen course. In the reading rooms, the staff will bring you any item from the collection that you can have a look at, while having the comfort of free Wi-Fi and peaceful study spaces- you just can’t take any items home. In order to have access to the reading rooms, you need to register for a free readers pass which can be done on the British Library website.

We rounded off the day with a visit to the British Museum, where we went in search of the Sutton Hoo boat burial treasures in room 41 complete with weapons, gold jewellery and silver bowls. Then everyone chose an item of interest of their own: Japanese art, the LGBTQ trail, the Lindow man and the Rosetta stone were some of the ones selected. 

Image credit: London – Euston Road – Entrance Gate British Library – by Lida & David Kindersley Txllxt TxllxT, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Additional images and text supplied by Antonia Linehan.

This blog post was written by Nina Wilson, a second-year English Language student working on a 120-hour placement as part of the English Language and Communication in the Workplace module. This module provides students with the opportunity to develop their skills, knowledge and aptitude of English language and communication in a professional setting, which helps prepare them for work and training in the future.