Leafing through history... Sultan Baybar's Qur'an, produced 1304-06, one of the treasures at the British Library. Photograph: Sean Smith
The threatened cuts in Treasury funding to the British Library would not only shorten its opening hours and force it to charge admission to the reading rooms. They would transform it into an essentially different and, sadly, more ordinary kind of institution.
The Library is one of six copyright libraries in the British Isles. It receives a copy of every book, periodical and newspaper published in the UK and Ireland, and - along with the copyright libraries in Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Aberystwyth and Dublin - maintains a complete archive of the nation's printed matter. Like the other five, the British Library also has vast collections of unique materials, from Gutenberg Bibles to Joyce's notebooks. For academics and researchers, using these places is an addictive privilege; afterwards, in lesser libraries, you catch yourself being self-righteously outraged when you can't consult the particular obscure 16th-century pamphlet you wanted.
But the most remarkable thing about the British Library is its universality - not just the incredible extent of its holdings, but also its universality of access. The point of a public library is that anyone can use it, and therefore to impose funding cuts which necessitate admission charges and severely reduced opening is not simply trimming fat: it goes to the bone. It's also important to notice that the likely changes would not be temporary, and could not easily be repaired in the future. If the library is forced to limit its collecting of books, journals and newspapers, its status as a comprehensive archive will be permanently damaged. Beyond this, a crippled British Library would be unable to fulfill its obligations as a copyright library, and it would be prevented from grasping a crucial moment in its own development, when it should be finding ways to win its perennial battle for shelf space by getting to grips with the possibilities of digital storage.
The key question isn't whether the Treasury is pressed for cash, whether culture and the arts are over-funded, or how else the money might be spent. It's not to do with the pragmatic usefulness or otherwise of the myriads of archived materials, or the consequences for the economy of jeopardising the revenue the library generates. The question is whether the integrity of one of the great libraries of the world is negotiable. Given the fact of the British Library, we can choose to see its maintenance as a necessity in a self-respecting civilisation, or we can decide that it's an option we may find it handy to dispense with. Are we at a point where this is arguable?
~ See digital reproductions of some of the British Library's treasures here.
