Report of the National Libraries Committee.

  • Great Britain. National Libraries Committee.
Date:
1969
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the National Libraries Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    101/340 (page 83)
    (ii) The photocopying and other services at present provided for the other South Kensington museums should be maintained. (iii) Adequate funds, administratively separate from those of Imperial College, should be made available for the continued development of the SML’s special collection in the history of science and technology. Similar provision should also be made in respect of any other specialised material which is at present provided primarily for the use of the Science Museum staff. (iv) Lending from the combined stocks through the national network should be on conditions at least as unrestricted as the present arrange- ments, and the SML’s limited role in a national photocopying service should continue. We do not think that this would be an undue burden for the new library, especially as the SML’s existing relatively small contribution would be further reduced if any of the stocks were transferred to national libraries, as we have suggested in paragraph 315 (iv), above. In order to satisfy conditions (ii), (iii) and (iv) above, a special grant from national resources may be appropriate. However, integration of the SML with the LPL must lead to considerable economies which will undoubtedly produce a substantial net saving of national resources. Outhousing Material from the BML and the NRLSI 317. The Trustees of the British Museum and several other important bodies have strongly urged in evidence to us that all the stocks of the BML and the NRLSI (in some cases, with the exception of the material outhoused at Colindale) should be kept together on a single library site in central London. Other bodies have recommended that, although the BML and NRLSI should remain physically separate, the complete collections of each library should be stored on their respective single sites. Most of this evidence has stressed that the value of the national reference collections would be enhanced if users could be certain that any item from the stocks of either library were immediately available to them from book-stacks on the same site as the reading rooms. It has been said that the present outhousing from both the BML and the NRLSI detracts from the usefulness of the libraries and that further outhousing would only aggravate the inconvenience to users. The attractions of this proposition are obvious, but practical considerations have led us to try to assess how high a priority should be afforded to its realisation. (a) The present situation 318. At present two quite distinct types of outhousing policy are operated at the BML and NRLSI: (i) Certain classes of publication, irrespective of the level of demand for them, have been outhoused from the BML to Colindale for a con- siderable time. The outhouse itself is purpose-built to store news- papers and periodicals, and there are facilities for readers and for photocopying. (ii) More recently, lack of space in Bloomsbury and in Holborn has forced the administration to outhouse some of the least used material from