Examination of Witnesses (Questions 190
- 199)
THURSDAY 16 MARCH 2000
MR BRIAN
LAKE AND
MR DAVID
ALEXANDER
Chairman: Gentlemen, I would like to
welcome you here today. I am sorry that your colleague has been
prevented from joining us. We are very glad indeed to see you.
For what it is worth, I would just like to make the comment that
this Committee is accused of being sensationalist by the press.
We are conducting an inquiry now of importance to millions of
our citizens in this country and so far not one single member
of the press has attended any of the sittings of this Committee.
Mr Fearn
190. You state that it must never be forgotten
that the New British Library Scheme was a botched job. Has the
library overcome the problems of the construction project since
opening?
(Mr Lake) Yes. From our point of view, I have to explain
the Regular Readers' Group was a pressure group and is a pressure
group. Probably, as in other functions in life, regularity becomes
irregularity. As a pressure group, we have an overview of the
last ten years, but the important thing is that the library is
now at St Pancras. The mistake made, in our view, in terms of
not incorporating the Round Reading Room into the facilities of
the library was a major scandal.
191. What do you mean by that?
(Mr Lake) The Round Reading Room is the centre piece
of the British Museum Library and when there was a split between
the museum and the library that remained as the centre piece.
It has been imitated throughout the world as a model for a reading
room. It was abandoned and that was something that should never
have happened, in our view. It should have been incorporated in
some way within the structure of the new British Library. However,
life moves on. We hope that the Round Reading Room will remain
as a reading room as part of the British Museum so that people
will be able to use it for reading books. It is very much a secondary
victory, if you like, to keep it as such, but the new buildings
at St Pancras are there. They are up and running and, for the
most part, it is working well. We have questions about certain
aspects of it but in general it is up and running and it is working.
It is only half a library and that always has to be remembered,
in terms of the space there, in terms of storage and reader space.
It is what we said it was going to be, very close to capacity
very quickly. Early books, for instance, I understand are virtually
at capacity already and those are books that have to be kept on
the site.
192. You did mention reading rooms there. What
is your understanding of the status of charges for the use of
the reading rooms?
(Mr Lake) There was a fiasco, I believe, last year
in which suggestions were made that there should be charging on
the part of the British Library management.
193. Who created the fiasco?
(Mr Lake) I think it came from the management. It
could have been seen as a way of persuading the Government to
give them extra cash. It had a positive effect in the sense that
it brought together a lot of readers who had previously not been
involved in any activities or the Regular Readers' Group and I
went to probably one of the best meetings I have ever been to
when readers from elderly professors from New Zealand through
to Trotskyist students were able to come together and talk about
the role of the Library. Charging should, in my view, never be
taking place in the British Library. I hope that the Library management
will commit themselves to never wanting to introduce it.
194. Has your readers' group had any formal
discussions with the British Library on reader issues?
(Mr Lake) I sent an additional addendum on the specific
point of wanting to institute in the Library a readers' forum
or an advisory group, which was part of the management structure
of the British Library so that readers could come together, not
just to make responses to forums and focus groups, but to be part
of the Library management structure. That was one of the things
that we tried to raise with Mr Ashworth and his team in 1997,
but there was no comeback from that. The truth of the matter is
that the Regular Readers' Group as a pressure group has run its
course. What we would like to see to replace it would be a proper
readers' group. Utilising the energy of readers is important both
for the British Library and also public libraries as well.
Mr Maxton
195. How do you define your readers? Who is
included in that? Is it people who go to the British Library to
read?
(Mr Lake) Yes. It was set up ten years ago. We have
300 members plus block memberships from other groups. Since then
we have acted as a pressure group— I think your Chairman
described us last time as "busybodies"—to try
and raise issues that we felt should be aired publicly.
196. I asked the question because could it include
and would you accept into the membership of your group those who
might access the British Library's websites and material through
that, rather than actually going to the Library, sitting down
and taking out a book to read?
(Mr Lake) The heart of the Library is the book. This
is obviously a discussion that you are going to go through with
other people and with the Library itself. The added value to a
library of new technology is just that. It is added. The central
core of it is reading books, in our view.
197. In the future, increasingly so and faster
and faster, the ability to read that book is not limited to handling
necessarily that particular book in that particular place at any
particular time, is it?
(Mr Lake) In the future, I would envisage that a properly
constituted reader representative body should certainly include
people who can use the services but do not enter the building.
198. The British Library is one of the holders
of very rare, very difficult to obtain books and manuscripts.
If it is only people who go to the Library that have access to
those, you are limiting those materials to a very, very small
percentage of the population of this country, let alone the population
of the world at large, who may wish to have access to them.
(Mr Lake) If you are arguing for digitalisation projects
and so on and wider access, of course, but that is a matter of
economics and digitalisation, as I understand it, is currently
very expensive.
199. That is exactly the point. Should the money
that the British Library has be spent on the expensive process
of digitalisation within a limited budget, however big it might
be, or should its major emphasis be on the provision of books
for those who can visit the Library, because there will have to
be choices made in these areas.
(Mr Lake) That is absolutely true and I would say
absolutely categorically that books are the most important part
of the Library and the other collections, manuscripts etc. That
is the core of the Library. The conservation of that material
has to be right before you spend your money on other projects.
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