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FRIENDS OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY MAGAZINE This new Magazine commemorates, among other developments, more than 15 years of our Friends giving financial grants to the British Library. Writers (Alan Bennett, Margaret Drabble and Andrew Motion), Library specialists, readers and users have contributed articles to the Magazine to further celebrate the UK's national library and the wonderful collections it holds. So far, the Friends have given almost half a million pounds to the Library. The British Library - www.bl.uk - is at the forefront of sources for family and local history. A new set of services for family historians has now been launched based on the comprehensive collections of local and national newspapers held (largely) at the Newspaper Library at Colindale in North London, on the UK electoral registers, and also on family documents and records held by the Library's India Office Records in Central London. And all kinds of materials in the Library's great collections help the local historian. We intend this to be the first of a series of Friends' Magazines. To help this aim, to enlarge our range of activities and most important of all, to increase our grants to the British Library, we are eager for more Friends to join us and to help us: both individual Friends (£35 p.a. individual subscription or £25 p.a. concessionary rate for over 60s, students and unwaged) and corporate or institutional Friends (£550 p.a. or £110 to registered charities). For membership details, copies of the Magazine and any further information you would wish to know, please contact us:
Of the Library's building in London opened in 1998, and its collections which the new building safeguards better than ever before, the novelist Margaret Drabble writes: "I am not claiming we become better people as we enter the Library; but I am saying.we feel the possibility of becoming better people. Not many buildings in history have achieved this sense". |