The Library's collections include around 14 million books,[9] along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and items dating as far back as 2000 BC.

The library maintains a programme for content acquisition and adds some three million items each year occupying 9.6 kilometres (6 mi) of new shelf space.

The Library's modern purpose-built building stands next to St Pancras station on Euston Road in Somers Town, on the site of a former goods yard.

[20] These three collections were later joined by the Old Royal Library, donated by George II,[22] and the King's Library of George III;[23] For many years its collections were dispersed in various buildings around central London, in places such as Bloomsbury (within the British Museum), Chancery Lane, Bayswater, and Holborn, with an interlibrary lending centre at Boston Spa, 2.5 miles (4 km) east of Wetherby in West Yorkshire (situated on Thorp Arch Trading Estate), and the newspaper library at Colindale, north-west London.

After a long and hard-fought campaign led by Dr George Wagner, this decision was overturned and the library was instead constructed by John Laing plc[24] on a site at Euston Road next to St Pancras railway station.

[25] Following the closure of the Round Reading Room on 25 October 1997 the library stock began to be moved into the St Pancras building.

[27] From January 2009 to April 2012 over 200 km of material was moved to the Additional Storage Building and is now delivered to British Library Reading Rooms in London on request by a daily shuttle service.

[28] Construction work on the Additional Storage Building was completed in 2013 and the newspaper library at Colindale closed on 8 November 2013.

[30] The new library was designed specially for the purpose by the architect Colin St John Wilson[13] in collaboration with his wife MJ Long, who came up with the plan that was subsequently developed and built.

[42] Four storage nodes locations (in London, Boston Spa, Aberystwyth, and Edinburgh) are linked via a secure network in constant communication automatically replicate, self-check, and repair data.

The policy and system is based on that of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which has crawled the .fr domain annually since 2006; with the help of the Internet Archive until 2010.

[47][48][49] Catalogues and ordering systems were affected, rendering the great majority of the library's collections inaccessible to readers.

In total, the collection consists of 660,000 bound volumes and 370,000 reels of microfilm containing tens of millions of newspapers with 52,000 titles on 45 km (28 mi) of shelves.

[64] The Newspapers section was based in Colindale in North London until 2013, when the buildings, which were considered to provide inadequate storage conditions and to be beyond improvement, were closed and sold for redevelopment.

[66] A significant and growing proportion of the collection is now made available to readers as surrogate facsimiles, either on microfilm, or, more recently, in digitised form.

Its Online Gallery gives access to 30,000 images from various medieval books, together with a handful of exhibition-style items in a proprietary format, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels.

[71] Catalogue entries for many of the illuminated manuscript collections are available online, with selected images of pages or miniatures from a growing number of them,[72] and there is a database of significant bookbindings.

In line with a government directive that the British Library must cover a percentage of its operating costs, a fee is charged to the user.

The Library replied that it has always admitted undergraduates as long as they have a legitimate personal, work-related or academic research purpose.

Now that access is available to legal deposit collection material, it is necessary for visitors to register as a Reader to use the Boston Spa Reading Room.

[92] A number of books and manuscripts are on display to the public in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery which is open seven days a week at no charge.

Some manuscripts in the exhibition include Beowulf, the Lindisfarne Gospels and St Cuthbert Gospel, a Gutenberg Bible, Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (King Arthur), Captain Cook's journal, Jane Austen's History of England, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and a room devoted solely to Magna Carta, as well as several Qur'ans and Asian items.

[97] In May 2005, the British Library received a grant of £1 million from the London Development Agency to change two of its reading rooms into the Business & IP Centre.

[100] Staff are trained to guide small and medium enterprises (SME) and entrepreneurs to use the full range of resources.

The collection also includes official gazettes on patents, trade marks and Registered Design; law reports and other material on litigation; and information on copyright.

Before this, the site had housed a World War II Royal Ordnance Factory, ROF Thorp Arch, which closed in 1957.

[106] In April 2013, BLDSS launched its new online ordering and tracking system, which enables customers to search available items, view detailed availability, pricing and delivery time information, place and track orders, and manage account preferences online.

[114] The three services, which for copyright reasons can only be accessed from terminals within the Reading Rooms at St Pancras or Boston Spa, are: The British Library sponsors or co-sponsors many projects of national and international significance.

This was so the problems of a complex structure, a mega hybrid library, global brand and investment in digital preservation could be managed better[120]