2
| Published date | 01 January 1961 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026290 |
| Pages | 15-23 |
| Date | 01 January 1961 |
| Author | E.M. NICHOLSON |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
2
E. M. NICHOLSON,
C.B.
Director-General, The Nature Conservancy; Chairman, Scientific
Library and Technical Information Committee of the Advisory
Council on Scientific Policy
THE NATIONAL need for comprehensive libraries and museums as a
basis for study and particularly as an aid to the advancement of science be-
came fully recognized during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and
attracted resources which were fairly substantial in comparison with other
public expenditure at the
time.
In the broad field of science and technology,
three national institutions emerged as being of outstanding importance.
These were the Library of the British Museum at Bloomsbury, the Library
of the Patent Office in Fetter
Lane,
and the Library of the Science Museum
in South Kensington. Of these, the first and the last were parts of national
museums while the second grew up as
a
part of the Patent Office. Not one of
them, therefore, was an independent national institution in its own right.
In
the case
of the British Museum Library,
the
scientific element, although
quantitatively important,
was,
in turn, overshadowed by the dominant role
of
arts,
humanities, and other non-scientific subjects which largely gov-
erned the staffing, organization, and main
uses
of this great library, in which
provision for the peculiar needs and working methods of scientists and
technologists took a very subordinate place. An even more peculiar and
frustrating situation arose at the
Science
Library which became, in practice,
pre-empted by Imperial College London as the main library (apart from
departmental libraries) serving that important part of London University
while, at the same time, it developed an entirely incompatible role as a
national lending library for scientific books and periodicals. This left only
the Patent Office Library as a comprehensive open-access library available
for
scientists
and technologists in London. Unfortunately, the Patent Office,
like the British Museum, appears in retrospect to have been accorded much
greater importance in the competition for national resources in the nine-
teenth century than in the twentieth, during which the proportion of titles
which the Patent Office was able to acquire in the
fields
of science and tech-
nology steadily declined, while the faculties which it could offer came to
compare less and less favourably with those of its opposite numbers over-
seas.
At the same time, the more flourishing of the professional and learned
bodies, and also the universities and some of the great cities, built up their
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