How to build a Great British Library

It is hard to believe that the construction of the new British Library attracted the sort of public opprobrium now reserved for the Millennium Dome. After its first full year at St Pancras, the library has produced a glossy annual report to show how wrong its critics were.

A lot has been going on behind those high walls, but little has grabbed the attention it deserves. The superbly designed Reading Rooms have attracted some 500,000 visitors in a year. The Millennium Memory Bank project, in partnership with the BBC, is the UK's largest ever exercise in oral history and will be an invaluable resource. The library's hundreds of exhibitions and events have mostly been expertly curated—the best example being the Chapter & Verse exhibition, taking in 1,000 years of English literature, sponsored by Pearson.

The BL board is all too aware that while it was embroiled in controversy over its bricks and mortar headquarters, the government was proclaiming a digital future for libraries. Many feel that this was when the BL lost its opportunity to be the hub of the much-heralded New Library Network. But in spite of (or perhaps because of) this missed opportunity the library has pressed ahead hard with online developments. With the launch of British Library Net, it was the first UK public service body to be a free Internet Service Provider. Its Online Public Access Catalogue (Opac) attracted over one and a half million searches last year. An innovative electronic viewing system, Turning the Pages, allows online viewing of the library's extensive collection of rare manuscripts and journals. And this year the library published the CD-ROM of Beowolf in Anglo-Saxon.

The BL's journal delivery centre at Boston Spa, which provides its most lucrative source of revenue, is perhaps the area most under threat from the popularity of the Internet among academics. Institutions are signing up in droves to online journal services such as Ingenta.com, or publishers' own digital subscription networks. To combat this, the library has signed up to Fathom.com, the £50m global Internet learning database and online library—an exciting opportunity for the BL to align itself with the best in world learning.

The library's new chief executive, Lynne Brindley, should work relentlessly to open the library's immense resources to the public, both by continuing to extend opening hours and by digitising as many resources as possible. When the British Library finally rids itself of all barriers to entry, it can stake its claim to a central role in the government's plans for libraries.