The British Library

A tour for public library staff

This tour will enable you to improve the services and resources available to users of the public library network.

The British Library is one of the world's largest libraries, which occupies three major sites and houses more than 150 million items.

We take you on a virtual tour of the Library enabling you to experience the library, its services and collections and help you make them available to your users.

Throughout the tour we highlight links to the British Library website which we hope you will want to explore.

You might also like to look at this short video, From Bones by Bytes (4 minutes), introduced by Tim Campbell.

Before you start

Set aside time to make the tour. It could take you up to three hours altogether but you can leave it as any point and return to where you left off to restart. You may wish to spend half an hour at a time looking at it.

You will need to print off a copy of the workbook.

It is available as a Word file or a PDF file. Please select the format you prefer.

Keep it at hand as you visit each area of the Library and answer the questions as you go along. The checklist at the back will enable you to record your progress through the tour.

You can visit the three sites and areas within them in any order you wish but you will need to cover every part to complete the tour.

At the end we would be grateful for your feedback. You may want to look at the feedback form before you start.