The National Art Library

The National Art Library is located within the Victoria and Albert Museum. On our tour we learned that the Invigilation Desk is where rare book requests are received. The reading rooms and the central room are the only rooms open to the public, and books stored in these rooms are classified with the Dewey Decimal system. Requests for books are made electronically. The library is open from Tuesday through Saturday, and every half hour a member of the staff picks up the slip requests for books. In order to find the book the book lists are cross-referenced with maps that indicate which room the book is located in. The current classification system is very elaborate and was built off of the system used in here in Victorian times. The library has 8,000 titles in periodicals storage, 2,000 of which are current. The periodicals are bound, which serves two purposes: ease of storage and theft prevention. There are nearly two million books in the library, the majority of which are in the online catalog. The offsite archives are shared with the British Library.

As we moved through the tour we found that the second floor is where the special collections are housed, including artist books, travel diaries, the Dickens manuscripts, books of hours, and books with particularly fine bindings. The books are arranged by size, as we have seen in the majority of libraries here. The V&A publications, written by curators, are housed here, and there are at least three copies of each, excluding some of the oldest ones. Here you will find the history of the V&A and the School of Art and Design history.

The library’s motto is preservation rather than conservation. There are over two million items in the library. When books do require conservation items such as the Dickens manuscripts have preference. There is no temperature control, but the temperature is monitored and does not fluctuate greatly. In order to preserve the books, no photocopies can be made of books that date before 1900. Some of the rare books that we were able to view included: Shakespeare’s first folio, a seventeenth century Islamic binding, corrected proofs of Bleak House with Dickens’s own corrections, an illustrated letter written by J.E. Millais to his cousin’s wife, and facsimile editions of Da Vinci’s notebooks. And this is only a sample of the exciting works that we were able to peruse! More on research and conservation can be found on the library's website here.