Did You Know?

 by Nathaniel Gingell

- the collections in the British Library cover over 746km (463miles) of shelving and include over 170 million items;

- if you viewed 5 items a day, it would take you 80,000 years to see everything;

- it would take you 3.5 years of continuous listening to get through the 1 petabyte of digital material in the Library;

- the basement goes 24.5 meters below ground and 14 stories up;

- the British Library is a research library in London with a second site in Yorkshire;

- over 115,000 people are registered to use the Library Reading Rooms and access items ranging from the writings of Jane Austin, Leonardo Da Vinci’s workbook, the Magna Carta and the oldest item being fragments of a Service Book from France or Italy dating back to the eleventh century.