Searching all media

A long-held ambition was realised this year: to make details of the richness and diversity of the Library’s collections accessible in the single sweep of a search term.

The search box is now centre-stage on our home page: a word entered in it – for example, ‘badger’ – will take you to image files, from medieval manuscripts to Victorian lithographs; sound files of badger calls and oral histories of badger baiting; and relevant books from holdings of some 13 million. The results also cite the latest research papers on badger tuberculosis and public reactions to culling proposals, from among 20 million articles on our British Library Direct service.