x-post hps-discussion
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This story just appeared in today's Times: the issue is currently being
discussed by the British Society for the History of Science and other
interested parties--
Jim Secord
September 14, 2004
Black hole in finances may mean the end for science library
By Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent
ONE of the world’s finest science libraries, which holds original editions
of works by Ptolemy, Newton and Einstein, will be broken up unless the
Science Museum can fill a £200,000 hole in its budget. The Times has learnt
that the museum in South Kensington, London, is considering plans to give
away 95 per cent of its collection of half a million books, journals and
documents, because 10 years of falling government grants mean it can no
longer afford to keep them. The library, which was established in 1883 and
until the 1960s was Britain’s national library of science, technology and
medicine, is in jeopardy because of a 400 per cent increase in the service
fees charged by Imperial College, London, which houses and manages the
collection. Unless the Government provides funds to meet the £200,000 annual
shortfall, museum executives will either donate most of its contents to the
British Library or replace it with a slimmed-down version at a disused
airfield in Wiltshire. Either option would drastically curtail public access
to a library that received more than 500,000 visits last year, and dismantle
one of the world’s most significant research resources for the history of
science and medicine. The museum is beginning a public consultation on which
course to take. The library, which is currently merged with Imperial’s,
contains approximately 500,000 items on shelves that total 18km in length.
Its oldest work is the first Renaissance translation, published in 1496, of
the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy’s Almagest, in which he established the
theory that the Earth stood at the centre of the Universe. Other rare books
include a 1704 edition of Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks, a copy of Gustave
Eiffel’s La Tour de Trois Cent Mètres, donated in 1900 by the engineer who
built Paris’s most famous landmark and a 1917 edition of the General Theory
of Relativity inscribed by Albert Einstein. Its document archives include
119 titles by James Watt, the notebooks of the mathematician Sir John
Herschel, Sir Frank Whittle’s original thesis on the jet engine, and an
Apollo 11 flight plan signed by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The National
Museum of Science and Industry which runs the Science Museum, the National
Railway Museum and the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television,
says it will have to disperse most of this collection because its funding
has not kept pace with inflation. Since the 1997 general election, core
funding for the museum has fallen by £7.7 million and its most recent
grant-in-aid increase was 2.6 per cent, compared with a minimum of 4.7 per
cent for Britain’s other national museums. Free admission has placed further
strain on resources, as the compensation paid for lost income by the
Government does not make up for increased costs. The library has survived
until now because of an agreement with Imperial, which charged an annual
rent of £63,000. Imperial has now raised this to £262,000 per annum,
excluding VAT, because of its own financial problems. Lindsay Sharp,
director of NMSI, said that while the museum does not want to disperse its
collection, it does not have a choice. “We have extremely rare materials
here that are the written counterpart to the objects our visitors see in our
galleries,” he said. “It is almost unheard of for any major national museum
not to have its own library, but the financial pressures are intense. None
of the options are particularly appealing, but unless the Government
addresses the financial issue we will have to implement one.” Jon Tucker,
head of the Science Museum, said: “The problem is the steady erosion of the
museum’s underlying funding. This means that Imperial’s service charge hike
— which we quite understand — immediately rendered the library
unaffordable.” Lord Waldegrave of North Hill, chairman of NMSI’s trustees,
said: “If the grant had kept up with inflation, then we might have been able
to get the extra money by stretching, pulling and shoving. As it is, we are
presented with little choice.” While executives are still lobbying the
Department for Culture, Media and Sport to increase its annual grant to save
the library, they believe it is unlikely that extra funding will be found.
Sponsorship, which already raises £1.3 million a year across NMSI’s museums,
is not felt to offer a long-term solution. NMSI is consulting users,
scientists and members of the public on which of two plans to implement.
Under one, half the collection would be given away to universities, while
the other half would be moved to the Science Museum’s reserve site at
Wroughton, a disused RAF airfield near Swindon. The second plan is to keep 5
per cent of the collection on the museum’s main South Kensington site,
including the most valuable works, and loan another 20 per cent to the
British Library. The remainder would be given away to other university and
public libraries. Either plan would cost about £2 million to implement, and
both would reduce public access. Wroughton would not be able to handle the
current volume of users and is difficult to reach, while British Library
users must apply for a pass and show a need to use the collection.
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