Help

You can see books, manuscripts, maps, playbills, scores and much more. Researchers can use our collection of electronic resources and databases to help them find material relevant to their research.

About the collection

Items you can view online include, but are not limited to: books, manuscripts, maps, scores, journals, research datasets, thesis and databases (indexing, abstracting and full text databases).

Records for all of this content can be found in one of the Library's main catalogues: Explore the British Library or Explore Archives and Manuscripts

We are regularly making more content freely available online, often in partnership with other organisations, but some content is restricted by copyright, or licence, to Reader Pass holders.

What can I see online?

Items freely available online include:

• Discover some of our collection items on our website
• Out of copyright books, e.g. Ballad Romances
• Digitised manuscripts, e.g. Beowulf
• Playbills, e.g. A collection of playbills from the Olympic Theatre
• Early music online: over 300 volumes of 16th-century anthologies of printed music, e.g. Moteti de la Simia
• Thousands of EU documents, e.g. Tools for an EU science diplomacy
• Collection items relating to World War One, e.g. Last Poems
• Six of our most treasured collection items, e.g. Caxton's Chaucer.
• Hundreds of research datasets, e.g. Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research
• US government documents, e.g. Nano.gov
• Business and Management publications
• Social Welfare reports

What can I see in the Library's Readings Rooms?

Reader Pass holders can, additionally, access content restricted by copyright or licence in our Reading Rooms. This includes:

• non-print legal deposit e-journal article/issues and e-books
• subscribed electronic resources: databases and e-journal or e-book collections.

Most titles can be accessed from any Reading Room computer but a small number can only be used on specific workstations.

Readers can also access a number of electronic resources on a personal device.