A G0OD RESEARCH SOURCE.

[Walter Snowdon]

For those who dont know of it, thr British library has for almost 200 years collected and filed almost all periodicals and magazines published in the UK. There are two centres, one at Colllingwood in London, and the other is only an hours drive away for me at Boston Spa near Wetherby in Yorkshire. Both have public access and I have found the staff at my end most helpfull. Both have cafes which serve very good (and cheep) food so if you are there all day you need not leave the site. The London branch has a "social " section, where all the craft magazines (including boat modeling) are easily accesible. The Yorkshire site is vast. The main building has a floor area larger than an aircraft hangar and SIX floors of very tall, closely packed book cases. It is open 9 till 5 and has very good photo copying facilities. The drill is as follows:  you go to reception where you are given an ID card and a locker key to store valuables and bags etc. (You are only allowed to take paper, pencil and relevent files into the archives with you.) You then go into the reading room where you make your interests known. If you only want to look at specific volumes they bring them to you. If you tell them, say ship building, they direct you to the relevent floor where a member of staff directs you to the relevent shelves and gives you a large table and chair to use. Mark the pages you want to copy, load the volumes ( They are all hard bound as quarterly or yearly volumes) onto a trolly, take them in a lift to the copying room, do your copying  and wheel them back and start on another lot! No one disturbs you. Some collections have a serarate bound index which is most usefull. For instance, ENGINEER magazine runs from I think 1846 to 1953 and the index is two inches thick! A visit there is an adventure and the sheer volume of information very quickly puts you into brain overload, so frequent visits to the cafe and rest rooms are very necessary. I have found model magazines there Which were only short lived and I had never heard of before. Sorry to be so long winded, but this source is a real treasure trove to people like us.   Once you are in the archives you are free to follow leads to other floors, just ask a member of staff you want to be on.  Regards, Walter.

[Red_Hamish]

Hello Walter, thank you for the information there. I for one had never realised that there was such a treasure trove of information accessible as this. The opportunities then are boundless for research. Thank you once again for shating this with us.

cheers

Jim