National Library of Wales
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The National Library of Wales (), Aberystwyth, is the national legal deposit library of Wales; one of the Welsh Government sponsored bodies. Welsh is its main medium of communication. However, it aims to deliver all public services in Welsh and English. In 1873, a committee was set up to collect Welsh material and house it at the University College, Aberystwyth. In 1905, the government promised money in its Budget, and the Privy Council appointed a committee to decide on the location of the two institutions. Aberystwyth was selected as the location of the library after a bitter fight with Cardiff, partly because a collection was already available in the College. Sir John Williams, physician and book collector, had also said he would present his collection (in particular, the Peniarth collection of manuscripts) to the library if it were established in Aberystwyth. He also eventually gave £20,000 to build and establish the library. Cardiff was eventually selected as the location of the National Museum of Wales. The library and museum were established by Royal Charter on 19 March 1907. Designed by architect Sidney Greenslade who won the competition to design the building in 1909, the building at Grogythan, off Penglais Hill, was first occupied in 1916. The central block, or corps de logis, was added by Charles Holden to a modified version of Greenslade's design. In 1996, a large new storage building was opened, and in recent years many changes have been made to the front part of the building. A new Royal Charter was granted in 2006. The second phase of the build was built by T. Alun Evans (Aberystwyth) Ltd. A fire on 26 April 2013 destroyed a section of roofing in an office area of the building. Restoration was assisted by a government grant of £625,000. The building houses over 4 million printed volumes, including many rare books such as the first book printed in Welsh (Yn y lhyvyr hwnn, 1546) and the first Welsh translation of the complete Bible (1588). It also keeps many rare and important manuscripts including the Black Book of Carmarthen (the earliest surviving manuscript entirely in Welsh), the Book of Taliesin, and a manuscript of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. As a copyright depository, it is entitled to receive a copy of every published work from the United Kingdom and Ireland. Its collecting policy is focused on Wales, Welsh-language and Celtic material. The Library also contains the Welsh Political Archive and National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales. It also keeps maps, photographs, paintings, topographical and landscape prints, periodicals and newspapers. It also holds the largest collection of archival material in Wales. In 2000, Peter Bellwood stole at least fifty antique maps from the library, which were sold to private collectors for £70,000. Arrested in 2004, he was jailed for four and a half years. The Library has published a series of books about its history and collections, including manuscript catalogues, a bibliography of Welsh publications, Parish Registers of Wales, and academic studies of Gwen John, Kyffin Williams and others. The Library also publishes the National Library of Wales Journal. Many of the most important manuscripts and books have been digitised and made freely available to view on the library's website in its Digital Mirror. The Library intends to have digitised much of its image, sound and print collections by 2018. The National Library of Wales has digitised the back-numbers of 50 journals relating to Wales, in Welsh and English, in the Welsh Journals Online project funded by JISC. It forms the largest body of Welsh text on the Web, and as well as allowing free access for all to scholarly articles on history, literature and science, and poems and book reviews. OCR of the page scans was undertaken to create TEI searchable text versions. The website contains a total of 400,000 pages. It is intended to add new issues of the titles as they emerge from the embargo period agreed with the publisher. The fifty titles include:
Contents
History and buildings
Librarians
Library collections
Publications
Digital content
Welsh Journals Online
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