Short talks on aspects of the British Library’s collections as a tribute to the late Philip Harris, historian of the British Museum Library.

Elizabeth Clark Ashby (Royal Library, Windsor):  'A Newly-Discovered 17^th Century Royal Library Catalogue’.

Charles II had at least two libraries. The one kept at St James’s Palace that would become the Old Royal Library now in the British Library, is reasonably well known. The other, Charles’s Whitehall Library, has been identified as later forming part of George III’s libraries, but it has been unclear what happened to it in the years between Charles II and George III. Now, a catalogue dated 1691 recently uncovered in a German library helps to explain the Whitehall Library’s history further.

Madeleine Smith (British Library): 'New Work on the Burney Collection of Newspapers’.

The Burney Newspaper Collection, collected by Charles Burney (1757-1817), is the most comprehensive collection of early English newspapers anywhere in the world. It was purchased by the British Museum Library in 1818. In 2007, the collection was digitised from microfilm and it is available online as the 17^th-18^th Century Burney Collection Newspapers by Gale Cengage. The original volumes, many of which are very fragile, are now restricted. While the digitisation increases access to the textual content of the Burney Collection, it wasn’t set up to document any evidence of provenance or other copy-specific information contained within the physical volumes. This presentation looks at some examples of this kind of ownership and readership evidence that, with a little digging, can be found within the seventeenth-century material in the collection. How did Burney collect his early newspapers and pamphlets? Who owned them beforehand? Were they all collected by Burney himself?

 Alice Wickenden (Queen Mary University): 'From Museum to Library: Plants and Dragonfly Wings in Sir Hans Sloane's Books’.

I will discuss the problems that were encountered when transforming Sloane’s collection into separate, demarcated Library and Museum spaces. By following the locations of two specific items – a herbarium volume and a volume of drawings – from Sloane’s collection to their current positions in the Natural History Museum and British Library respectively, I will think about the way that the categories of what belongs where have been formed, changed, and challenged over time.