House of Lords Library - The Library Today

The Library Today

David Jones took over as Librarian in 1991, and during his time in charge the number of staff in the Library continued to grow, with the recruitment of more research clerks, librarians and secretarial staff. In 1976, the Library had just ten members of staff, whereas by 2009 there were well over thirty. The Lords itself underwent a historic change in these years, with the removal of the majority of the hereditary peers from membership of the House in 1999. In the years since, the Library has served a membership that now largely consists of working life peers, and its services have been very well-used. When David Jones retired in 2006, the Library underwent its own change by becoming part of a wider Department of Information Services, headed by the new Librarian, Elizabeth Hallam Smith, and also consisting of the Parliamentary Archives and the House of Lords Information Office. The Library retains its own identity, however, and in recent years it has embraced the possibilities of the digital age, acquiring its own intranet site and subscribing to a large number of e-journals and other web resources, while continuing in its traditional role of providing a repository for Parliamentary papers. The Library's law collection also remains very large, though the long-standing connection with the Law Lords was finally severed in the autumn of 2009 when the Law Lords moved to the new Supreme Court, taking their own library with them. The Lords Library, however, still maintains its main law collection in the Brougham Room as a resource for all members. The collection today is also very strong on works of history, politics and biography, and many of the Library's more historic works are still on display in the Derby Room (named after the 15th Earl of Derby, twice Foreign Secretary in the nineteenth century) and elsewhere.

The Library now stretches well beyond the core riverside suite of rooms; its expansion was driven in no small part by the increase in the size of the collections, which by 1991 had grown to around 80,000 bound volumes, plus other documents like reports and pamphlets. Staff work in several offices scattered over the Lords end of the Palace of Westminster, and parts of the collection are stored in the basements, the Committee Corridor and in outside storage facilities at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre and Westminster Archives. In 2001, a branch library was opened across the road in Millbank House, to serve the numerous members and their staff who now had offices over there due to overcrowding in the Palace. This branch library closed in the summer of 2009, and will be replaced in 2011 by a new e-library at 1 Millbank which will boast considerably more space, including more office room for Library staff. Work is also ongoing to bolster the Library's online presence with the creation of a new virtual library, a project that first began to bear some fruit when a virtual tour of the main Library suite was launched in 2008.