New light on the Reading Room’s future

When the British Library vacates the British Museum’s round Reading Room it will be restored to its pristine decorative style and will accommodate a reference library of publications relevant to the civilisations, cultures and societies represented in the Museum’s collections. It will also house the Walter and Leonore Annenburg Centre which will combine modern technology with traditional sources of information retrieval giving access to COMPASS, the British Museum’s Collections Multimedia Public Access System, linking a highly computerised database with a sophisticated search facility.