AND

Parliamentary investigations during the 1830s and 1840s concluded that the British Museum's Department of Printed Books and its reading room were inadequately funded; the investigations also called attention to overcrowding, inadequate staffing, and inefficient service. The collection, consisting largely of donated material from wealthy private libraries, was valuable but unbalanced. Panizzi redefined the library's mission and sought regular government funding. He wanted the library to become a worldrenowned, national educational and research institution, open to scholars of all classes. Panizzi and his staff developed a collection policy that produced one of the largest and most representative research collections in the world. The collection was further augmented after 1850, when Panizzi received permission from Parliament to enforce the library's right of copyright, which it had held since 1757 but had never actively pursued. Panizzi improved access to the collection by developing a manuscript, alphabetical catalogue produced in accordance with a systematic cataloguing scheme based on the "Ninety-One Rules" formulated by Panizzi and four of his colleagues, John Winter Jones (1805-1881), Thomas Watts (1811-1869), Edward Edwards (18121886), and John Parry (1816-1880). In 1852, Panizzi drew up plans for the present-day reading room and its adjacent storage facilities, which opened in 1857.