History of the Library and Information Centre

The history of the RSC's Library is almost that of the Society itself as it was formed in 1841, the same year as the RSC's precursor the Chemical Society. The Society received its first Royal Charter in 1848 and one of its 'objects' was to create a "Library of scientific works". Interestingly the charter also said that a "Museum of chemical preparations and standard instruments" was also to be formed, though we don't know what happened to that idea!  Happily after the first bookcase was bought in 1842, the Library took off and very quickly thrived and grew.

The development of the Chemical Library was prominent in the thoughts of the Society's founders and was referred to in some of the earliest documents relating to the history of the Society. The early Fellows appear to have been generous in their gifts to the Library, one of the first being a present by Michael Faraday of some books from his own library. Another benefactor was Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe (1833-1915) who was President of the Society from 1880 to 1882. He gifted to the Library his rare and valuable collection related to alchemy and early chemistry. More on special collections can be found on our historical pages.

The importance of the Library as a national centre for information on the chemical sciences was well established during the First and Second World Wars, when the then War Office and other government departments made extensive use of material on chemistry (for example dyestuffs and explosives) simply not found elsewhere in the country. In 1919 the Chemical Library was the de-facto library for seven UK societies related to chemistry. In later years before the establishment of a national library it formed an essential book loans service to chemists visiting in London. This later developed into a postal loans services and extensive remote document delivery service.

The Library has been of invaluable support for the Society's editors in helping to produce their publications especially many of the secondary publications such as Analytical Abstracts. During the 1970's the Library's resources helped to provide much of the material for the British input to the American Chemical Society's publication Chemical Abstracts (this agreement between the two societies ended in 1982).

The Library has always been very innovative and was one of the first to offer services to corporate bodies as well as individual chemists. It continues to change and in its latest incarnation it has developed an online Virtual Library that offers premium full text to chemists who are members of the RSC, anywhere in the world that can access a computer.