The British Library contains over 170 million items in every language that is known. It has around 25 million books, more than any other library. It has manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC. There are books, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings and much more.
The British Library, by the law of the United Kingdom, receives copies of every book that is published in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, including all foreign books that are sold in the UK. It also buys many books which are only published outside Britain and Ireland. The British Library adds about three million items to its collection every year. The British Library has about 388 miles (625 km) of shelves.
The British Library, before it got its present name, started out as a group of collections made by several people in the 18th century and then given as part of a national library. The collectors were King George III, Sir Robert Cotton, Sir Hans Sloane, and Robert Harley. The national library was part of the British Museum and was kept at various places, with some of the most important items always being on public display in the museum.
The British Library was created in 1973 by the "British Library Act 1972". Since 1997 the main collection has been housed in a single new building on Euston Road next to St. Pancras railway station. In the middle of the building is a four-storey glass tower containing the ‘’King's Library’’, with 65,000 printed volumes along with other pamphlets, manuscripts and maps collected by King George III between 1763 and 1820.
Not all of the collection is kept in this new building. Part of the collection is at the Document Supply Centre in Yorkshire and all the newspapers from before 1800 are kept at the newspaper library at Colindale, north-west London.
In December 2009 a new storage building at Boston Spa was opened. It cost £26million and will house seven million items, stored in more than 140,000 bar-coded containers, which are retrieved by robots, from the 262 kilometres of temperature- and humidity-controlled storage space.
Disk image
A disk image is a single computer file containing the complete contents of a device that contains data, such as a hard drive, tape drives, floppy disk, CD, DVD, BD, and key drive.
A disk image file (or simply a disk image) is an exact binary copy of an entire disk or drive. Disk image files contain all the data stored on the source drive including not only its files and folders but also its boot sectors, file allocation tables, volume attributes and any other system-specific data. A disk image is not a collection of files or folders but is an exact duplicate of the raw data of the original disk, sector by sector.
R-Drive Image
R-Drive Image is disk cloning computer program that can create copies of computer hard drives. This program is developed by R-Tools Technology Inc..
R-Drive Image uses a closed file format, with the .arc extension (unrelated to the data compression format also with the .arc extension).
Parnitha
Parnitha is a mountain of Greece. It is in the south of Greece, in Attica peninsula. This mountain is the highest mountain in Attica, 1,413 meters high. The mountain is covered by dense vegetation. In the lower points is covered by Pine forests and in the higher points by Greek-fir forests. In the summer of 2007 a big part of forest was burnt because of a destructive wildfire.
John Dankworth
Sir John Dankworth, CBE (20 September 1927 - 6 February 2010), was an English jazz composer, saxophonist and clarinetist. He was widely thought of as Britain's most famous jazz musician. He had a very big influence in the development of jazz in Britain. He composed film music and several television theme tunes such as "The Avengers" and "Tomorrow's World". In his early career he was known as Johnny Dankworth He was the husband of jazz singer Cleo Laine.
John Dankworth was born in Woodford and grew up in Highams Park, Essex. His father was a sales manager who worked for an electrical engineering firm. John soon found that he loved jazz. He played the clarinet in a jazz band when he was still at school.
In 1944 he went to study music at the Royal Academy of Music. He was playing the saxophone, too, but kept this a secret because jazz was not thought to be suitable for study at the RAM.
When Dankworth did his National Service with the army, he often played in the army dance bands. He then got a job playing jazz on the Queen Mary which sailed regularly over the Atlantic Ocean to New York. In America he heard some of the greatest jazz players, especially Charlie Parker who played bebop.
Back in Britain Dankworth took many jobs to get experience playing in jazz bands. He was a member of a group called Club Eleven which played together for several years. He also formed a band called Johnny Dankworth Seven with Frank Holder, who played bebop in the style of Miles Davis. They started to get well-known, and in 1951 were joined by a young singer called Cleo Laine.
In 1953 the band broke up and Dankworth formed his first big band. It had eight brass instruments, five saxophones, a rhythm section and vocalists. The group was redesigned in 1956 when he put in a group of soloists instead of the saxophones. They often played on the radio and brought in guest artists who were not necessarily jazz musicians, e.g. the clarinettist Jack Brymer and the violinist Kenneth Essex as well as the music comedian and cartoonist Gerard Hoffnung.
In 1960 he gave up playing in the band to spend more time on composition. He wrote some very successful film music, e.g. "The Servant", "Darling", "Modesty Blaise" and "Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment". He wrote the television theme for "The Avengers" and "Tomorrow’s World", as well as lots of music for television adverts. He composed a musical version of "Lysistrata" together with Benny Green for the Bath Festival.
In 1958 he married Laine. He wrote many songs for her and played the beautiful accompaniments, often on the clarinet.
In 1969 they built a concert hall called "The Stables" in their garden in Wavendon in Milton Keynes. It became an important centre for concerts, educational programmes and cultural events.
Dankworth and Laine have two children: Alec who is a double bass player and Jacqui who is a singer. John formed a band which included Alec playing the double bass.
Dankworth set up scholarships for young musicians and often worked with young people. He encouraged educational work at "The Stables". He continued to work hard until shortly before his death.
Dankworth died in hospital in London on 6 February 2010. His death was announced a few hours later by Laine, who spoke to the audience at the end of a concert in "The Stables". She had told the performers before the concert began. She wanted the concert to be a celebration of his life. Alec and Jacqui were both performing in the show.
Dankworth was made a CBE in 1974 and was given a knighthood in 2006.
•The Daily Telegraph, 8 February 2010 p. 31: Sir John Dankworth – Obituary
Child abandonment
Child abandonment is when a parent leaves their child. There are many causes of child abandonment, including poverty or mental illness. In many countries, if a children are abandoned, they become orphans and live in an orphanage. They are raised there until they reach 18.