Catalogue description Records of the Document Supply Centre and its predecessors

In 1916 Albert Mansbridge, founder-secretary of the Workers' Educational Association, founded the Central Library for Students, primarily to provide access to books for adult education students who had no other source. Financed partly by subscription and partly by grants from the Carnegie Trust and other private philanthropic institutions, it developed a system of lending through local libraries. In 1919 the Adult Education Committee (999.2) set up by the Ministry of Reconstruction proposed that the Central Library for Students should become the nucleus of a much larger central lending library for the whole country. The Public Libraries Act of the same year, however, failed to provide for central co-ordination of lending as envisaged by the committee. The Kenyon Committee on Public Libraries reported in 1927 in much the same terms as the Adult Education Committee of 1919; and in 1931 the Central Library for Students became the National Central Library under royal charter. This gave it official standing as the national clearing-house for inter-library lending, as a provider of books to adult classes and as a lending library and bibliographic information centre. Between 1931 and 1938, a modified version of the Kenyon committee's proposals on regional libraries was also carried out. Ten regional bureaux were set up, closely collaborating with the National Central Library, which now also received funds from the Treasury, eventually replacing the support of the Carnegie Trust. Recommendations of the Kenyon Committee that were not carried out included the suggestion that the regional bureaux, based on the largest library in each region, should also become the repositories of regional historical records; and a proposal to make the National Central Library into an autonomous department of the British Museum.

Under the charter of 1931, the National Central Library was governed by eleven trustees, of whom two were appointed by the trustees of the British Museum, one by the trustees of the British Museum (Natural History) and one by the Library Association. These four together appointed the remaining seven trustees. In 1966 the library moved to new premises in Store Street. By this time its main functions were defined as inter-library lending, arranging for the interchange of duplicate and surplus library material (both nationally and internationally) and publishing the British Union Catalogue of Periodicals (BUCOP). On the formation of the British Library in 1973, the National Central Library merged with the National Lending Library for Science and Technology in Boston Spa, West Yorkshire.

The Adult Education Committee was reconstituted with new membership in 1921 as a standing committee of the Board of Education. The committee's original report was published in 1919 as Cmnd.321.