What does the British Library offer licensees? Sandra Powlette and Kai-Chuan Chao have a surprising answer

How lovely to be here; thanks for making time. And two of you! So what are your roles here at the British Library?
Sandra Powlette: I’m the Image and Brand-Licensing Manager…

Kai-Chuan Chao: And I lead on the sales in China and East Asia markets on brand licensing and special partnerships.

Excellent. Now, the British Library is – obviously – a somewhat august organisation… But how old is it?
Kai-Chuan: That’s actually not as straightforward as you might think! You have to trace our history back to when it was the reading room in the British Museum, until the UK Parliament passed the British Library Act in 1972.

Oh!
Sandra: Yes – and the Museum and the Library got divorced… Reborn, some people say! But the BM gave up loads of its books, maps, manuscripts and so on, and the BL opened in its own right the following year. They combined that collection with several other science and technology information libraries around the UK to create, in effect, a national library for the UK.

That’s extraordinary – and it does sound a bit like a divorce…
Sandra: It’s funny – I had an inquiry about a publication yesterday… Most of this particular manuscript stayed with the British Museum. I think we got one volume – they kept the other six. Ha!

Ha! What was it about? Negotiation skills?! That would be the cherry on top!
Sandra: Ha! I’d need to check – it was quite funny what we were given when we split from the Museum. As well as books and manuscripts,the library acquired Jane Austen’s writing desk and spectacles… We’ve got some swords and guns! Last week, I found out we have material envelopes from when people used to write letters and put them in cloth envelopes to send off.

And I know this changes on a daily basis, but how many items are in your collections?
Kai-Chuan: It’s about 170 million at the moment. As well as books and manuscripts, the Library also holds a vast stamp collection, journals, newspapers, sound recordings and numerous objects.

170 million! My days…
Sandra: We have a number of different collections, of course. Each one has its own name based on where it came from, or who collated it. We’ve got the Royal Manuscripts, for example, and we’ve got Hans Sloane’s manuscripts. His bust is in the Library’s entrance…

Hans Sloane having founded the British Museum, of course. So, it sounds to me – in licensing terms – that people are spoiled for choice here. And on that, your licensing program has evolved over the last ten years. Tell me about that…
Sandra: One way I’d say it’s evolved is that there’s now room to be more creative. Previously, people tended to look only at a whole object or image… But now we also look at doing something with one little detail from an image. So let’s say we have a page with a picture of a lady on it, and she’s holding a flower… Instead of just thinking about how you could use the whole thing, you might just take the flower – or just the lady.

Almost like a reframe; interesting. Can you give me an example of something like that?
Sandra: One of our Chinese partners put an image of some flowers on a bag a while back. But one of our UK agents took part of that same image and made it into a napkin! Another example would be some of our greeting cards: they aren’t all the whole image… It’s a flower here. It’s some cats there… It’s the details.

So in terms of becoming a licensing partner and working with you – they want to weave one of your images into a rug, say – what’s the process?
Sandra: Our conversation tends to start once people have looked at part of the collection. Which item would you want to put on the rug? Or what kind of thing? Because the collection is so vast, that has to be part of the initial conversation to narrow thing down ahead of any negotiation on royalties or whatever else.

And what do you look for in a licensing partner, Kai-Chuan?
Kai-Chuan: Firstly, it’s any organisation that shares the same values as us. We like organisations that value the stories behind our items… So they would enjoy the learning side of it, or the creative writing; the storytelling. I think that’s the first thing. Then – just to go back to how people approach us – there are two different groups… Those who already know roughly what they want to use and those that only know that they want to work with our brand and what it stands for.

So that does happen, but that’s the tricky one because our collection is so large, where do you start? So it does help if you’ve done a little research to narrow it down. Which people mostly do; people tend to know, roughly what kind of thing they want to put on their mugs or rugs or cards or whatever. And even though we’ve only got a small fraction of the collection online, that’s still the best place to start the research.

Right. And it would take dozens of lifetimes, presumably, to get all your images online! So how do they get added? Is there a team of you relentlessly scanning images?
Sandra: Well, just to make it clear: we photograph our images rather than scan them – we have a photographer and an imaging team. Those pictures then go up on a database, at which we look in order to extract images. But there’s more to it than that because we have to find the metadata to put in the images so that they can be found… It all takes a long, long time.

In terms of the stuff that you’ve already got across the line, then, to what we can we point and say: this is a great example of licensing with the British Library?
Kai-Chuan: There have been some wonderful licensing projects! We’ve seen brands producing water jars, glasses, book nook kits…. Something else I especially like is promotional licensing projects where brands use the British Library brand and images in their marketing campaigns… It’s shorter term and bespoke, but they find a creative angle and blend storytelling with our items to enrich brands on both sides. By way of example, there’s a Chinese gaming company that came to us through our agency, ARTiSTORY.

Ah, yes! You’ve partnered with them for a number of years, have you not? Growing the relationship in 2023?
Kai-Chuan: Exactly right. And this particular deal was with a company that had an online game aimed at young female audiences. The aim of the game is for the main character to interact with different male characters in quite a traditional way. The way they use British Library is to have the characters visit the site to find a story…

Goodness, this is really novel! Can you give me an example?
Kai-Chuan: So one character is the main protagonist who loves music. It’s his birthday. To treat himself, he comes to the Library, registers a reader’s card, and goes to the Treasures Gallery to see something he finds really interesting: Beethoven’s tuning fork…

Which you really do have?
Kai-Chuan: Absolutely. It’s in a little wooden box upstairs. So this particular campaign had three smaller approaches, with each of three characters coming to the library to do different things. Each one has a very different but established fan base. Interestingly, after that campaign ran, we had a lot of Chinese students and young professionals taking photos here, and doing selfies, with their reader passes in the same position as the one in the video game. It’s really creative and fun.

Fascinating. And not an obvious match at all; very creative. So how did each of you come to be working here? Oh! Sandra’s laughing as though I’m going to regret asking! Ha! Are you not supposed to be here, Sandra?!
Sandra: Well… I started at the British Library as a temp. I’d left another job, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I did that for a while – but I probably left and came back four or five times in all! After I’d been working in patents, I got called back by one of the managers… They wanted me to stay, so they went to the director and arranged it. And that was 20-odd years ago.

Twenty YEARS? That’s some temp job! Ha! But you’ve had different roles?
Sandra: Yes, I worked in patents and trademarks, then over to finance because I was studying to be an accountant. When finance moved up to Boston Spa, I relocated into this building and the picture library. I was only supposed to be here for a year to cover someone on maternity leave – but they didn’t come back. In the meanwhile, I used my accountancy skills to reevaluate how BL was charging for the usage of images… And bolstered it when I started working with TV companies and charging more money. And the rest is history!

Fantastic! And Kai-Chuan? Don’t tell me… You came here as a day visitor and stayed ten years?
Kai-Chuan: Ha! No, no! I studied political science, then worked at EU dedication in Taiwan and Amnesty International. So I’d been jumping around before I came to the UK in 2016. The first job I applied for here was Project Manager for The British Library in China project. Back then, the UK and Chinese governments invested quite a lot in people-to-people dialogue so there was a fund to support cultural-exchange activity… So we brought in collection items and co-curated exhibitions with the National Library of China, Shanghai Library and so on. We also built Chinese social-media platforms and language websites.

After the project finished in 2019, we saw other opportunities in Chinese markets because we’d built the British Library brand. We had businesses coming to us to say that they wanted to do licensing with us. Well, I’d already been throwing things to Sandra! Eventually, we decided that we needed to take the market more seriously and expand our offerings there… So I moved to the commercial team and started working more closely with agencies.

Well, I really love the way this has become a bigger and bigger focus for you both. Tell me, is there anything else I could’ve asked you about today that I didn’t?
Kai-Chuan: You could ask Sandra about her future plans…

Good idea – now that it’s clear she’s not a temp!
Sandra: Ha! My plans would be to take the licensing forward and delve deeper into the collections. But because the collection is so huge, we just have to be quite commercially minded about it. Sometimes I think we can depend more on the photographers for that, saying, “I’ve just come across this… What do you think?” and take it from there. Other times, I think of looking for dead people…

Beg pardon?! You want to do what there now?!
Sandra: Ha! What I mean is that the longer someone’s been dead, the fewer complications there are in terms of copyright and licensing. So we could just start looking at the oldest illustrations and collections to see what we can find.

I think that makes absolute sense; very logical… Then the creativity comes in.
Kai-Chuan: From my side, I’d love to do more location-based experiences, which is growing very quickly as an area. I’d also like to expand our reach into South Korea, Japan, and other territories internationally. Of course, that’s easier said than done because expanding across the world doesn’t just require us to understand different languages… It also means understanding different cultures. But that would be great.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much to both of you for joining me. I’m a big fan of the Library and I’m delighted we could chat.