Taking Liberties, British Library, London

The first thing you see in Taking Liberties is a huge concrete slab displaying a series of questions about freedoms and rights in Britain. The fake concrete is used throughout, and while the exhibition is not impenetrable, it is hard work in places.

The clenched fist that publicises Taking Liberties seems to promise something more radical than the fairly conventional approach to display that is used.

The strength of the exhibition is the work the curators have done to find and analyse the 200-plus objects that tell the 1,000-year history of the struggle to secure freedoms and rights for Britons.

The exhibition is divided into seven zones covering themes such as parliament, voting, human rights and freedom of speech. It begins with Liberty and the Rule of Law, and the starting point for the story is the Magna Carta.

The Magna Carta on display is one of only four surviving copies that were made in the days after King John's agreement, although the text that accompanies it acknowledges that it "may appear rather plain".

This could be said of other texts in the exhibition, although struggling to make the display of books interesting is nothing new. The British Library has even developed technology, Turning the Pages, to get round the problem.

Some texts are great to look at though, particularly the 1649 death warrant of Charles I. The blood-red seals of the signatories lend it a macabre appearance, providing a dramatic introduction to the Parliament and People zone. There are also fascinating documents in the right to vote section.

Particularly affecting are the prison diary of suffragette Olive Wharry and the front page from the Daily Herald in 1913, which is displayed nearby. This newspaper features a drawing of a suffragette being force fed above the quote, "For what you are about to receive…"

The format for the display of documents is to open them at a specific page with some explanatory text underneath. This approach sometimes makes the exhibition seem more one-paced than it actually is.

In fact, the subject matter moves on pretty quickly and the ideas it covers are exciting and thought-provoking. But there are only so many times you can say: "Wow, that's the original text…" Only occasionally is some relief provided by objects such as the Chartists' "truncheon" table leg on loan from the People's History Museum in Manchester.

Part of the difficulty must have been the sheer volume of material to choose from. The exhibition's guest curator, Linda Colley, a professor of history at Princeton University, says the "UK differs from most modern states in possessing no single document setting out the fundamentals of government, the limits of executive power, and the rights and duties of its individual citizens… There are though a multiplicity of legal and political texts, manifestos, speeches and images to do with rights, liberties and struggle."

There is a temptation when so much is available to try and include as much as possible, but focusing on a few key stories could be more illuminating. With some topics, such as the Beveridge report into the welfare state, there are enough documents and supporting information to do the subject justice.

In other displays, the lack of in-depth coverage is frustrating. The text that accompanies the great dock strike of 1889 says it "was a landmark in industrial relations in the UK", but only two documents accompany this.

The other problem arises from the library's desire to give all sides of the various debates. This might seem a common-sense approach to something as complex as rights and freedoms, but the result is that the exhibition poses lots of questions, which can get tiresome.

This in contrast to Colley's short book to accompany the exhibition, Taking Stock of Taking Liberties. Subtitled A Personal View, her attempt to provide some answers rather than simply posing questions makes it a good read.

Where the questioning works well is in a series of audiovisuals where contemporary speakers discuss various issues. The first is in the Liberty and Rule of Law section, where a film shows journalist Peter Hitchens, Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti, MP Diane Abbott and others debating the rights and wrongs of holding people without charge.

Visitors are not left out of the debate and at various points you can use a touchscreen computer to answer multiple-choice questions about everything ranging from the future of the monarchy to DNA databases. These computers are accessed using a wristband that you hold under a reader. At the end of the exhibition you can compare your answers with those of other visitors.

Taking Liberties is well-supported by a good website and an official publication that complements Colley's book. There are also citizenship and history workshops for students, and the events programme looks particularly ambitious, with talks covering subjects such as the legacy of colonisation, and rights and freedoms in a diverse society.

Taking Liberties, despite its drawbacks, is thought-provoking and the British Library should be applauded for tackling such a challenging and topical subject. There is no doubting the in-depth research behind it, but with a little more verve and experimentation in its display it could have been so much more.