The web opens up our
collection to a huge
international audience.
The growth in usage of
our web resources averages
25 per cent a year. We
digitise masterpieces and
add interactive interpretation,
connecting people to the
treasures of diverse cultures.
We open up access to cutting-edge international scientific
research, connecting the lab
results of higher education to
the corporate R&D units of
top brands.
The digital world also gives
us the new responsibility of
collecting information published
in the UK in new formats, in
hard formats like DVDs as well as on the internet. The
digital publications we collect
come in a multitude of file
formats, and may be usable
only with specific hardware and
software. Coming generations
of researchers will want to
connect to this material – so
the digital library that we’re
building has to be flexible,
sophisticated, and future-proof.
Connecting millions
of researchers
worldwide deep into
our web resources
with Google Scholar
Search results on Google Scholar now include links to our document
delivery service, BLDSS, so researchers can order international research
articles automatically. Payment and delivery take place online,
and we pay a copyright fee direct to the publishers.
One element of the digital library will be the archive of UK websites.
We continued our selective harvest of UK sites with their rights
holders’ permission, choosing 500 that had particular cultural and
historic resonance and complemented our collection strengths. For
example, a special effort was made to record sites set up in the
wake of the London bombings on 7 July 2005. The sites are stored
along with others selected by the UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC)
at www.webarchive.org.uk.
The Digital Preservation Coalition shortlisted the web archiving
project for their annual awards in November 2005.
Building the digital library means
re-thinking and re-designing most of
our processes to handle digital materials
in parallel with traditional publications.
We’re working closely with colleagues
from the other Legal Deposit Libraries,
publishers, and academic and other
partners. We’re concentrating our technical
development on automatic intake (ingest)
of e-journals and the e-material we
receive under the publishers’ voluntary
deposit scheme.
Secure storage systems for digital materials
have been set up on two Library sites,
with the underpinning software being
continuously improved. Discussions have
been held with other libraries, in particular
with the National Library of Wales, over
the location of further storage systems.
In September 2005, DCMS set up the Legal
Deposit Advisory Panel to help devise the
regulations that will bring the Legal Deposit
Libraries Act 2003 into force. Our Director
of Scholarship and Collections was invited
to join. In parallel, a pilot project in
anticipation of legal deposit of e-journals
was set up with 23 UK publishers, under
the Joint Committee for Legal Deposit. The
pilot runs until June 2006 and will provide
practical evidence that may influence the
Advisory Panel’s recommendations.
We are contributing our expertise on digital
preservation technologies to the Office of
Science and Technology’s e-infrastructure
steering group. The group is mapping the
digital infrastructural requirements of the
UK academic and corporate research
enterprise, which is migrating to a wholly
digital environment at an accelerating pace.
We have also led a successful bid for a
major European digital preservation project,
PLANETS (Permanent Long-term Access
through Networked Services). We are
leading a 15-member international
consortium that combines content holders,
research institutions and technology vendors
in the four-year, €8.6 million project.
“My team brings expertise from different
directorates to focus on the digital
library preservation strategy and
programme. A significant step for the
team this year has been the successful
completion of the JISC-funded LIFE
project in partnership with University
College London Library, which defined
the life cycle stages and long-term
costs of different digital collections.”
Rory Mcleod
Digital Preservation Manager
In March this year Bill Gates visited the Library and met CEO Lynne
Brindley to set the seal on a long-term strategic
partnership. Initial plans include the digitisation of 25 million
pages of our out-of-copyright books in the coming year. The Library
was also a co-sponsor with Microsoft, Apple, Barclays, BP and Toshiba,
among others, of a submission to Ecma International, the digital
standards organisation, of the Microsoft® Open Office XML document
format technology. With the various formats available as an open
standard, users can have increased confidence in their ability to
store and manage data in the long term. The submission is significant
to the Library in relation to our work on the digital library.
Our collaborations with Microsoft and Google
Scholar underline the Library’s position as a top
content provider to learners and researchers
across the world. These ventures also reinforce
the importance of our work on the digital
library, which will guarantee access to digital
resources for future generations.
The Renaissance celebrated in style. In 1475 Constanzo Sforza and Camilla
of Aragon held an eight-hour banquet to celebrate their marriage.
A contemporary account is now online. It features in the earliest
of 250 Renaissance
festival books we’ve digitised in partnership with the University
of Warwick. The festival books show the magnificent ceremonies that
took place in Europe between 1475 and 1700. They are a superb scholarly
resource, documenting marriages and funerals, coronations and pageants
and will fascinate everyone who enjoys history. The Arts and Humanities
Research Council, which funded the project, rated it as ‘outstanding’
and it was shortlisted for the Information Management 2005 awards.
‘Magnificent!’, ‘a superb creation’, ‘quite breathtaking’ – just
some of the responses to the web debut of Mozart’s own handwritten
catalogue and Lewis Carroll’s manuscript of Alice’s
Adventures Under Ground, which features his own illustrations.
Mozart’s Verzeichnüss
aller meiner Werke details most of his compositions during
the seven years up to his death in 1791, including his five mature
operas, last three symphonies and a number of tantalising works
which have since been lost. The online version was launched to celebrate
his 250th anniversary and uses our awardwinning Turning the Pages
interactive animation system.
Popular versions of history have often airbrushed out the contribution
of non- Europeans to Western culture. In recent years, however,
scholars have begun to challenge the idea that race or ethnicity
is a barrier that can stop individuals from participating in any
field they choose. In light of this, we asked the writer and historian
Dr Mike Phillips to work as guest curator on two online features,
Black
Europeans – which reveals the African backgrounds of great
names in European culture, such as Alexander Pushkin and Alexandre
Dumas – and Caribbean
Views: Sugar, Slavery and the Making of the West Indies.
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