2. Build the digital research environment

Development of our archive service for large-scale digitisation projects has been rescheduled to 2008/09 because of slippage in the Microsoft Digitisation Project and time needed to resolve a technical issue. Reading Room access to the digitised books has been rescheduled to 2008/09. We launched a pilot service for the ingest of e-journals at the end of 2007 and will extend this through 2008, with Reading Room access to e-journals rescheduled to 2008/09.

The PLANETS project, launched in June 2006, aims to ensure long-term access to Europe’s digital intellectual heritage. At the CeBIT international trade show we linked with key European digital preservation initiatives to increase awareness of the programme among software vendors. We made a new release of the Plato preservation planning tool and a highly successful workshop in Vienna introduced the tool and planning methodology to over 50 participants.

Work continues on our Smart Crawler project with the Library of Congress, Internet Archive and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France but has been delayed by the resignations of key individuals at the Library and the Internet Archive. We’ve made substantial progress on defining the Automated Content Access Protocol, which will enable automated targeting and capture of eligible sites, and work to replace the current PANDAS web archiving system is proceeding with the UK Web Archiving Consortium. We have taken over leadership of theWeb Curator Tool project to develop a tool to manage the gathering and archiving process. Major partners including the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Wellcome Library have expressed interest in the Library’s Web Archiving Service.

In July the Library installed the Digital Object Management (DOM) system store and ingest service at the National Library of Wales (NLW). This extends the shared infrastructure for delivering access to UK digital works received through future legal deposit legislation. Recommendations on an interoperable infrastructure for the legal deposit libraries were agreed, subject to final consideration by the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland.

We contributed to the Gowers Review of IP last year and we’re working with the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills on legislative reform following the review. We are also following up with DCMS on the Creative Industries strategy, which includes recommendations from the Gowers Review. The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) exceptions consultation was hosted at St Pancras and we’ve provided briefings on IP issues for political institutions, key MPs and peers, and the media.

We aim to make two million pages of 19th century British newspapers accessible on the web to the higher education (HE) and further education (FE) communities and to deliver a further 1.1 million by the end of 2008/09. The website was launched to the HE and FE users in October and is now available in our Reading Rooms. A launch to the wider public is planned for autumn 2008. We are also working to add a further 4,200 hours of archival sound recordings to the 3,900 already online at www.bl.uk/sounds. This second phase is progressing well with 2,266 hours of material digitised and an IP clearance framework due to be finalised shortly. 217 HE and FE institutions have now signed up to the service.