Richard Boulderstone

Director, e-Strategy and Information Systems

"We have made significant progress this year in developing our digital library system. This is one of our major programmes and is critical to ensuring that the British Library can store, preserve and provide access to the UK’s intellectual and cultural output in digital form."

"During the past year we have begun to populate the digital library store. It now contains over 400,000 items including digitised books, digital newspapers, sound files and electronic materials received through a voluntary deposit arrangements scheme. We have also, for the first time ever, been able to provide Reading Room users with access to digitised content directly from the catalogue – in this instance digitised 19th century books.

These developments are helping us to build our expertise and capability in managing digital content, which is important as we continue to increase the number of items and different types of content that our digital library store contains.

As well as these important digital library developments, we have continued to build our activities and support for science, technology and medicine (STM) with the introduction of our TalkScience events programme. This is based on the popular ‘Cafe Scientifique’ approach of an informal, yet informed, debate on topical issues in scientific research. The four events that we have held, on topics ranging from citation in science to infectious disease, have attracted a wide range of researchers and research funders both in person and online. This programme is establishing a name for the Library as a place to discuss and debate science. "