2. Build the digital research environment

Software to process electronic journals was received and tested. More testing was found to be needed and introduction was re-scheduled for May 2009. The mailroom system is being replaced to process books and newspapers published in digital form. Work on open standards interfaces was re-scheduled so that it could be co-ordinated with the PRIMO ‘Search Our Catalogue’ service. Successful pilot testing took place to give access to digitised and ‘born-digital’ newspapers.

The PLANETS project (Preservation and Long-term Access via Networked Services) aims to reduce the loss of digital information and improve accessibility of digital materials in the long term. Software was successfully introduced and events held to prepare for the implementation of PLANETS by national libraries. The preservation planning tool, Plato, won an award for best demonstration at ECDL (European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries). A major survey of the potential market for PLANETS technology and services closed with returns from over 200 organisations.

The Legal Deposit Advisory Panel made its first recommendations to the Secretary of State for offline (‘handheld’) publications such as CDs and DVDs, and freely available online material in the UK web space. The Panel has also planned a series of projects to address different aspects of deposit and to arrive at a recommendation for commercial and other online publications.

The voluntary scheme for the deposit of e-journals continues and much effort has been put into testing and development.

The National Library of Scotland has agreed to join the existing partnership between the British Library and the National Library of Wales to extend the shared technical infrastructure for electronic legal deposit by adding a further node in Scotland.

The Library signed a contract with Microsoft in 2006 to digitise 25 million pages of out-of-copyright printed books. The project was completed in November, six months ahead of schedule, and although Microsoft decided not to continue with the project, these digitised books are now available in our Reading Rooms for researchers to use. An additional £200,000 from the 2008/09 Digitisation Fund will allow a further three million pages to be digitised.

Two million pages of 19th century digitised newspapers are already available to higher and further education communities on the web. A further one million pages were digitised in the second phase of the JISC project. Targets for adding audio content were exceeded and a further 24,000 sound recordings were added.