Digital Library Programme

The British Library’s strategic vision is to “provide both physical and digital access to world-class information where and when people need it.
More and more people expect to find the answers to their questions instantly, just a click away from a Google search.

The British Library intends to be at the centre of this new world by creating a critical mass of digital content. We will do this by collecting new published works in digital form and by digitising more and more of our unparalleled physical collections. We will, of course, continue to respect the rights of content creators and publishers by ensuring that we only use content in ways that are permitted to us.

We are creating and collecting an ever-increasing number of digital items. For example:

Digitised materials donated to the Library under voluntary arrangements
Digitised versions of parts of our own printed collections
Academic journals published in digital form (e-Journals)
Digital audio, both acquired by the Library and created by our own Sound Archive staff
Archive copies of websites
Digital newspapers
Cartographic data used to create digital maps

Under long-standing Legal Deposit legislation the Library receives a copy of every printed publication produced in the UK and Ireland. The Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 extends this legislation to non-print materials and gives us new opportunities and new responsibilities:

It enshrines the principle that electronic or e-publications and other non-print materials will be deposited in the Library
It requires that these publications are saved as part of the published archive, to become an important resource for future generations of researchers and scholars.

We are working with Government, publishers and the other UK Legal Deposit Libraries through the Legal Deposit Advisory Panel to formulate Regulations that will specify how the Act is to work in practice.

The Digital Library Programme is responsible for providing the hardware infrastructure and software tools to enable our colleagues to acquire, process, store and make accessible digital items. It is also our responsibility to provide the tools and infrastructure to keep this material safe and ensure that it is accessible to future generations.