Towards the Digital Library: The British Library′s Initiatives for Access Programme

Citation

Wright, C. (1999), "Towards the Digital Library: The British Library′s Initiatives for Access Programme", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 27 No. 2, pp. 49-50. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.1999.27.2.49.1

Anyone who expects to be working in or around libraries in the next decade can gain inspiration and information from this book. First, it is a real book, beautifully published with elegant typeface, colour illustrations, stitched signatures, and a coherent, linear style. Furthermore, it is written in the clear prose of the storyteller because, more than anything else, it is the tale of a great library′s efforts to describe a role for itself, and by definition for all libraries, in the new digital world.

Towards the Digital Library is a collection of essays describing the British Library′s Initiatives for Access Programme, a series of pilot projects (some of which have become permanent services of the Library) that sought to exploit the new digital technology available in the mid‐1990s. The book consists of 21 case studies divided into three sections: Digital Imaging, Document Management and Descriptive Data, and Network Services and the Way Ahead. Framing these studies are Foreword and Afterword essays that eloquently describe the opportunities and risks facing libraries at the century′s end. For the lay reader, the book′s lasting value may lie in these philosophical surroundings.

“We are in the middle of poorly understood change for which we have few real guides. Much discussion about the future is conducted in terms of high‐level summary labels which have little explanatory power,” writes Lorcan Dempsey, head of the UK Office for Library and Information Networking in his thoughtful Afterword. “Yet, for all our difficulty in taking a long perspective, we know a glass network spans the globe which is putting in place the material for new ways of working, communicating and learning. This glass network is creating the first global information economy, an economy with a capacity to work as a unit in real time on a planetary scale.”

These various projects undertaken by the BL under Initiatives for Access (or IfA) are an attempt to define some of these new ways “of working, communicating and learning”. For readers of this journal, the words of Sir Anthony Kenny, former Chairman of the Board of the BL, in his brief Foreword, will be the confirmation of long‐held beliefs. “Once, it was enough if a library provided its readers with a desk to which books could be brought, and, under the same roof, a written catalogue of its holdings. Now, a great library′s catalogue is expected to be available far beyond its own walls, and the information contained in its holdings is pursued by many who will never set foot in its reading rooms.” Examining the three canons of librarianship (acquisitions, preservation, and access) Kenny concludes that “the provision of access is emerging as we reach the end of the twentieth century, as the dominant partner among the triad of library functions”. While that is not news, it is well said and welcome reassurance for those of us who labour in the vineyard of document delivery. IfA as described in the introduction by John Mahoney, Director of Information Systems at BL,

was intended to be creative, open and challenging. It was predicated on the recognition that we did not and legitimately could not possibly understand all the implications of the fast‐changing technology and creative environment being generated by the development of digital techniques and global computer networking.

“The [IfA] programme therefore set out to learn about new ways of working, to demonstrate those new ways to staff within the Library and to people in a broad range of constituencies outside, and to embed understanding of the enthusiasm for the new technologies within the staff in general. In all these ways it aimed to open the way for further, faster, more effective and more creative change.

The IfA projects were selected to cover a broad range of situations that the participants thought might be amenable to digital treatment. For the humanist and casual reader the first set of essays dealing with digital imaging is the most engaging. Grouped here are several tales of academic sleuthing, including a fascinating account of efforts to recreate the original text of a description of a multimedia project combining tests, pictures and sound to recreate a medieval mystery play of Doomsday; and a engaging description of how the Library came to develop its Turning the Pages project that allows viewers to “turn” the pages of a digital facsimile.

In many of these discussions, the authors include their own reactions and conclusions, which may prove interesting long after the technology has become standard procedure. In Turning the Pages, the authors realise that by making it possible for gallery visitors to “handle” the Sforza Book of Hours or the Leonardo codex they had returned the book to its original use. “In an application such as this,” they concluded, “the codex can be reintegrated and rescued from being a disembodied artefact in a case or a disconnected photograph in a book. Rather than breaking up the codex, new technology can help bring the codex to life.”

Taking this a step further, in Electronic Beowulf, Andrew Prescott of the BL′s ÑDepartment of Manuscripts observes that the promise of digital technology lies not just in replicating artefacts as we know them, but in allowing new combinations and disclosures not heretofore available. “There is a terrible risk that as digital libraries enter a phase of commercial developments this will be lost sight of. The only way of ensuring that the kind of research‐oriented approach which the Electronic Beowulf has pioneered continues and develops is to maintain the build on the close co‐operation between scholar, curator, conservator, photographer and technical expert...”

This is not to imply that Towards the Digital Library is a philosophical tract. Each project is described in terms of its technological and organisational goals, using language that is understandable if not lucid to the lay reader (I am certainly no authority on digitisation). It also includes a good quantity of useful, and sometimes wry, advice. Discussing the Image Demonstrator project, a journal article Ñfacsimile pilot, Cindy Carr of the Document Supply Centre noted that, despite technological virtuosity, the project still had to please the customer. “Does a customer really care if the images are all the same way up when they get the printed copy? The answer to this was a resounding YES.” And when do you settle for available technology? “We learned that we should have been very specific about what we wanted and that we should, to a certain extent, have ignored what was already available.”

Most readers will not find it necessary to read every chapter in this book. That is a fault neither of the book nor of the reader. I personally found the chapters on the British Library′s online information server and network OPAC of interest because my colleagues at the Library of Congress are grappling with some of these same issues. Obviously, as a document supply manager I found the Ñchapters on Automated Request Processing and BL′s Inside document ordering service required reading. Others will find the detailed and (to me) challenging chapter on Excalibur and image‐based test searching to be a riveting glimpse into the possibilities of character recognition. Every librarian with an eye to the future will find something of interest in these individual studies.

But for long‐term inspiration I am brought back to the book′s overview of the IfA project. In the nineteenth century librarians introduced electric lights into the reading room of the BritishÇMuseum Library, allowing readers to use the books even on foggy days. Then they began substituting photographs of manuscripts to reduce wear and tear on the originals. In the twentieth century the BL adapted factory processes to create the Document Supply Centre and streamline the process of delivering books and articles to readers. Now comes the digital library, “but the aim remains the same as it was for the great Victorian librarians to use every available technical aid to give the quickest and cheapest access to information.” Above all, this book reaffirms the basic purpose of librarianship and eloquently presents some new tools for achieving this aim.