News from the British Library

Citation

(2002), "News from the British Library", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 36 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/prog.2002.28036bab.001

News from the British Library

News from the British Library

The British Library and Elsevier Science sign a new partnership deal

A deal that allows access to over 1,000 Elsevier Science journal titles by readers in the British Library Science Reading Rooms at St. Pancras, London and to over 20,000 worldwide customers of the Library's Document Supply service, has been signed.

The British Library, the world's leading supplier of documents, and Elsevier Science have strengthened their existing partnership by agreeing the supply and use of material in electronic format. The agreement means that the electronic full text produced by Elsevier Science in ScienceDirect can be stored by the British Library for use in its public reading rooms and for satisfying document delivery requests via the British Library Document Supply Centre (BLDSC) at Boston Spa, Yorkshire. In an extension to the previous service the new licence will permit users of the library's inside service to receive copies of articles from Elsevier material instantly.

The deal, which lasts for three years, covers all the titles published by Elsevier on ScienceDirect. In addition to licensing Elsevier's ScienceServer software the agreement also includes use of electronic bibliographic data, including abstracts, which will be used in the library's inside and Zetoc document and information services.

450,000 Union Catalogue of Books records online

Stage one of a project (which started in 1999) to put online the 1.5 million Union Catalogue of Books (UCB) records, listing stock held by the BLDSC, is now complete. This means that the BLDSC's pre-1950 records (450,000 records in total) are now available on the British Library Public Catalogue and can be searched via the library's Web site.

Housed at the BLDSC in Boston Spa, Yorkshire, the UCB contains over five million book records, many of them stretching back to the nineteenth century, in 3,792 catalogue drawers. Nearly half a million of these are stock records for pre-1950 books, added to the BLDSC collection over the last 40 years. The catalogue includes donated material, foreign language books and many historical items of interest to researchers and scholars.

British Library funds online music research and performance project

The first comprehensive map of all the UK's music resources is to be produced as an online database. The database, to be called Cecilia will include:

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  printed music and audio collections;

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  concert programmes and other memorabilia;

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  autograph scores and other heritage items;

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  performance sets supporting amateur choral and orchestral societies;

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  archives of jazz and popular music; and

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  collections of musical instruments.

The Web site will be a one-stop shop for music information designed to satisfy the needs of users from those pursuing their private passions, through to learners, performers and researchers. The completed database will provide a detailed profile of the music collections held across the UK in libraries, museums and archives. Cecilia will identify the scope and scale of materials held, how they can be accessed and how the institutions can be contacted. The project will be developed in conjunction with the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML). Funding for the project has come from the British Library, the Research Support Libraries Programme and Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries. Cecilia is due to go live in November 2002.

Launch of Digital Preservation Coalition

A coalition to secure the UK's digital heritage was launched in February 2002 at the House of Commons. Chaired by British Library (BL) Chief Executive, Lynne Brindley, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is a consortium of 19 major UK organisations which aims to ensure that digital archiving is kept on the policy agenda. Information about its work can be found at www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/preservation. Organisations on the board of the DPC include the British Library, Consortium of University Research Libraries, Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher and Further Education Funding Councils (JISC), National Archives of Scotland, OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), Public Record Office, Public Record Office for Northern Ireland, Resource: the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries and the University of London Computer Centre. Associate members of the DPC include Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, Central Information Technology Unit for Northern Ireland, Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, National Electronic Library for Health, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Publishers Association, Research Libraries Group, Trinity College Library Dublin and Wellcome Trust Library. The DPC aims to ensure that digitally produced information is not lost to future generations of researchers and scholars.

Key messages of the coalition launch were the:

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  need to ensure long-term preservation and access to digital information;

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  importance of an urgent and collaborative approach so that safeguarding of digital information becomes a mainstream service within institutions;

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  need for safe repositories and storage systems for electronic material such as books, journals, government records and Web sites.

Due to the speed of technological change, formats for storing digital material can quickly become obsolete and the stored information rendered inaccessible. This has profound implications not just for scholars and researchers, but also for business and industry in terms of the cost of recovering lost data.

The BBC Domesday project of the 1980s typifies the challenges of digital preservation and access. Initiated to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book, the BBC collected a massive amount of social, environmental, economic and cultural information on 12 in. video discs. With only a few working examples of the software needed to interpret the data on the discs still extant, the information on this incredible historical object will soon disappear forever.

Giving one of the keynote speeches at the coalition launch, Lynne Brindley said:

Increasingly the BL and other institutions in the UK are collecting digital materials that their users will expect to be available for the long term. Significant steps are being taken at the BL and at other DPC member institutions in this area. For example the BL is working with IBM in building a digital library store, and with the publishing industry and other UK copyright libraries on the voluntary deposit of electronic publications, in advance of legislation for digital deposit.

She continued:

The concept of long-term digital preservation is new and poses new technological and policy challenges. When the average life of a Web site is some six weeks, and the life-cycle of new technologies is measured in only singleton years, the concept of long-term access to digital content being measured in hundreds of years is, to say the least, challenging! We plan to share experience of Web-archiving projects and we intend to hold a forum with industry to encourage more involvement of the private sector in our work. The DPC is seeking funding to develop a UK digital preservation survey establishing current and future needs and capacity in the UK. Members are now working collaboratively to develop skills, tools and ways of ensuring that records, e-publications and research data only available in digital form are kept. To continue and develop this activity the DPC will seek further membership, sponsorship and funding of projects, both from public institutions and from those industries which will directly or indirectly benefit from our work.

For further information please contact Press and Public Relations, British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, UK. Tel: +44(0) 20 7412 7111; Fax: +44(0) 20 7412 7168; E-mail: press-and-pr@bl.uk; URL: www.bl.uk