Memorandum submitted by the British Library
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1. The British Library is a great cultural
institution with, at core, a mission to support research in its
widest sense; we exist for everyone who wants to do research—for
academic, personal, or commercial purposes. The Library is by
definition a growing organism; its collection must grow if it
is to continue both to meet the needs of research and innovation
and also to act as a great cultural heritage resource for current
and future generations of researchers from all walks of life.
The Library is not principally focused on providing a museum experience
and only selectively does it itself undertake primary research.
The Library's principal offering is an intermediate good as part
of the research process. The Library operates at the hub of the
UK and world information and library networks.
2. The British Library occupies a prominent
place in the intellectual and cultural life of the nation. It
is an integral component of the research infrastructure and it
plays a correspondingly significant role in ensuring the research
excellence of the UK and in supporting creativity and innovation.
The public value that the Library and its collection bring is
essentially three-fold:
— it is a critical resource for
UK research;
— it underpins business and enterprise
through Its contribution to knowledge transfer, creativity and
innovation; and
— it is a world-class cultural
institution with a vital role as a holder of the national memory.
It contributes to the PSA targets of three Government
departments: DCMS, DTI/OSI, and DfES, and this has recently been
underlined by the establishment of an Inter-Departmental Panel
for the British Library and articulated in the Library's new Tripartite
Funding Agreement.
3. Section 2 of this submission comprises
a detailed account of the Library's approach to collection stewardship.
The Library takes an integrated, format-neutral, life-cycle approach
to the management of its collection. The Library would welcome
the Committee's general support for its work in building, managing,
providing access to, and in ensuring long term preservation of,
its world-class collection.
4. The Library also seeks the Committee's
specific support for:
— the good progress being achieved
by the Library in attracting new audiences and in providing access
to all those with an interest in researching any aspect of the
collection both via the reading rooms and remotely, including
(bearing in mind the Committee's previous interest)[1]
through digitisation (paras 59-66 and 85);
— the importance of sustaining
the real terms' value of the Library's acquisitions budget in
general, given its underpinning role vis-a"-vis the
UK research environment (paras 29-34 and 86-87);
— the importance of heritage acquisitions
in maintaining the record of the intellectual heritage of the
UK and the initiative of the Library in establishing a Working
Group on the United Kingdom Literary Heritage (paras 35-40);
the importance of completing the Library's Additional
Storage Programme to ensure that the national collection is housed
in fit-for-purpose storage with controlled environmental conditions
meeting British Standard BS5454 (2000) (paras 41-45 and 89-90);
— investment in the digital infrastructure
required to preserve and to provide long-term access to the UK's
national electronic published archive (paras 54-58 and 91).
SECTION 1—INTRODUCTION
5. The British Library welcomes the opportunity
to provide written evidence to the House of Commons Culture, Media
and Sport Committee to assist in its inquiry "Caring for
our Collections".
The British Library and its expertise
6. The British Library was established by
statute in 1972 as the national library of the UK. The Library
is one of the world's greatest research libraries and the main
custodian of the nation's cultural and intellectual heritage.
The Library's incomparable collection has developed over 250 years;
it covers three millennia of recorded knowledge and represents
every known written language and every aspect of human thought.
The Library is the beneficiary of legal deposit, and it also purchases
widely with a £17 million annual budget for material of research
value. It is estimated there are well over 150 million items in
the collection; these occupy over 600km of shelving. The Library's
mission is to help people advance knowledge to enrich lives. The
Library exists for everyone who wants to do research—for
academic, personal, or commercial purposes.
7. The British Library is by definition
a growing organism; its collection has to grow if it is to continue
both to meet the needs of research and innovation and also to
act as a great cultural heritage resource for current and future
generations. The Library is not principally focused on providing
a museum experience and only selectively undertakes primary research.
The Library's principal offering is an intermediate good as part
of the research process. The Library operates at the hub of the
UK and world information and library networks.
Funding
8. The British Library is funded from the
vote of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). In
the current financial year (2006-07), the Library will receive
£102 million in grant-in-aid from DCMS and it expects to
receive £21.6 million in self-generated income from the provision
of priced services, donations etc, enabling it to build, preserve
and provide access to its collection in support of research, business,
the wider library network and broader educational goals, through
its reading rooms, through its exhibition galleries, educational
programmes and loans to other institutions, through its remote
document supply services, and through provision of information
and bibliographic services.
9. In recent years the Library has been
successful in securing project funding from a range of other public
and charitable bodies, including £3.1 million from the Joint
Information Systems Committee (JISC) for digitisation of sound
and newspapers, and £1 million from the London Development
Agency for the development of the Business and IP Centre. The
Library has also recently been awarded Academic Analogue status
by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) from April
2006 until March 2011. No other national library in the world
matches the levels of self-generated revenue earned by the British
Library, and its fundraising record is also notable, currently
over £5 million per annum.
Public and economic value
10. The British Library occupies a prominent
place in the intellectual and cultural life of the nation. It
is an integral component of the research infrastructure and it
plays a correspondingly significant role in ensuring the research
excellence of the UK and in supporting creativity and innovation.
A recent independent economic impact study commissioned by the
Library suggests that the total value added to the UK economy
by the Library each year is at least £363 million, over £4.40
for every £1 of public funding.[2]
11. The value that the Library and its collection
bring is essentially three-fold:
— it is a world-class cultural
institution with a vital role as a holder of the national memory;
— it is a critical resource for
UK research; and
— it underpins business and enterprise
through its contribution to knowledge transfer, creativity and
innovation.
Thus it makes an important contribution to DCMS's
key agendas, including not least its growing support for the creative
industries and its contribution to the modernisation of the UK's
intellectual property regime. It also plays a unique but essential
role in facilitating knowledge transfer, innovation, enterprise
and business growth, thereby also supporting the work of the Department
for Education and Skills and the Office of Science and Innovation.
The Library's cross-cutting role has recently been underlined
by the establishment of an Inter-Departmental Panel and articulated
in the Library's new Tripartite Funding Agreement.
12. The British Library's collection serves
five principal user groups—researchers, the business community,
the UK library and information network, education and the general
public. Each year, we receive over 450,000 visits to the reading
rooms, some 5,900,000 collection items are consulted in the reading
rooms or are supplied via the Library's document supply service
to remote users, and nearly 25 million searches are made of our
public catalogue. We also receive over 850,000 visitors to our
onsite and "virtual" exhibitions. Over 4,200,000 people
overall access the Library's website (48.5 million page hits)
each year.
13. Under the leadership of Chief Executive
Lynne Brindley, the Library's Executive Team is pursuing a fundamental
programme of change to modernise the British Library to deliver
better and more responsive services in terms not least of broadening
access, reaching new audiences, e-delivery and digital investment.
One imperative of this highly challenging programme is to sustain
the Library's collection purchasing power and to redistribute
resources to front-line activities—the programme is targeted
to realise £67 million cumulatively in operating savings
by 2007-08. A recent National Audit Office report on the British
Library concluded: "The Library has undergone significant
and beneficial organisational change. The Library is much of the
way through a major reform programme and it is already clear that
the changes will make the Library better able to meet the needs
of users, including those accessing the Library's services remotely".[3]
14. The Library is operating in a turbulent
external environment. The internet generation has new and demanding
expectations for swift, free and easy access 24/7 to information.
Ever more rapid innovation and new technologies are transforming
traditional models of scholarly communication, of information
creation, dissemination, storage and access. In light of the impact
of new technologies, the UK must develop a digital research information
infrastructure to support the research process. Our response,
as set out in our strategy for 2005-08,[4]
is to redefine the British Library for the digital age to sustain
it as a great world library for the 21st century.
SECTION 2—THE
LIBRARY'S
APPROACH TO
COLLECTION STEWARDSHIP
Underpinning philosophy and skills base
15. The British Library applies the definition
of care to the collections in the broadest sense. We take a holistic
approach to the stewardship of our collection, spanning all phases
of collection development and management. This integrated approach
takes a "format-neutral" stance; that is to say stewardship
encompasses all forms of analogue and digital materials. We have
led on the development of a life-cycle approach to collection
management, most recently through the Life Cycle Information for
E-literature (LIFE) project.[5]
16. Each aspect of managing a collection
item, from acquisition to access, is part of its life cycle. Life
cycle philosophy and methodology means that the interdependencies
between all the stages in the life of the collections are defined
over the short, medium and long term. The Library is increasingly
able to apply the methodology to assess the full costs associated
with caring for its collections, digital or print, that is, the
cost of acquisition, making accessible, conserving, preserving
and storing. It seeks to obtain best value throughout the life
cycle.
17. Our curatorial and other professional
experts have the depth and range of knowledge and skills required
to care for our collections during each part of the life cycle.
As well as ensuring that we acquire the right material, whether
new publications or heritage collections for our readers now and
in the future, and at best value, our experts provide rich catalogue
records to enable the public to navigate our collections, and
selectively carry out original research for publications, exhibitions,
international conferences and lectures. Paragraphs 59-66 describe
our approach to access and services in some detail.
18. In conservation and preservation, as
documented in paragraphs 46-58, our staff have expertise which
is unrivalled nationally, and in many cases internationally, borne
out by our project and thought leadership.
Overview of the library's collection
19. The British Library's collection of
150 million items truly holds the world's knowledge, spanning
three millennia in all principal languages, covering all subjects,
cultures and formats. The DNA of civilisation can be said to be
contained in the Library's "comprehensive collection of books,
manuscripts, periodicals, films and other recorded material, whether
printed or otherwise".[6]
It ranks among the world's largest and most comprehensive research
libraries. The collection ranges from priceless historic manuscripts
and early printed books to a wide range of contemporary publications,
including fugitive "grey" literature, as well as electronic
material, both born-digital and created through digitisation.[7]
Annual acquisitions can average up to 2.5 million items, enough
to fill 11km of shelving, thereby ensuring that the Library is
always up-to-date with the very latest research and publishing
from across the globe.[8]
Material is principally acquired through a combination of legal
deposit and purchase, with some donations and exchanges.
20. Long renowned as a centre for textual
resources, published and unpublished, the Library is also a treasure-trove
of visual and audio-visual materials. While our collection of
4,500,000 maps, second only in size to that of the Library of
Congress, may be internationally acclaimed, our other visual materials
cover a wide range of media from drawings, watercolours, paintings
and sculpture to prints, posters and photographs. Photographic
collections (comprising 400,000 original photographs plus much
manuscript, including the Fox Talbot archive, and printed material)
are being developed more systematically, with an eye to the focus
of the Victoria and Albert Museum, with the Library concentrating
on topography, travel, architecture, archaeology and the photographically-illustrated
book.
21. Internationally, the depth and scope
of the Library's sound recordings are quite unmatched. Dating
back to the end of the nineteenth century, there are more than
3,300,000 recordings from every corner of the globe and from sources
ranging far beyond the products of the national recording and
broadcast industries. Around 10% of the holdings are unpublished,
including oral history interviews, ethnographic field recordings,
soundscapes and birdsong. The Library also has extensive collections
of moving-image material, including commercially published music
video, unpublished video recordings of performance art, and selected
UK television broadcasts of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as material
relating to world and traditional music. Also held are some 13,000
popular music promotional videos acquired by donation, and the
country's most comprehensive collection of film music, acquired
under voluntary deposit.
22. Setting out our corporate strategy for
2005-08, we identified one of our strategic priorities as being
to grow and manage the national collection.[9]
To meet this strategic aim, in April 2006 we published a consultation
document focusing on some general principles of collection development
and on specific collecting priorities for the arts and humanities
and social sciences: The British Library's Content Strategy:
meeting the knowledge needs of the nation.[10]
The results of this consultation exercise will be published early
in 2007, and a similar consultation on science, technology and
medicine collecting and connecting strategy will follow.
LEGAL DEPOSIT
ACQUISITIONS
23. One of the key roles of the British
Library is as memory to the nation, which it mainly discharges
through its responsibility for the national published archive.
In the print environment, the Library is entitled by statute to
the automatic free deposit by UK publishers of one copy of each
of their publications. This right, currently embodied in the Legal
Deposit Libraries Act 2003, originates in the Press Licensing
Act 1662 which conferred this privilege on the Royal Library from
whence it was transferred to the British Museum in 1757 and then
to the British Library in 1973.[11]
Although there are five other UK legal deposit libraries (one
of them now in the Republic of Ireland), they do not have the
right of automatic receipt of printed publications, but have to
claim them, and their collecting is generally rather less comprehensive
than the British Library's, very significantly so in the case
of certain types of publication such as newspapers and popular
magazines. In the last complete financial year, 2005-06, the Library
acquired under legal deposit no fewer than 545,000 items, including
103,000 monographs, 282,000 serial issues, 155,000 newspaper issues
and 5,000 other items. Despite the digital revolution, the country's
printed publishing output has increased by about 50% during the
past decade.
24. Non-print publications emerged during
the twentieth century, initially recorded sound, then moving pictures,
then microform, then handheld electronic materials, and finally
online publications. As these non-print materials were not subject
to legal deposit, the integrity of the national published archive
in these formats depended upon a combination of Library purchasing
and voluntary deposit. Inevitably, these arrangements have proved
only partially effective, and significant gaps have opened up
in the archive, not least in dynamic areas such as websites, most
of which have already been lost to the nation. Accordingly, it
became important for the Library to press for the extension of
legal deposit to non-print matter. It did so continuously from
1974, the year after it came into statutory being, but it took
almost thirty years for its campaign to succeed, in 2003, with
the passage of the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003, a Government-sponsored
private member's Bill.
25. The Act made little immediate difference,
simply transferring the print requirements over from the Copyright
Act 1911. The Act specifically excluded sound and film from its
provisions, which continue to be deposited only on a voluntary
basis, with the British Library and the British Film Institute
respectively. In terms of other non-print media, the Act created
a framework for subsequent legislation, through a series of Regulations
to be brought before Parliament by the Secretary of State for
Culture, Media and Sport. Thus, at the time of writing, unlike
in several overseas countries, legal deposit in the UK is only
operational for print material.
26. When the Act received Royal Assent (30
October 2003), it was generally believed that there would be a
fairly natural progression of Regulations, subject to the mandatory
Regulatory Impact Assessment, public consultation and to the affirmative
resolution of both Houses of Parliament, probably beginning with
a Regulation for offline publications, which since 2000 had been
the subject of a voluntary scheme agreed between publishers and
the legal deposit libraries, with the British Library as the default
place of deposit. However, subsequently the Government's Better
Regulation initiative, with its presumption not necessarily in
favour of Regulation, has led to a growing emphasis on the need
to prove that the do nothing option or a voluntary route would
not be effective. The commitment by Government to establish the
Legal Deposit Advisory Panel,[12]
an Advisory Non-Departmental Public Body to assist it in moving
forward with implementation of the Act, led to the creation of
the Panel in 2005, and it met for the first time in September
2005. The Library is an ex officio member of the Panel.
The first year of the Panel's work was necessarily fairly exploratory.
The Panel's main decisions to date have been to relaunch the voluntary
scheme for offline publications in 2007, to agree on the need
for a voluntary deposit scheme for e-journals, and to accept the
case in principle for a Regulation for non-commercial websites.
However, the Library believes there is no prospect for any Regulation
in any medium before 2008 at the earliest.
27. One particular dimension of voluntary
action deserves mention, and that is the area of website archiving,
especially the UK's public domain webspace, now the sole dissemination
vehicle for the overwhelming majority of publishing, broadly defined,
in this country. The British Library has been experimenting in
this area since 2000, and, since October 2003, has led the UK
Web Archiving Consortium,[13]
its fellow members being the National Library of Wales, the National
Library of Scotland, the Wellcome Trust, The National Archives
and the Joint Information Systems Committee. The Consortium's
archive site went live in May 2005 and quickly made the shortlist
for the Digital Preservation Award in that year. Each member has
a particular collecting development responsibility, the widest
being that of the British Library, with a focus on sites of research
interest, cultural value and technological innovation,[14]
plus events-specific archiving, for example, the 2005 general
election, the 7/7 bombings, and the 2012 Olympics. Much of this
material is fugitive and/or rapidly changing, and—as the
number of broken links (manifest in the dreaded internal 404 error
messages) testify—it is immensely vulnerable, with huge
swathes of information already lost for good.
28. For legal reasons, the Consortium has
been working on a permissions basis, approaching the website owners.
However, the success rate has been rather poor, only 27% in the
case of the Library, compounding the inherent losses in the web
medium. The Library therefore feels that a voluntary route to
web archiving is unlikely to be effective. The Legal Deposit Libraries
Act 2003 already permits harvesting by the libraries, once enabled
by Regulation, and establishes the necessary legal indemnities,
and the Library is now working with the Legal Deposit Advisory
Panel to see how faster progress might be made towards a Regulation
for archiving public domain sites. The Library is also collaborating
with sister libraries around the world, through the International
Internet Preservation Consortium,[15]
to develop the essential technological tools which will automate
the archiving process, including making whole-domain archiving
on a snapshot basis feasible. The Library has just announced the
successful development with the National Library of New Zealand
of a web harvesting management system.[16]
Current purchased acquisitions
29. The British Library has an acquisitions
budget of £17,389,000 in the financial year 2006-07. Of this
sum, around 90% will be spent on new, contemporary publications,
and about two thirds of that on serials. As the transatlantic
league table research undertaken a few years back by the Research
Support Libraries Group (RSLG) demonstrates,[17]
this level of expenditure ranks the British Library on a par with
the great American university collections such as Yale and Harvard.
The Library far surpasses the investment being made by the major
university libraries in this country, even Oxbridge. Indeed, relative
to the United States and other countries, research library provision
is disproportionately concentrated on the national library in
the UK, a highly cost-effective method of public expenditure.
As the Group commented in its final report: "The resources
of the British Library are, we believe, one of the main reasons
why UK universities are able to match, and in many cases exceed,
the quality and scale of research undertaken within similar sized
universities in other parts of the world."
30. Unfortunately, there are a number of
threats to the Library's ability to sustain the value of the acquisitions
budget. One of them is the enormous explosion in the quantity
of information being published, which means that, even for an
institution operating on the scale of the British Library, it
is hard to keep pace. Output in many of the developed nations
has risen considerably, while new publishing nations such as China
and India are now emerging as their economies grow and their investment
in research and education with it. The explosion is especially
evident in electronic publishing, but is by no means confined
to it. In the case of electronic material, content is increasingly
accessed under a license, rather than being acquired in a holding
sense.
31. Second, and perhaps more importantly,
since the 1980s price increases of commercially published academic
serials and monographs have risen well above normal inflation
and already stretch the Library's grant-in-aid funding. Currently,
for instance, annual inflation on the books, periodicals and other
materials which the Library purchases is running at 6.6% per annum,
compared to the Government's general inflator of 2.7%. In the
face of increasing budgetary pressures, the Library regularly
reviews and renegotiates contracts and subscriptions with publishers
and suppliers to continue to obtain best value. However, it is
not likely that this can be sustained over a longer period without
some difficult decisions being made regarding the actual selection
of material.
32. Third, academics and—to a somewhat
lesser extent funders—have proved relatively reluctant to
take up proposed new and (for libraries) potentially cheaper business
models for scholarly communication such as open access (subscription
free), and particularly author-pays models.[18]
The Library is helping to promote change, not least through its
recently-announced lead partner role in hosting, managing and
developing the UK version of PubMedCentral, a free digital archive
of peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences journal literature.[19]
However, at this time, only a tiny proportion of the outputs of
the highest-quality global research still do not have to be purchased
on a subscription model. At this rate, the Library would require
an extra £5 million per annum by 2010-11 in order to maintain
the current value of our acquisitions budget.
33. Fourth, and at the same time, there
is an assumption that the Library will continue to underpin the
UK research environment. Despite the digital revolution, there
is a growing, not a diminishing, expectation of the Library's
central role in national provision. Since the late 1980s, initially
public libraries, then special libraries, and now university libraries
have had, relatively, to retrench in terms of diminished acquisitions,
as reflected in a whole array of library purchasing reports produced
by groups such as the Society of College, National and University
Libraries (SCONUL) and the Publishers Association. Evidence from
SCONUL shows that, among its members, new acquisitions represent
2.3% of total stock, compared to 3.5% 10 years ago, and also that
university libraries, like the British Library, are experiencing
the challenge of inflation in the price of serials.[20]
34. Further testimony to researchers' growing
expectations of the Library's role in purchasing contemporary
publications, especially from overseas, is to be found in the
early analysis of the organisational and individual responses
to the Library's draft content strategy, already noted above (paragraph
22). There was virtually no support for any proposal to reduce
our current level of collecting, or connecting to resources elsewhere,
and yet at the same time there was strong demand for greater collecting
in new disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas, or from emerging
publishing nations. The point was repeatedly made that, in addition
to supporting contemporary researchers, the British Library has
a clear duty to collect in anticipation of future research needs.
The final analysis of the responses to the consultation, and the
individual responses themselves, will be posted to the Library's
website in due course. In the meantime, the draft content strategy
is important as a detailed description of our collecting strengths
and priorities in arts and humanities and social sciences disciplines,
and for the principal information formats.
Heritage acquisitions
35. The British Library's acquisitions focus
is not simply on contemporary publications from Britain and around
the world. We also make extensive retrospective purchases, especially
of so-called heritage material, which is generally defined to
comprise collection items which are literally unique, for example
archives and manuscripts, or printed publications before 1900.
Historically, much of this has been in private ownership, sometimes
in private collections and sometimes on deposit in public repositories,
but it is increasingly coming on to the open market, and much
of it has been lost abroad, through the inability of British public
institutions to be able to afford to buy it.
36. During recent years there has been mounting
public and parliamentary concern about the nation's inability
to retain some of its most significant patrimony. The issues were
well-aired in the Goodison Review of 15 January 2004,[21]
to which the Government has only partially responded; the Art
Fund's research,[22]
which generated an exchange in the correspondence columns of The
Times during May 2006, to which the Minister for Culture,
David Lammy MP contributed (on 16 May); debates in the House of
Lords on British authors' archives on 13 December 200[23]
and on the funding of works of art on 24 July 2006,[24]
during both of which Lord Evans of Temple Guiting set out the
Government's position; and in DCMS's current efforts to develop
a strategic framework for heritage acquisitions, with particular
reference to museums and galleries, in association with national
collecting institutions and funders. Notice has also been given
of an adjournment debate on special acquisition funds for museums
and galleries in the House of Commons on 11 October, to be introduced
by Sir Patrick Cormack MP.
37. While heritage acquisitions for libraries
and archives may rarely reach the eight-figure prices of old master
paintings (the John Murray Archive in the process of being bought
by the National Library of Scotland being an obvious exception),
they have been subject to significant inflation during recent
decades. Substantial and important archive collections, for example,
are now often priced in the £500,000 to £1 million range,
with fierce competition from institutional and private collectors
in the United States and, more occasionally, other countries.
Major libraries, such as the Macclesfields' great historical library
of science at Shirburn Castle,[25]
have recently been broken up for auction and their contents dispersed
across the globe. Through judicious management of its resources
the British Library has been able to save for the nation an impressive
variety of heritage material of exceptional quality, such as the
Coleridge family papers which have recently attracted extensive
international press and research interest.[26]
38. The importance attached by the Library
to heritage acquisitions is reflected by the budget it has established
for purchasing such items, equivalent to about 10% of the Library's
total grant-in-aid-derived acquisitions budget, and representing
£1,850,000 in the financial year 2006-07. This is supplemented
by a number of British Library trust funds, the largest of them
in terms of endowment being the Shaw Fund, although, for an institution
which has been going for 250 years, the Library does not have
huge endowments. The Friends of the British Library and the American
Trust for the British Library also contribute to heritage acquisitions,
each typically awarding grants totalling £10,000-20,000 a
year for this purpose. The Library is systematically trying to
build up bequests in this area. For the rest, the Library is dependent
upon fishing in the same financial pools as the remainder of the
cultural sector, particularly the Heritage Lottery Fund, the National
Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund.[27]
The principal dedicated charitable fund for libraries and archives
available to the British Library, the Friends of the National
Libraries,[28]
only has around £150,000 in total for disposal as grants
to all applicants in any one year. In addition, the British Library
benefits from the Acceptance in Lieu scheme administered via MLA.[29]
39. A case-study in the challenges of acquiring
heritage material for libraries and archives is presented by the
British Library's leadership of the campaign to improve the retention
by the nation of English literary manuscripts.[30]
The roll-call of writers whose archives have been lost to the
nation, largely through sale to American universities such as
Texas, Emory and Indiana, is now a long one; it includes major
tranches of the papers of D H Lawrence, Graham Greene, Evelyn
Waugh, Tom Stoppard, David Hare, John Osborne, Arnold Wesker,
Ted Hughes, Ian Fleming, Malcolm Bradbury and Julian Barnes. Three
of the six authors shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize for
Fiction had already sold their papers to the United States at
the time of the prize-giving. In the aggregate, British collecting
institutions have insufficient funds to compete on a level playing-field
in this market.
40. The British Library launched an initiative
in 2004 in an effort to stem the outflow and to redress the balance.
This has resulted in the establishment of a Working Group on the
UK Literary Heritage, chaired by Lord Smith of Finsbury and with
a representative national membership of collecting institutions,
authors, funders and other interested parties. The Group is hosting
an international two-day conference at the Library on 19 and 20
October this year to publicise the issues and to deepen engagement
with stakeholders. We have also entered into dialogue with funders,
MLA and HM Treasury. In the case of Treasury, the Group submitted,
on 11 November last, two modest proposals to improve the situation
by incentivising living authors to sell their archives to British
public institutions. One proposal would have involved the loss
of a small amount of tax revenue through extension of the douceur
arrangement to living authors; the other would have been cost-neutral,
entailing an anticipation of the Acceptance in Lieu arrangement
while authors were alive, to enable them to better plan the disposition
of their papers with their executors.
Physical storage[31]
41. The Library's collection of over 150
million items currently occupies 624.2 linear km of shelving of
the total shelving capacity of 654.5 linear kilometres, which
is distributed between the Library's two main sites at St Pancras
and Boston Spa and its four other London stores (one freehold
and three leasehold). This means an occupancy level of 95.4%.
Given the annual collection growth rate, the Library is running
short of space. The Library developed a coping strategy, through
stock compression, deduplication and the commissioning of temporary
storage, but it has now exhausted these possibilities. New physical
storage has thus emerged as a critical capital need for the Library
in recent years in order to adequately care for and make accessible
the national collection.
42. Long-term preservation of printed and
other analogue publications, not least those which are produced
on acidic or other inferior papers, is hugely dependent upon establishing
and maintaining an appropriate storage environment. Controlling
levels of temperature and humidity is especially important, and
the life-prolonging effects on books and periodicals of a proper
environment have been frequently demonstrated through scientific
research. These requirements have been carefully specified and
are currently embodied in a British Standard: BS5454 (2000). At
present, only the accommodation in the Library's flagship building
at St Pancras fully meets these specifications—just 44%
of the whole shelf-storage. Therefore, up to 85 million items
are possibly stored in sub-optimal conditions. The most pressing
of these is the newspaper collection at our Colindale site which
will also be full in 2007, making the seeking of alternative storage
arrangements a priority. As discussed in paragraph 90, the preservation
of this collection is of the utmost importance to the Library
and action is being taken to ensure that a significant part of
our national heritage is not lost forever.
43. The Library has worked closely with
DCMS since 2001-02 to address these challenges, and DCMS has been
very supportive in providing two substantial capital allocations
to date (totalling £24 million) as part of the SR2002 and
SR2004 settlements to the Library to make a significant inroad
into the problem. This is now enabling good progress to be made,
although, as will be seen from paragraphs 89-90, there is still
unfinished business in respect of newspapers and film-based media
(such as microform) requiring cold storage, and no revenue funding
has been forthcoming to meet the significant costs of associated
book moves. The capital allocations were made in response to evidentially-based
business cases by the Library which incorporated the results of
original research, commissioned by the Library and externally
validated, notably projections of publishing growth to 2020 (including
the changing balance between print and digital publishing) and
international comparative research into storage planning by the
other major research libraries in the world.
44. The specific design solution being adopted
was the outcome of extensive market research, option appraisal
and procurement. The Library will be implementing an innovative
and cost-effective high-density, high-bay and low-oxygen storage
facility delivering the equivalent of 262 linear km of shelving,
and with an automated retrieval system. This will enable the Library
to cope with collection growth to 2022-23 for all printed publications
apart from newspapers, and to relinquish some poor leasehold storage.
In accordance with the Board's two-site property strategy of 2002,
the building is being constructed on the Library's Boston Spa
campus. When finished and fully occupied, by 2011, the amount
of storage accommodation to the BS5454 standard will have risen
to 65%.
45. The Library's innovative storage solution
is now being emulated by Oxford University Library Services, a
reflection of the extent to which the professional knowledge and
experience gained by the Library can be shared with, and applied
by, the wider library sector. The development of a high-quality
and secure new storage facility at Boston Spa has also opened
up the possibility of more collaborative solutions, especially
with higher education libraries, and in respect of low-use printed
material, both books and journals. With capital funding for library
extensions and stores increasingly at a premium in higher education,
a number of universities are looking to relying increasingly upon
British Library holdings, augmented as necessary by stock transferred
to the Library from their own institutions.[32]
An interesting pilot exercise around low-use monographs was completed
with the White Rose Consortium (Universities of Leeds, Sheffield
and York) in 2005 and is now entering a second phase.[33]
More generally, the Library has teamed up with the Consortium
of Research Libraries in the British Isles (CURL) first to commission
a consultancy and then to devise an implementation project around
utilising the Library's storage facilities, and associated remote
services, to optimal national benefit. It has been conservatively
estimated that at least £100 million of capital investment
in higher education library storage which might otherwise have
been required, from the higher education funding councils or individual
institutions, could be avoided.[34]
Analogue conservation and preservation
46. The scale of the challenge to care for
the Library's collection is due to a number of factors. First,
the sheer numbers—150 million items which equates to an
estimated five billion pieces of paper. Second, most of the material
is organic, and mostly cellulose-based that is susceptible to
both chemical and mechanical deterioration. Third, the collection
is very heavily used in a very (literally) "hands-on"
manner—which is significantly different to many other cultural
organisations' collections. The wear and tear to the 2.8 metre
collection items issued in the reading rooms every year has an
impact on the physical conditions of the collection. Fourth, a
fundamental condition audit of the comparative physical state
of all the Library's collection revealed that 86% of the materials
are stable; and 14% are unstable, including 5% unusable. This
5% equates to approximately 1m items and is disproportionately
concentrated in the newspaper collection. Early indications from
the data on five of the six UK copyright libraries currently available
are that the Library's collection is overall in the worst physical
condition (most probably attributable to the heavier levels of
use).
47. The Library has developed a repertoire
of preventive and interventive techniques to prevent damage occurring
to items in the collection, and to repair them if damage does
occur. Furthermore, in caring for its collection, the Library
operates a "mixed economy", combining in-house conservation
expertise that is not available on the required scale externally,
with outsourced routine operations that can be provided more cost-effectively
externally. The Library's in-house conservation[35]
department is the largest in the UK, with a budget of £2,377,000
and around 80 staff (£2,133,000 staff costs and £244,000
equipment and materials). The department carries out interventive
conservation across the whole range of the Library's collection,
from medieval manuscripts to Chinese scrolls to maps and printed
material. The work ranges from refurbishment and making `phase-boxes'
to the treatment of extremely friable birch bark fragments.
48. The preservation[36]
department has a budget of £2,977,000. The majority of this
(£2,423,000) is spent on external contracts, with £514,000
spent on about 20 staff who carry out work aimed at preventing
damage to the collection. The contracts are mainly for the more
routine treatments that are more cost-effectively carried out
externally, together with some expert conservation in areas in
which the Library does not, nor does it intend to have, expertise.
49. A major construction project is currently
under way to create a new, purpose-built Centre for Conservation
on the Library's St Pancras site due to open in 2007. The rationale
for the British Library Conservation Centre is to turn an accommodation
problem—whereby 50 Library conservation staff remain based
on the British Museum site in accommodation that is expensive,
unfit for purpose, and on short leasehold and 10 Sound Archive
technical staff are housed in suboptimal short leasehold accommodation
in Islington—into an opportunity. The new £15 million
Centre, funded by Government, the Library and fundraising, has
been explicitly designed to be a catalyst and enabler of change
at the Library. An ambitious programme has been established that
will result in state-of-the-art conservation studios, a visitor
centre linked to the main exhibition galleries, public demonstrations
and tours; improved conservation treatments and skills for the
current cohort and new training courses for future book conservators
(including a new foundation degree in book conservation with a
university partner). There will be improved materials testing
and microscopic examination facilities, and more opportunities
to convey the findings of conservation research to the public.
50. In 2002, the British Library identified
the need for conservation research applicable to caring for the
collections in libraries and archives in the UK and internationally.
In 2003, the Library appointed the first head of conservation
research in a UK library or archive; this was followed by the
creation of a similar role at The National Archives. The British
Library produced a conservation research strategy in 2004, identifying
how science would underpin the conservation of the Library's collection
and enhance knowledge about it. The fundamental principle is that
conservation research has to contribute directly to the long-term
preservation of the physical collection, either by developing
less interventive or more effective techniques for conservation,
or by improving our ability to prevent damage to the collection.
Wherever possible our tactic will be to form collaborative partnerships
with other bodies (libraries, archives or academic institutions),
both nationally and internationally, in order to maximise the
use of resources and spread the workload. Applied conservation
research also supports the Library's own research strategy by
increasing knowledge about our collection; this provides an extra
dimension to original research carried out by users of the Library
and by curators.
51. The British Library attracted funding
from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation for an international roundtable
to produce a peer-agreed strategic framework of priorities for
conservation research in the library and archive community in
the next five years.[37]
Under the Library's leadership, a collaborative national framework
was produced with the other UK copyright libraries and The National
Archives, and with a European and United States dimension, aimed
at securing external funding for a five-year programme. The themes
that emerged are: the "life cycle of the collections",
including life-cycle prediction, natural ageing of materials and
the evaluation of preservation strategies; the effects of the
storage environment, including the selection of the optimum environment
for different materials; and the non-destructive methods for assessing
damage to materials.
52. In fulfilment of the aims of the strategic
framework, the British Library has just been awarded $700,000
(one of the largest grants ever made for conservation research
in the UK) from the Mellon Foundation for two projects. One project
will research the condition of identical books in different nationally-significant
libraries. Identical volumes held in the different environments
of the six legal deposit libraries across the UK provide a unique
research resource. The second project will research the emission
of volatile organic acids by books and paper, again studying real-time
collections at the UK copyright libraries and The National Archives.
The scientific analysis will be outsourced to the Centre for Sustainable
Heritage at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University
College London and to the University of Strathclyde. The emphasis
on applied conservation research and the collaborative, outward-looking
approach reinforces many Library corporate strategies.
53. The British Library submitted written
evidence to the recent House of Lords Science and Technology Sub-Committee
Review of Science and the Cultural Heritage[38]
and was subsequently invited to give oral evidence[39]
to the Committee.
Digital preservation and storage
54. The virtual corollary to the storage
buildings for the 624 km of the Library's tangible, physical collection
is the need to store, preserve and make accessible the, at present
(but rapidly growing), 200 terabytes of the intangible, digital
collection. The British Library is investing significantly
in a Digital Object Management Programme whose vision is to create
incrementally a management system that will store and preserve
any type of digital material (whether born-digital or digitised)
in perpetuity, provide access to this material to users with appropriate
permissions, and ensure that users can, where possible, experience
material with the original look and feel. This has never been
done before by any national library and is pioneering work in
the cultural heritage sector. The preservation-quality storage
layer is already built, and partially populated, and a contract
for the development of the ingest module has recently been let,
following procurement. The Library's system will be a key component
of the UK research e-infrastructure.
55. In conformity with its format-neutral
approach to the stewardship of its collection, the British Library
is actively addressing the challenges of digital preservation.
In 2003, the Library was central to the establishment of the Digital
Preservation Coalition,[40]
formed by knowledge organisations concerned about the potential
for the total loss of digital material. The Coalition now has
11 full members and 17 associate members. The Library's Chief
Executive, Lynne Brindley, has taken a leading role in this area,
being the founding chair of the Coalition, as well as the only
non-US steering board member of the Library of Congress' $100
million digital preservation programme NDIPP (National Digital
Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program). Within the
Library itself, the first digital preservation co-ordinator post
was created in 2003 and the first interdisciplinary digital preservation
team in 2005.
56. The e-preservation of the documentary
heritage is a new field of research. The British Library is moving
from minor involvement in theoretical and demonstrator projects
(such as CEDARs[41]
and CAMiLEON)[42]
to leading on real-time study of its digital collection. One example
is the Joint Information Systems Committee-funded LIFE (Life Cycle
Information for E-Literature) project,[43]
collaboratively run by University College London (UCL) and the
British Library, which defined the life cycle of the collection
and preservation of key digital collections at UCL and the Library;
and established the costs of the individual stages in the cycle
to show the full financial commitment of collecting digital materials
over the long term. The exemplars at the Library included the
study of the life cycle costs of the 200,000 digital objects received
under voluntary legal deposit since 2000. An extension to this
applied research is now being sought.
57. Another major digital preservation project
in which the Library is involved is PLANETs (Preservation and
Long-term Access through NETworked Services), which has recently
been awarded multi-million Euro funding under the EU's sixth Research
Framework Programme. The British Library is leading the project
consortium of 15 European national libraries and archives, universities
and commercial companies, including the Dutch national library
and Microsoft. The aims of the project are to enable organisations
to take the steps necessary to ensure long-term access to their
valued digital content and to create, evaluate, and execute preservation
plans with a high level of automation. It will enable vendors
to compete in a market place for differentiated preservation services
and tools, and give European citizens confidence that their digital
cultural and scientific heritage will be preserved and made accessible
to future generations.
58. A third example of the Library's thought
leadership in digital preservation is its work with Microsoft
to ensure the longevity of the Office file format, which is the
basis for so many e-documents.[44]
The Library is a founding member, and provides the vice-chair,
of the technical committee that is defining an open standard for
Office file formats that will retain compatibility with Microsoft
formats, and thus to address needs for ongoing interoperability
and for long-term preservation. This exemplifies how the Library
does not consider that the sizable challenges of e-preservation
can be solved in isolation and is actively collaborating in applied
research with parallel libraries and archives, with universities
and commercial organisations, nationally and internationally.
Enabling access and delivering services
59. The Library's collection is not an end
in itself. It can only come to life when enabled by appropriate
access tools and services. Awareness of and access to our rich
and varied collection is thus a primary function of the British
Library. To support users in searching, navigating through the
collection, discovering and accessing information we invest heavily
in the development of search and navigation tools and systems,
as part of our infrastructure.
60. In 2004 the Library took a major step
forward in improving access to its collection by the successful
implementation of the integrated catalogue, running on industry-standard
hardware and software. This replaced 23 separate catalogues and
databases, deploying bespoke and obsolescent technologies with
limited interoperability, and gave users a single point of access
to over 13 million titles. This programme was an excellent example
of a successful IT initiative in the public sector, delivering
the desired goals on time and to budget, and providing good value
for public investment. The integrated catalogue is available on
the internet at http://catalogue.bl.uk. Our catalogue records
are also made available in many other ways, including through
inclusion in the UK's two principal union catalogues, COPAC and
SUNCAT.
61. Coming very shortly will be easier remote
access and ordering via a new single entry point on our main website,
through which users from anywhere in the world will be able to
simultaneously search across the integrated catalogue, the nine
million journal article references contained in the Library's
Electronic Table of Contents, all the pages on the Library's website,
and across "Collect Britain", a collection of over 90,000
digitised images and sounds. The Library will soon be launching,
as a free online resource, the definitive catalogue of all English
books published before 1801, whether held by the Library or not.
It is also planned to develop the integrated catalogue still further
over the next year or so, in particular by incorporating records
for our archives and manuscript and our sound collections.
62. A major challenge facing the Library
is the legacy of large amounts of catalogue data still in manual
formats, for example in historic printed or card catalogues, often
only available within the Library's reading rooms. These catalogues
obviously need to be converted to digital formats in order to
expose our collection completely outside the walls of the Library.
The Library has invested over £500,000 in retrospective catalogue
conversion projects since 2000, and as a result has made one million
more records available to users via the internet. But much still
remains to be done to convert older data and to enhance it to
bring it up to modern standards and satisfy contemporary user
needs. Many of these data are for internationally important special
collections, including manuscripts, early printed books, and the
bulk of our holdings in non-Western languages.
63. Such discovery tools enable our users
to locate and order collection items, either to our reading rooms,
or, where conservation and copyright permit, for remote delivery,
usually in the form of a copy. However, this does not satisfy
the increasing requirement for virtual desktop access to our collection.
In an endeavour to meet this need, the British Library has been
engaged in digitising items from its collection for over 13 years,
during which period it has gained an acknowledged expertise, and
deployed some innovative technology such as Turning the Pages(tm),
the Library's award winning software providing a high degree of
interactivity with virtual forms of significant manuscript or
early printed material.[45]
Over 20 million objects have been created as a result of this
digitisation, mostly with the aid of additional income generated
from the public and private sectors, and mainly (for legal and
licensing reasons) out-of-copyright material, generally published
before 1900. Our digitised collection ranges from individual iconic
items such as Beowulf, Magna Carta, Lindisfarne Gospels, and Gutenberg
Bible to mass digitisation of historic newspapers (three million
pages to date) and sound (4,000 hours to date),[46]
both projects substantially funded by the Joint Information Systems
Committee, and nineteenth-century books (a minimum of 25 million
pages, funded by Microsoft). The Library considers that it is
making good progress in responding to the Committee's challenge
on digitisation as set out in its previous report in 1999-2000,[47]
and is encouraged by the National Audit Office's endorsement of
its strategic approach to digitisation.[48]
64. Access to, and enjoyment of, the collection
is also extended by a vigorous public programme, both onsite and
remote. At its flagship building in St Pancras there is an exciting
portfolio of free exhibitions, targeted at the broadest possible
global audience, one which is notably diverse in culture, language
and styles of learning. This comprises two new major exhibitions
each year, privately sponsored, showcasing collection items in
the Library's Pearson Gallery; year-round access to a selection
of treasures from the Library's world heritage collections in
the Sir John Ritblat Gallery; new topical displays mounted every
three months in spaces available in the Library's front hall and
Treasures Gallery; and displays of works of art around the whole
building. In selecting items for exhibition, care of the collection
is a paramount consideration; for example, the Library has recently
introduced a rotation policy for its most iconic items, to ensure
that they are rested for six months after an 18 month period of
display. As can be seen from our "what's on" pages,[49]
the exhibitions are accompanied by a series of public lectures,
debates, readings and performances, in the building and on the
piazza, which bring new audiences to the Library, and raise awareness
of its collection.
65. Closely allied to the public programme
at St Pancras is a programme of regional outreach and co-operation
with the UK public library network and regional agencies. Turning
the Pages(tm) is included in the Library's complementary virtual
learning environment, the Online Gallery, along with views of
current and past exhibitions, and short research articles by our
experts. The Library's learning programme promotes the development
of young people's research skills and engagement by schools and
lifelong learning audiences with world culture and heritage. We
deliver an onsite programme of workshops, exhibition activities
and major educational projects with schools, further education
colleges and youth and community learning groups, and ensure public
activities meet appropriate learning and access criteria.
66. The Library has worked hard to attract
new audiences and provide access to everyone with an interest
in researching or enjoying any aspect of its collection. As a
result, according to market research commissioned by the Library
from MORI, public recognition of the Library has risen to 75%
across the UK from under 50% five years ago.
Intellectual property rights
67. The Library's collection essentially
comprises the intellectual property rights of third parties. Only
a relatively small minority of it is out of copyright or has rights
vested in the Library itself. Accordingly, access to, and care
of, the collection must operate within the constraints of the
UK's intellectual property framework. The Library is fully respectful
of third-party rights and advocates a position of balance between
the needs of users and rightsholders, in support of a healthy
and innovative knowledge economy. However, as we have made clear
in our lengthy written evidence to the ongoing Gowers Review of
Intellectual Property, evidence which is still unpublished but
summarised in our recently-launched intellectual property manifesto,[50]
there is a pressing need for copyright to be re-interpreted for
the digital age, in order to maintain the historic balance of
interests. As the digital collection of the Library grows, a significant
number of problems have arisen regarding long-term preservation
of and access to digital items.
68. One particular area is Digital Rights
Management systems (DRMs) which, through Technological Protection
Measures (TPMs), apply certain controls to the use of e-material.
These have recently been subjected to scrutiny by the All Party
Parliamentary Internet Group, to whose inquiry the Library contributed.[51]
These controls, and the associated contracts and licenses to use
the material, have total protection in UK law, with no practical
processes allowing for legal circumvention in the interests of
access by disabled users, long-term preservation or where the
system prevents the exercise of statutory limitations and exceptions
under copyright law. In a random sample the Library discovered
that 28 out of 30 licenses offered by publishers and suppliers
were more restrictive in terms of rights than copyright law permits.
In other words, through new technology, the principles of copyright
law are being undermined.
69. A second area affecting statutory limitations
and exceptions to copyright concerns fair dealing and library
privilege. This is critical to the Library since these rights
underpin our ability to provide copies of in-copyright collection
material for the non-commercial research and study of our users,
either to take away from our reading rooms or for remote supply
through our document delivery services. The World Intellectual
Property Organisation is clear that digital is not different,
that these limitations and exceptions are equally applicable to
the digital as to the analogue environment. UK law is silent on
this matter, allowing some rightsholders to challenge the Library's
ability to supply copies of material electronically under library
privilege.
70. The Library is similarly concerned that,
under current copyright law, we are not able to make copies of
sound or film recordings for archive (preservation) purposes.
As we have seen in paragraph 21, the British Library Sound Archive
is one of the largest archives of music and other audio works
in the world. Many audio and film formats are fragile and transitory,
and they require the urgent creation of preservation surrogates.
Alongside the need to clarify the law in this respect, the Gowers
Review is in turn examining the length of copyright term in sound
recordings. The Library strongly believes that the current term
of 50 years strikes an adequate balance between rewarding the
creator and encouraging innovation and creativity in society through
the use of sound recordings by the public. Any extension (a term
of 95 years is mooted, taking almost the entirety of the UK's
audio history out of the public domain) would bring even more
material into copyright and therefore restrict still further the
making of copies for preservation, thereby increasing the likelihood
that the collection will suffer from decay and lower use.
71. The national library collection also
contains what are known as orphan works—published and unpublished
material where the copyright owner cannot be traced, despite reasonable
endeavours on the part of libraries, thus rendering it impossible
to secure specific permissions to reuse the material, for instance
in digitisation projects. For fear of subsequent legal challenge,
libraries and, indeed, publishers are reluctant to reuse these
works. Creating a framework for dealing with orphan works, preferably
one that mirrors the proposed "light-touch" approach
of the United States, is vital for ensuring digital access to
a large part of the national collection. An allied issue with
unpublished works created before 1989 is that they have a transitional
term of copyright protection to reflect their perpetual copyright
status under previous UK law; the Library contends that they should
be brought under the standard copyright term for literary works
of life plus 70 years.
Security
72. In caring for the collection, the Library
has to strike an appropriate balance between security on the one
hand and access by legitimate users on the other. These two interests
are, in essence, in constant tension with each other. The Library
takes a risk-based approach to the security of the collection,
built around a combination of physical security measures and robust
policies and procedures. In common with other national collections,
and in response to the well-publicised international threats to
cultural property, this is an area in which we have made increasing
investment, of money and of staff time, over recent years. A high-level
collection security steering group keeps the matter under constant
review, and is supported by operational staff, including a new
full-time post of head of collection security. Taskforces are
immediately convened to investigate major suspected incidents.
Fortunately, known thefts from, or serious damage to, the Library's
collection are relatively uncommon and, where they occur, they
are pursued vigorously by the Library, as will be evident from
the recent extensive media coverage of the Library's efforts to
secure justice in the case of Edward Forbes Smiley III, an American
dealer who stole antiquarian maps from seven public and private
collections, including from the British Library.
Deaccessioning
73. As part of its balanced and long-term
approach to the stewardship of the collection in its care, the
Library has developed a transparent policy on deaccessioning,
which is summarised on its website.[52]
This represents a combination of the statutory limitations on
the disposal of collection items, laid down by Section 11 of the
British Library Act 1972 in respect of material transferred from
the British Museum, and the policy on other collections of the
Library's Board, at any given time, which was last revised in
February 2003.
74. In summary, the Library has a cautious
approach to the disposal of collection items, in practice mainly
confined for printed items to the deaccessioning of duplicate
copies once the service requirement for duplication has elapsed
(a consideration which especially applies to superseded editions
of reference works and additional copies of journals purchased
to support the remote services of the document supply centre).
Requests to dispose of items held in a single copy require the
express permission of the Board. This caution reflects: the Library's
recognition that much of its collection is not to be found elsewhere
in the UK; the lessons learned from disposal exercises of the
1990s; and (as noted in para 45) an emerging buy-in from higher
education to the concept of the British Library providing a national
research reserve, as the most cost-effective way of the nation
preserving access in perpetuity to low-use library material. Beyond
this, the Library naturally also has to keep under continuous
review its policy on the print/digital transition for contemporary
publications, where the same content has become available in identical
or near-identical print and digital formats. Our current thinking
in this area is set out in Section 3.4 of our recent public consultation
document on our draft content strategy.[53]
Initial analysis of the responses indicates a broad stakeholder
endorsement of our intentions.
75. In these respects, the Library is in
a very different position to most museums and galleries. Within
the museums domain there has been a vigorous debate for the past
five years or so about whether it is right and proper for museums
to hold so many of their collections in reserve stores and for
them not to be exhibited to the public. The Museums Association
has recently announced an open consultation as part of its updating
of its own ethical guidelines on museum disposals.[54]
But artefacts are not the same as books. The role of research
libraries, and the British Library in particular, is conceptually
very different. Our primary purpose is not to exhibit, indeed
only around 1,000 of our 150 million collection items are physically
displayed to the public at any one time, but to build up collections
to support current and future research in our reading rooms and
via our remote services. Our measure of success is ultimately
not footfall through exhibition galleries but our ability to provide
researchers from all walks of life with the knowledge and resources
to undertake their enquiries, and the staff expertise which will
enable them to get the best out of those resources.
Cultural property
76. The same degree of due diligence which
applies to deacessioning also obtains in our management of cultural
property, the subset of our collection which has heritage status
or other cultural associations. The British Library's first full-time
cultural property manager took up post in October 2005. This was
also the first such post of its type in any national UK cultural
institution. The manager has been appointed to develop and lead
implementation of an overall strategy for the Library's holding
of significant cultural property, national as well as international,
taking account of the complex external environment of legislative
changes, and political, faith-related and other cultural sensitivities
in which the Library must operate.
77. The remit of the cultural property manager
at the Library therefore also includes questions of cultural restitution,
an area of notable media interest and coverage at present. Examples
from the Library's collections include the Beneventan Missal,
which came before the Spoliation Advisory Panel,[55]
and the Lindisfarne Gospels, the subject of a campaign to "restore"
to the North-East. The Library responds proactively to such questions
and is in a position to act on lessons learnt. The Library recognises
and values the international stewardship role it fulfils and believes
that it has an excellent record in curating its collection from
whatever part of the world, particularly in today's culturally
diverse Britain. As one of the world's foremost research libraries,
the Library collaborates internationally with other bodies and
institutions to increase the awareness, exploitation, and enjoyment
of its world heritage collection. The Library considers that there
is great educational and research value in maintaining the "universal
collection" built up in our institutions and where the products
of various cultures and civilisations can be seen together, compared
and contrasted—not only by the citizens of the UK but by
the many visitors every year from all parts of the world. This
position is similar to that now being actively articulated by
national museums and galleries.
78. A number of national and international
fora have considered the ethico-legal issues that arise from such
stewardship and considerable effort has been made to raise standards
of ethical and moral practice in museums and other institutions.[56]
It is increasingly possible that funding and good ethical practice
may become linked. There have been four broad categories of developments:
— non-binding codes which are
in effect mandatory or good practice;[57]
— Government advisory panels such
as, in the UK, the Spoliation Advisory Panel and the Illicit Trade
Advisory Panel;
— new legislation including, in
the UK, the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act 2003, the
Iraqi Sanctions Order 2003, and the Human Tissue Act 2004; and
— mooted or possible legislation,
such as implementation of the 1954 Hague Convention and Protocols,
legislation designed to curb the sanctioned seizure of art in
cross-border restitution claims, and the current Government consultation
on Holocaust era spoliation legislation.
79. Looking forwards, the Library is currently
codifying its due diligence requirements for prospective acquisitions.
This will ensure that the Library is observing the DCMS Due
Diligence Guidelines. In respect of its legacy collection,
the Library is undertaking an audit of its most culturally significant
material. It is expected that both these actions will reduce the
risk of the Library to spoliation and restitution claims for material
acquired in the future, and will enable the Library to more efficiently
deal with issues arising from past acquisitions. The Library has
also responded at length to all recent DCMS consultation papers
on subjects affecting the stewardship of cultural property, and
it maintains active links with sister cultural institutions, the
trade and other interested and knowledgeable parties.
Working in partnership
80. The British Library is a great historic
institution, with a critical mass of its own and a vibrant international
brand. However, it is not an island. In caring for its collection,
it seeks to work productively with a range of partners where there
is a demonstrable mutual benefit. Some specific collaborations
have already been noted throughout this document, for example
in paras 46-58 on preservation and conservation. Here are summarised
some of the more cross-cutting ones, affecting both the library
and archive domains.
81. As set out in Section 6.1 of our draft
content strategy,[58]
collecting and connecting to information resources are particularly
important as a basis for joint working, and we have a number of
well-established relationships in this field. The Library was
instrumental in the establishment and sponsorship of the British
Library/Higher Education Taskforce of 1999-2001, the Research
Support Libraries Group of 2002-0[59]
and the Research Information Network,[60]
which was launched in 2005 and has its administrative headquarters
at the Library. We have forged increasingly close links with higher
education research libraries in general and have been an active
full member since 2001 of the Consortium of Research Libraries
in the British Isles. We are working with the Joint Information
Systems Committee (JISC) to develop a UK e-content policy framework
to enable public sector organisations to collaborate and co-ordinate
their e-content activities, making best use of limited resources.
82. We partner with individual libraries
in specific acquisition areas, such as with the London School
of Economics and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies of the
University of London, to improve national provision of overseas
official publications, statistics, gazettes and law. In respect
of the UK, we have strong links with the other legal deposit libraries,
not least the National Library of Wales and the National Library
of Scotland, and we provide extensive leadership to the national
library and information community, in professional areas (such
as the development of standards) and in policy areas, as evidenced
by our leadership of a national consortium to secure improvements
to Clause 2 of what is now the Terrorism Act 2006 and to highlight
inadequacies in the current regime of intellectual property rights
(see paras 67-71). Our library partnerships are also truly global.
We have been a major player in the creation of The European Library
and work especially closely with libraries in Europe, the United
States and Asia.
83. We have increasingly formal relationships
with a range of funding bodies and sponsors. Memoranda are in
place with the Higher Education Funding Council England,[61]
the Arts and Humanities Research Council (with whom we now have
Academic Analogue status),[62]
and JISC,[63]
and we are working towards an agreement with the Economic and
Social Research Council. We have attracted £10 million from
the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund to administer an Endangered
Archives Programme,[64]
seeking to identify archival materials at risk in the developing
world, to arrange their transfer to a safe archival haven in the
country or region of origin, and to create surrogate copies for
distribution by the Library. This exemplifies how the Library's
standing in the archives domain is gaining increasing recognition,
and we are in discussion with the National Council on Archives
to see how our expertise and reputation may be better harnessed.
We are working with The National Archives on a range of joint
activities, including conservation research for libraries and
archives. We similarly have much contact with the MLA, at both
national level and through the new regional partnerships (where
we have worked especially closely in the South-East and North-East).
We have long-standing links with many of the major scholarly publishers
and have recently concluded an innovative hybrid business model
agreement with Thomson Gale to make available our collection of
out-of-copyright British newspapers online. We are similarly working
with Microsoft as a technology partner for our Digital Object
Management programme and as sponsor of a project to digitise and
make freely available a substantial number of our nineteenth-century
books.
84. While we do not underestimate the challenges
of partnership working, including the management overhead, we
believe that the Library's reasoned and selective approach to
collaboration is paying dividends in terms of the stewardship
of our collection and the services we offer to researchers and
the public, and offers an additional return to the nation on the
investment which is made through grant-in-aid in the British Library.
SECTION 3—CONCLUSIONS
Access
85. The biggest strength of the Library's
collection is that it is accessible to researchers from a variety
of backgrounds and research needs and, in a digital environment,
is becoming more accessible with our ongoing partnership work
on cataloguing and digitisation. Care of the collection is inconceivable
without access. We are continually seeking to expand our accessible
material to benefit the research base in the UK and abroad. In
order to maintain the rapid progress of opening up the collection,
the Library needs both continued public investment and to repeat
successful projects with the private sector. There is a risk that
any reductions in core funding, including in staff expertise so
carefully built up over the years, will lead to a slowing of this
process and compromise the Library's excellent progress on access.
Acquisitions funding
86. In his evidence to the House of Commons
Education and Skills Committee, Sir Brian Follett, the leading
proponent of collaborative research library solutions in the UK,
commented that: "without the provision of resources at the
British Library, university libraries would have to increase their
expenditure on books and periodicals from approximately £150
million a year to around £400 million a year." The Committee
report itself concluded that the Library's support here is invaluable,
stating that "we are proud that the British Library is recognised
as a world leader and we pay tribute to its work in providing
research resources for higher education and for enterprise".
The centralised model for library support for research implied
in the onsite and remote services of the British Library thus
represents tremendous value for money. It is in the national interest
to do everything possible to maintain the Library's purchasing
power in real terms into the medium-term future.
87. Against such a background, the Library
is naturally apprehensive about the outcomes of the forthcoming
Spending Review, in preparation for which we have been asked to
model the impact of real-terms cuts building up to 15% and 21%
by year three. If the 15% were to be applied to the Library's
acquisition budget, and taking account of the differential inflation
on publications (see para 31), we would suffer a permanent drop
of 45% in purchasing power over three years. This would have a
devastating impact upon our ability to underpin the UK's research
in all its forms, at a time when researchers are increasingly
looking to us for research information provision and support (see
paragraphs 33-34). Such a shortfall could not be made up elsewhere.
It is impossible to raise money for purchasing current publications,
which are naturally seen as a core responsibility of Government
for a national library, and it is increasingly difficult to raise
money for heritage acquisitions in a more competitive fundraising
environment. Our collection is at the heart of what the Library
is and does; if investment in it is not sustained, we will be
quickly relegated to the ranks of the second-rate.
88. More specifically, the British Library
is working with other institutions to protect the UK's intellectual
and cultural heritage and would like the Committee to note the
importance of heritage acquisitions to the UK collection.
Physical storage
89. The British Library's collection is
growing at a fast but steady rate, and therefore continued investment
is needed to ensure that new and existing materials have the space
to be stored and at the required British Standard. DCMS has hitherto
been supportive of the Library's Additional Storage Programme,
where capital funding has been provided since SR2002. The programme
is incomplete, and additional investment is still required to
meet three needs:
— revenue costs associated with
the substantial book moves which will have to take place when
the first new storage building at Boston Spa is finished in 2008;
— capital costs for a new storage
facility for newspapers (discussed in the next paragraph); and
— capital costs for a cold storage
facility for film-based media such as microform.
90. The national newspaper collection, housed
at Colindale in North London, is one of the largest and most important
historical collections of newspapers in the world, with many unique
holdings, but it is under threat from its own fragility. Current
storage conditions are not fit for purpose, in terms of temperature,
humidity and other environmental controls. It has already been
noted (para 46) that newspapers present our greatest preservation
challenge, with 15% of the collection now inaccessible for research
due to the deterioration of the newsprint. Moreover, Colindale
will be operationally full by the end of next year. A twin-track
solution is required. On the one hand, the creation of digital
or other surrogates will help preserve the collection and facilitate
greater access, especially through our reading rooms, alongside
the rest of our collection. We will be bidding for funds from
a variety of non-Government sources to enable this strand, in
particular through a continuation of our digitisation programme.
On the other hand, the transfer of the physical newspaper collection
to environmentally-controlled storage will greatly enhance its
longevity, and we are looking to Government to make this investment,
to secure the future of this critical component of the national
heritage.
Digital initiatives
91. In addition to addressing the pressures
on physical storage, the British Library is committed to storage,
preservation and access to its growing digital asset base. Much
of this material is only available in electronic form, not least
websites, and a considerable quantity has already been lost for
good. Our responsibilities in this area should increase significantly
as the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 takes progressive effect.
The outputs of our digitisation programme will also be important
and augment this digital collection. This is a major part of our
vision for a 21st century library—opening up the collection
through a variety of digital means, wherever possible, beyond
the physical confines of the Library, and making it accessible
to new audiences that wish to research. To do this, we look to
Government for support:
— to sustain our investment in
the Digital Object Management programme (para 54);
— to accelerate, so far as practicable,
the implementation of the non-print provisions of the Legal Deposit
Libraries Act 2003 (paragraphs 23-28); and
— to ensure that the intellectual
property framework is modernised for an e-environment (paragraphs
67-71).
Summary
92. In summary, we look to the support of
the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee for:
— the Library's ongoing work in
building, managing, providing access to, and in ensuring long-term
preservation of, its world-class collection, as described in Section
2;
— the good progress being achieved
by the Library in attracting new audiences and in providing access
to all those with an interest in researching any aspect of the
collection both via the reading rooms and remotely, including
through digitisation (paras 59-66 and 85);
— the importance of sustaining
the real terms' value of the Library's acquisitions budget in
general, given its underpinning role vis-a"-vis the
UK research environment (paras 29-34 and 86-87);
— the importance of heritage acquisitions
in maintaining the record of the intellectual heritage of the
UK and the initiative of the Library in establishing a Working
Group on the United Kingdom Literary Heritage (paras 35-40);
— the importance of completing
the Library's Additional Storage Programme to ensure that the
national collection is housed in fit-for-purpose storage with
controlled environmental conditions meeting British Standard BS5454
(2000) (paras 41-45 and 89-90);
— investment in the digital infrastructure
required to preserve and to provide long-term access to the UK's
national electronic published archive (paras 54-58 and 91).
93. The British Library stands ready to
give further oral evidence following this submission as required.
September 2006
1 "We strongly support the British Library in
its endeavours to continue its digitalisation of internationally
important books and manuscripts. We recommend that, wherever possible,
those images should be freely available on the Internet. We consider
that support for this process should be considered a high priority
for Lottery or Government funding as appropriate. It should be
the Government's avowed aim to establish the British Library as
a hub for the United Kingdom and the international library network.
This will enable the British Library to become a universal resource
rather than the preserve of a relatively small number of users
on the site-a library for the many not just for the few. The expansion
of the British Library's role should not be at the expense of
and should in no way compromise the performance of the British
Library's core statutory functions"-Sixth Report of the Culture
Media and Sport Committee, Session 1999-2000, Public Libraries,
HC 241, p 86. Back
2
Measuring our Value: Results of an Independent Economic Impact
Study Commissioned by the British Library to Measure the Library's
Direct and Indirect Value to the UK Economy, 2003. Back
3
The British Library: Providing Services Beyond the Reading Rooms,
National Audit Office, 2004, HC 879, http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/nao_reports/03-04/0304879.pdf Back
4
Redefining the Library: The British Library's Strategy, 2005-08,
British Library, 2005 http://www.bl.uk/about/strategy.html Back
5
A collaboration between University College London Library Services
and the British Library; for more information please see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/lifeproject/.
LIFE developed a methodology for analysing and costing the life
cycle of a collection of digital materials. It tested this methodology
by applying it to real life collections in a number of case studies
and also developed a model for estimating the preservation costs
of a digital object's life cycle. For an overview of the concept
of life cycle collection management by a member of the British
Library's staff, see Helen Shenton, "Life Cycle Collection
Management", LIBER Quarterly, Vol 13, No 3/4, 2003,
http://liber.library.uu.nl/ Back
6
From The British Library Act 1972, http://www.bl.uk/about/blact.html
one Back
7
For more information about the Library's collection, see http://www.bl.uk/collections/ Back
8
For further statistics on our overall holdings and annual acquisitions
please see the latest annual report at http://www.bl.uk/about/annual/2005to2006/pdf/stats.pdf Back
9
http://www.bl.uk/about/strategic/growmannatcoll.html Back
10
Please see http://www.bl.uk/about/strategic/contentstrategy.html Back
11
For an introduction to many of the events and issues summarised
in this section, see Clive D Field, "Securing Digital Legal
Deposit in the UK: The Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003",
Alexandria, Vol 16, No 2, 2004, pp 87-111. This article
includes the text of the 2003 Act. Back
12
http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/Libraries/legal_deposit/ Back
13
http://www.webarchive.org.uk; see also Steve Bailey and Dave
Thompson, "UKWAC: Building the UK's First Public Web Archive",
D-Lib Magazine, Vol 12, No 1, January 2006, http://www.dlib.org Back
14
See http://www.bl.uk/collections/britirish/pdf/modbritcdpwebsites.pdf
for the Library's collection development policy for websites. Back
15
http://www.netpreserve.org Back
16
http://www.bl.uk/news/2006/pressrelease20060925a.html Back
17
http://www.rslg.ac.uk Back
18
Currently, for instance, 50 journal titles are participating
in Oxford Journals open access experiment to assess the implications
for authors, publishers and researchers. Please see http://www.oxfordjournals.org/oxfordopen/ Back
19
http://www.bl.uk/news/2006/pressrelease20060731a.html Back
20
"There are changes in the trends observed for the serials
collection. The growth in titles per academic staff member has
slowed, and there is increasing diversity between the sectors.
The proportion obtained in printed format continues to fall. Information
provision expenditure has kept pace with academic book price inflation
over the last five years, but not with increases in serials prices."
SCONUL Library Statistics: Trends 1994-95 to 2004-05, SCONUL,
2006, Executive Summary, p 2, and see also pp 29-30. Back
21
Securing the Best for Our Museums: Private Giving and Government
Support, Her Majesty's Treasury, 2004, http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk./media/B9D/02/ACF10B6.pdf Back
22
The Collecting Challenge: The Art Fund Museum Survey, 2006, Art
Fund, 2006, http://www.artfund.org/news/pdf/Collecting%20Challenge.pdf Back
23
Hansard, Lords, Vol 676, Cols 1109-1111. Back
24
Hansard, Lords, Vol 684, Cols 1540-1544. Back
25
Nicolas Barker, "What Price Our Literary heritage?",
Times Literary Supplement, 21 June 2006. Back
26
http://www.bl.uk/news/2006/pressrelease20060821.html Other notable
acquisitions during the past year or so include: six Latin and
Greek manuscripts collected by Sir Thomas Phillipps; the thirteenth-century
cartulary of Otterton Priory; a Flemish book of hours from the
early fifteenth century; a unique copy of the first printed mathematical
book in English, 1537; My Ladye Nevells Booke of keyboard music
from Tudor England; a unique collation of Abraham Ortelius's atlas
of the late sixteenth century; the only example of a dramatist's
"foul papers" to have survived from Shakespeare's day;
Joseph Haydn's music publishing contract, 1796; correspondence
of Queen Victoria to 1st Viscount Cross; correspondence of the
Victorian philanthropist, Angela Burdett Coutts; papers of the
novelist and short story-writer, Angela Carter; correspondence
of film critic and writer, Dilys Powell; sketches and drafts of
the composer, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Back
27
The Library is extremely appreciative of the support which we
have received from each of these funds during recent years, but
we are aware of the enormous demands placed on them, and we share
the anxieties of other collecting institutions about the challenges
which Lottery funding may face on account of the 2012 London Olympic
Games. Back
28
http://www.friendsofnationalllibraries.org.uk Back
29
Occasionally, but much less commonly than in the past, the Library
also receives substantial donations and bequests of collections,
recent examples being: the archive of Sir William Henry Fox Talbot,
the father of modern photography; and the Oscar Wilde collection
formed by Mary Hyde Eccles. Back
30
This is one of a number of areas in the archive domain where
we are recognised by The National Archives as having a leadership
role for the development of a national collecting strategy. Another
example would be the archiving of websites. Back
31
Additional British Library background to this section may be
found in: Helen Shenton, "The Future Shape of Collection
Storage" and Dawn Olney, "A UK First: An Automated High-Density
Storage Solution for the British Library", Where Shall We
Put It? Spotlight on Collection Storage Issues, edited by John
Webster, National Preservation Office, 2005, pp 4-15 and 58-63
respectively; and Helen Shenton, "Strategic Developments
in Collection Storage of Libraries and Archives: Architectural,
Technical, Political", LIBER Quarterly, Vol 15, No 3/4, 2005,
http://www.webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/aq/liber/lq-3-05/Shenton.pdf Back
32
It is believed that little more than 10% of the collective holdings
of higher education libraries are not represented in the British
Library's collection. Back
33
http://www.bl.uk/about/cooperation/whiterose.html Back
34
http://www.curl.ac.uk/projects/CollaborativeStorage/Home.htm Back
35
Conservation: interventive treatment to collection items that
have been damaged through use, and/or have deteriorated through
chemical and environmental factors. Back
36
Preservation: activity aimed at preventing damage to the collections
(such as training in handling, disaster preparedness, collection
salvage, and risk mitigation). Also termed "preventive conservation". Back
37
The roundtable resulted in publication of The Future Life
of Collections, British Library, 2005, http://www.bl.uk/about/collectioncare/pdf/futurelife.pdf Back
38
The written evidence is available at http://www.bl.uk/about/collectioncare/new.html£houseoflords;
or http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/st2BL.pdf Back
39
The transcript of the oral evidence given by Dr Clive Field and
Helen Shenton is at http:www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld/lduncorr/s&tii2504.pdf Back
40
http://www.dpconline.org Back
41
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars Back
42
http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON Back
43
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Is/lifeproject Back
44
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-21EcmaPR.mspx Back
45
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html Back
46
http://www.bl.uk/news/2006/pressrelease20060926.html Back
47
See above, footnote 4. Back
48
See above, footnote 6. Back
49
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/whatson/whatson.html Back
50
http://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/ipmanifesto.pdf Back
51
See, for instance, http://www.bl.uk/news/2006/pressrelease20060607.html Back
52
http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/bldeaccess.html Back
53
http://www.bl.uk/contentstrategy Back
54
http://www.museumsassociation.org/disposal&-IXPOS-=manews1.4 Back
55
http://www.culture.gov.uk/Reference_library/Publications/archive_2005/rpt_spoliation_advisory_panel.htm Back
56
1970 is now widely accepted as a turning-point in the history
of international efforts to curb the illicit trade in cultural
property. The date was in effect set by the UNESCO Convention
on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import,
Export, and Transfer of Cultural Property, 1970. Subsequently
international conventions and UK legislation have recognised this
date as the practical threshold. Back
57
For instance, International Council of Museums, Code of Ethics
for Museums, 1986, Museums Association, Code of Practice for Governing
Bodies, 1994, Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, Conference Principles
on Nazi-Confiscated Art, 1998, National Museums Directors Conference,
spoliation section on their website (from 2000, and members continue
to publish lists of spoliated material); Museums and Galleries
Commission, Restitution and Repatriation: Guidelines for Good
Practice, 2000, National Museum Directors' Conference, updated
Statement of Principles and Proposed Actions, 2004. Back
58
http://www.bl.uk/contentstrategy Back
59
http://www.rslg.ac.uk Back
60
http://www.rin.ac.uk Back
61
http://www.bl.uk/cgi-bin/press.cgi?story=1231 Back
62
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/ahrb/website/news/news_pr/2006/new_funding-opportunities_for_uk_museums_galleries.asp Back
63
http://www.bl.uk/news/2005/pressrelease20050613.html Back
64
http://www.bl.uk/endangeredarchives Back
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