British Library praised for e-access
The British Library has been praised by the National Audit Office (NAO) for its response to the information age.
Sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the British Library had a turnover of £121 million a year.
It contains more that 150 million items representing every age of written civilisation, including manuscripts, printed matter, sound recordings, and digital material.
Key upcoming digitalisation projects include placing over one million pages of 19th Century newspapers online. In June it also announced that it would be seeking to achieve around 6000 web pages to provide a snapshot of online activity.
The NAO finds that the Library has undergone “significant and beneficial organisational change”
Sir John Bourn, head of the NAO, said: “The Library is providing an important range of services beyond its reading rooms, which are generally of a high quality. It deserves much credit for responding well to the increased competition to its document supply services and for the other improvements it is making to its remote services.
“Digitisation has proved to be popular. For example, it gives us the opportunity to virtually “turn” the pages of manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. It is important that the Library and other organisations collaborate to exploit fully the great opportunities for providing materials of relevance to a wide range of users.”
However, the watchdog also warns that the Library needs to care to ensure that its digital material can still be accessed beyond the short to medium term. There are concerns that some of the digitalised material may not be accessible to future generations if technology changes rapidly.
Also, as the Library is dependent upon external funding for its digitisation project, it needs to work on maintaining the images, rather than simply creating them, and is urged to collaborate with other digital collects to share best practise.
A spokesperson for the British Library told politics.co.uk that they were very pleased with the report, particularly the recognition that they have undergone significant restructuring and offer services beyond the traditional reading rooms for academics.
It will review the NAO’s recommendations and a request for digital maintenance funding is likely to feature in its next spending review bid.
The library sees digitalisation as a way of communicating with a wider audience, and in September will launch a major new online collection entitled “Collect Britain”. This, funded by the New Opportunities Fund, aims to cover as many aspects of Britain as possible, and will include music, maps and examples of dialect from the Library’s collections.
