This evening I attended this – and have just collected all tweets from the evening:
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#BLGEW15 ‘Profit with a Purpose
Tag: British Library
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Digital Archives
Digital content has been around for 20+ years, and is now formally being collected.
All British print publications have been held by the libraries since 1662. But from today, says Lucie Burgess, the library’s head of content strategy, this has been extended “to capture the digital universe as well”.
The 4.8 million websites using the .uk domain will all be collected and made accessible from January 2014, though certain material will be available earlier. Other British websites with .org and .com domain names should follow soon after.
Read full article… what further ramifications does this mean for a society in which we say that our past is all recorded? As a historian I’m thinking, even if it all is, we’re going to be selective in what we search for/access, and how it’s categorised will change access…
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The British Library and Data
The British Library is rising to the challenges posed by the creative chaos of the digital age, says outgoing chief executive Lynne BrindleyThe banking system may have lost public trust, but great libraries such as the British Library, which contain the DNA of civilisation, have the public interest built into their core values.
Those values – which also include independence, integrity and longevity – must be maintained. But as I reflect on my glorious, exciting and rewarding 12 years as chief executive of the British Library, it strikes me that the challenge for such institutions today is to continue to reposition their role in the “always on” digital culture, which submerges scholars, consumers and citizens alike in a deluge of data.
The British Library’s purpose has always been to acquire, preserve, organise and give access to information: the intellectual, scientific and cultural memory of the nation, exercised through statute. Our far-sighted predecessors ensured that any book published in the UK could be made available in a reading room in perpetuity. Today our remit extends into the digital sphere, with prospective regulations set to charge us with avoiding a “digital black hole” in material relating to the 21st century.
Read full story.
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/32104790@N02/4051917129/
As someone who spent hours and hours in the Newspaper archives at Colindale, this is exceptionally good news. It’s also interesting to see that the documents are not being scanned simply as electronic-paper, but there are plans to use that digital information to create an ‘encyclopedia of memory’, a ‘national memory’. Interestingly, the project is being worked on by the people behind Genes Reunited (yes, the people behind Friends Reunited… my first social network!)… due to issues of copyright, the current plans are to digitise to 1900, although the expectation is that it will continue to at least World War I/The Suffragettes, and then much more difficult discussions have to take place! The website, when ready, will be free if you’re at Colindale (which I thought had closed down!), but for ‘a modest sum’ for internet users (better than the long journey out, I guess!)
“It’s an absolute fact. The history of the newspaper publishing industry is the history of failure,” says Ed King, the charismatic head of the British Library‘s newspaper collection. King paints a bleak picture – but he is overseeing the library’s ambitious attempt to make millions of pages of yesterday’s chip paper available online for the first time. This, he claims, could give “short-lived, ephemeral titles” a second birth.
The library is one year into its plan to digitise 40m news pages from its vast 750m collection, housed in Colindale, north London. This autumn, the library will reinvent its cavernous vaults as a website, where amateur genealogists and eager historians will be able to browse 19th-century newsprint from their home computer.
“This is going to be a huge bonus for us,” says King, one of Britain’s most celebrated librarians. “It’s been available for 80 years here. It will now be further available much, much more widely than just here, so people don’t have to come up the Northern Line.”
Read full story in yesterday’s Guardian.
The British Library’s new researcher-in-residence will use both her media and academic expertise, writes Hannah Fearn
With an enviable career as a television presenter and popular technology pundit, entry into the academy seemed an unlikely path for Aleks Krotoski.
But a year after completing a PhD at the University of Surrey, she has found the ideal post, which allows her to do work with “academic rigour” and to make the most of her ability to inspire non-specialist audiences about the potential of emerging technologies.
Dr Krotoski was this week unveiled as researcher-in-residence for the British Library’s forthcoming exhibition Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research.
The exhibition, held in partnership with Times Higher Education, will showcase current and future technologies that could revolutionise the conduct of research the world over. The British Library’s partners include technology companies such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, and institutions such as Brown University in the US. Input will also be sought from other leading libraries such as the New York Public Library and Columbia University’s library.
- Read full story
- Read about ‘Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research‘, which runs from 12th October 2010 to 16th July 2011
- Follow @aleksk on Twitter