Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The British Library must therefore not only continue to increase its
collection of print material through legal deposit, but also extend its
collection building to digital content. The idea of legal deposit dates
back several hundred years and is well suited to print publications, but
it does not work well in the e-environment. With an increasing volume
of important material published in e-format, primary legislation for
extending legal deposit to electronic publications has been in place since
2003, but progress towards the secondary legislation has been slow.
There are a number of reasons for this. First, there is the issue of the
place of publication. In the print world it is fairly easy to identify the
place where an item was published, but when material is published on
the internet, traditional boundaries are removed. An item published in
one country can be easily accessed elsewhere, and other countries may
want to archive it and their users may want to access it.
The second issue is the funding, the development and, more crucially,
the sustainability of the robust technical architecture required to
archive and preserve huge amounts of digital information. The
technological issues lie not only with the infrastructure but also with
the processes that will allow the content to be read by future
generations. Technology transfers in recent history have illustrated the
problem. For example, information stored just a few years ago on floppy
discs might well by now have become corrupted, even if a machine
could still be located to provide access to the stored information. The
issue of technical obsolescence has to be addressed if the British Library
is not to amass a collection of bytes than cannot be read.
Perhaps the most challenging issue is how the British Library
provides access to this vast array of born-digital content. The role which
national libraries undertake in preserving material for the long term
does not equate to making that material available over the internet.
The British Library does indeed provide open access to its catalogue and
it has also digitized and made available online much of the material in
its out-of-copyright collections. Moreover, it has digitized and made
available other collections where copyright still applies, notably many
thousands of pages of newspaper archives and many hours of audio
recordings. Although these digitized collections are available on the
internet, they are only accessible via an authentication system. This
means that only UK higher and further education institutions that sign
