Exploring the world's knowledge in the digital age

Abstract

The advent of the digital age has brought about a dramatic change in the techniques for the dissemination of, and access to, historical documents. For today's researcher, the internet is a primary source of the tools and information that supports their research. The British Library (BL) provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. The British Library's collections include 150 million items from every era of written human history beginning with Chinese oracle bones dating from 300 BC, right up to the latest e-journals. For almost 20 years the British Library has been engaged in transforming physical collection items into digital form enabling access to that content over the World Wide Web.In this talk, I describe the depth and range of the collections that are held at the British Library. I will outline the digital conversion process we undertake, including our current solutions for digital formats, metadata standards, providing access to the content and preserving the digital outputs in perpetuity. Finally, as the British Library undertakes projects that will digitise millions of pages of historical text based items, I will look at the challenges we face, such as storage requirements and enhancing resource discovery, and how are we addressing those challenges.