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Abstract
The new information and communications technologies (ICTs) have stimulated a wide-ranging debate on the future of learning institutions in the age of the ‘network society’. Recent academic commentary has tended to equate globalized information networks with commodification, the delocalization of learning, and threats to the public service traditions of higher education. This paper investigates the extensive programme of digitisation now under way at the British Library (BL), one of the world's largest knowledge providers and a key player in the UK research libraries network. The findings presented in the paper do not reflect the belief that the spread of global information networks will undermine the public service remit of large knowledge providers such as the BL – but the evidence does show that these providers are becoming more connected to other players in the digital environment, with inherently complex, and potentially far-reaching implications for the production of knowledge in the emergent ‘network society’.
Notes
1 For an overview see Hand Citation(2003).
2 An important distinction to emerge from debate in the last few years is that between entirely new entities (for example Jones International University) and existing institutions (Baer Citation2002; Cornford Citation2000; Harris Citation2000).
3 The principle of ‘last resort’ access through legal deposit libraries, available for printed publications since 1911, was extended to electronic resources by the legal Deposit Libraries Act of 2003 as this paper was being drafted.
4 A recent report from the House of Commons Education and Skills Select Committee identified the British Library as a national resource for the UK higher education (HE) sector. (House of Commons Education and Skills Committee 2002). In July 2002 the government published Investment in Innovation, a report on science engineering and technology; this acknowledged ‘the value placed on the BL as a resource for scientific researchers in the UK, both public and private’.
5 The recent White Paper on ‘The future of higher education’ argues that the BL should focus its efforts in three main areas: its contribution to the effectiveness of the UK HE sector as a provider of knowledge and information services; its contribution to excellence in teaching through digital and other resources; and its role as a provider of resources for corporate and business users (DfES 2003). Successive annual general reports (available at www.bl.uk/news/report/html) have affirmed the library's public sector remit to engage with five major user constituencies: the UK HE sector; business users; school students and teachers; lifelong learners and the general public.
6 Holdings at the library's Boston Spa repository include an estimated 283,000 journal titles, 3 million books, 433,000 conference proceedings, 5 million reports, 150,000 UK theses and 47 million patents. The BL estimates that its document supply service is used by 90 per cent of the UK's top R&D scoreboard companies. EDD is also aimed at the growing number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) making use of library resources.
7 Electronic files supplied to users are scanned from material held as hard copy by the library. The Adobe Reader software ‘wraps’ the electronic document in a securely encrypted file, rendering it immune to unauthorized copying, or further file transfer. The BL currently supplies PDF files of journal articles from over 2500 titles.
8 The Electronic Beowulf project, begun in 1993, uses digital imaging and network technology to provide enhanced public access to rare documents. Selected images from the project were among the first pictures of medieval manuscripts to be mounted on the Internet. In April 1998 the library launched Turning the Pages. This project created virtual objects from four of the Library's greatest treasures: the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Diamond Sutra, the Sforza Hours and the Leonardo Notebook. The current version of Turning the Pages is based on 3D software and is displayed to the public on a 37-inch touchscreen designed to give the sensation of leafing through a rare volume.
9 Social inclusion and widening access to BL content and services was a prominent theme in the New Strategic Directions policy review carried out in 2001 and it has featured in successive annual reports.
10 The National Opportunities Fund (NOF) provided £3.2 million for hardware and for the salaries of trained digitizers and metadata creators. The BL invested a further £2 million in collection management systems and curatorial expertise.
11 One senior member of staff interviewed noted that the project was designed around the need for a regional appeal which would help to overcome the perception of the BL as an ‘elitist’ ‘metropolitan’ institution. Another interviewee stated that the project provided a way of ‘making the national library fully national’. The project was also shaped by broader definitions of British citizenship – the content includes material from the home countries of UK citizens from South Asia and the Caribbean.
12 This project received substantial financial support from HM Treasury's Invest to Save Budget. The contract to design ‘Twenty First Century Citizen’ was awarded to Worth Media, an interactive media agency specializing in education and health. The web resource includes text, images, manuscripts, mapping, statistics and sound recordings from the collections of the three partners. The style of the support materials and activities will encourage an enquiry-based approach to learning about controversial contemporary issues.
13 This included the recruitment of specially appointed creative research fellows (funded by Pearson Education) and close engagement between the BL education service and teachers in creating interpretive content and courseware. This approach was in accord with plans for the BL to become a supporting partner to the DfES in specific areas of innovative pedagogy. Plans to extend Collect Britain beyond the duration of the NOF project anticipated the creation of digital environments that would allow individuals and groups to make formal or informal ‘learning journeys’ through BL web resources.
14 The RLSG was established in 2001 by the four UK higher education funding councils, the British Library and the national libraries of Scotland and Wales. The RLSG final report is based on extensive surveys of researchers' needs over a 10-year planning horizon.
15 JISC is responsible for the maintenance of the JANET network and for delivering the national electronic research network. The Follett committee review of the JISC (www.jisc.ac.uk/pub01/follett.html) noted that the JISC ‘has been very successful in managing national resources for community-wide benefit’.
16 The shared licensing of electronic resources has been achieved through the National Electronic Site Licensing Initiative (NESLI). This has apparently met with some success in leveraging lower prices and reducing the burden on individual university libraries to negotiate licences.
17 The Society for College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) estimates that spending on electronic resources has rise from close to zero to more than 10 per cent of information provision expenditure.
18 The RLSG survey findings show significant differences in patterns of information use across different academic disciplines: 75 per cent of researchers in the sciences now view electronic access to e-journals and electronic full text services as essential, compared with 57 per cent in social sciences and 22 per cent in the humanities. Some 60 per cent of scholars in the humanities expect their use of electronic journals to increase in the next 10 years and the RLSG reports that ‘even in those disciplines where electronic resources have made a heavy impact, there is no sign of hard copy resources being abandoned’ (RLSG Citation2003, para 29).
19 Holdings of serials in individual libraries are both under-exploited (because it is difficult to establish what is available across the library system) and in need of rationalization, in large part because academic libraries will typically retain very substantial back runs of rarely used serials. The RSLG argues that action to remedy this situation is beyond the capacity of individual libraries working in isolation: it requires collaboration on collection mapping and assessment on a national scale.
20 The report notes increasing support for the development of ‘open access’ publication and new pricing models – notably the Budapest Open Access Initiative (RSLG 2003, para 31) and the new titles set up with the support of the Scholarly Publication and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). A significant UK development is the JISC-sponsored SHERPA project, which is currently exploring the use of new electronic formats for the self-archiving of scholarly output (www.jisc.ac.uk/sherpa). The RSLG anticipates that subject-specific portals will eventually incorporate additional value-added services that meet the resource discovery needs of researchers.