Reflecting a changing world
British Library opens consultation on new content strategy
As the amount of information produced and consumed around the world increases at an unprecedented rate - and appears in diverse and rapidly evolving formats - how are national libraries to ensure that they continue to collect material that is important and relevant to researchers now and for generations to come?
This is the question at the heart of the British Library's content strategy, which will be offered for wide-ranging consultation tomorrow (25 April 2006), and which will help determine the Library's purchasing priorities for the coming years.
The strategy relates mainly to international material that the Library collects using its acquisition budget (currently around £15m p.a.) - which is in addition to UK material received by the Library via legal deposit.
Key changes proposed in the strategy include:
- Overseas collecting to take greater account of changing patterns of international research, with more priority given to China, India, Anglophone Africa and Latin America;
- Increased focus on certain areas of the social sciences, including international law, politics, economics and social policy;
- Increased focus on non-textual materials such as primary research data and visual/audio-visual collections;
- An accelerated shift to electronic formats in some areas - for example, 'grey literature' and conference proceedings - to respond to moves from print-based publishing to online-only distribution;
- Supplementing existing strengths in manuscripts and archives with a greater focus on e-manuscripts - for example by collecting digital archives from key literary, political and scientific figures;
- Review of purchasing strategy for overseas newspapers to ensure collecting is fully aligned with existing areas of particular depth (Middle East, South Asia, Eastern Europe and North America).
To read the strategy in full go to: /aboutus/stratpolprog/contstrat/
The publication of the content strategy on 25 April 2006 marks the start of a 12-week consultation period during which the Library hopes to generate an ongoing dialogue with users and other stakeholders. After the closing date (21 July 2006) feedback will be analysed and a summary of views expressed will be made available at the end of the year. The content strategy will then be revised as appropriate and rolled out through 2007.
"As we made clear in our recently published strategy, Redefining the Library: The British Library's Strategy 2005-2008, the traditional model of collecting and providing access to information now needs to be adapted to engage with a transformed research environment", concludes Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library. "To do this successfully it's essential that we consult our users and stakeholders about how we can best reflect the realities of a rapidly changing world while building on the existing strengths of our historic collections."
For further information please contact: Ben Sanderson at the British Library Press Office (telephone +44 (0)1937 546126, email: ben.sanderson@bl.uk) or Lawrence Christensen (telephone +44 (0)20 7412 7114, email: lawrence.christensen@bl.uk)
Notes for Editors
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It 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 today's newspapers.
The Executive Summary of the content strategy is as follows:
"The beginning of the twenty-first century is a unique point in the history of the whole information sector, and of libraries in particular. Society is experiencing an unprecedented increase in the volume of information that is produced and consumed. At the same time, the internet has opened up entirely new ways of creating, disseminating and searching for information. Libraries, whose traditional model of collecting information and providing access to it has been unchallenged for centuries, now need to adapt to new paradigms. This challenge is made clear in the British Library's recently published strategy, Redefining the Library: The British Library's strategy 2005-2008.
As the national library of the UK the British Library plays a crucial two-fold role within the UK's knowledge sector. First, through our status as a legal deposit library we are a trusted repository for all UK publications: we are thus a keeper of the UK's cultural, scientific and intellectual memory. Second, we have a broad responsibility to serve the information needs of everyone in the UK who is doing research, for academic, commercial, public service or personal reasons. This requires us to provide access to materials from around the world as well as those from our UK legal deposit intake. However, the rate of growth in global publishing and the changes in research and communications brought about by new technologies mean that for materials that do not fall under legal deposit we must continually prioritise what we collect and increasingly seek to augment our own holdings by connecting with the content held by others. We must develop a 'content strategy', not simply a 'collection development strategy', if we are to remain one of the great research libraries in the twenty-first century.
The Library views this document as the first part of what will initially be a two-stage process. In this first stage we have articulated the overarching principles of our content strategy, and in addition have applied these in some detail to the areas of arts & humanities and social sciences . In a second, later, stage, we will consult on our science/technology/medicine (STM) strategy. This paper will look at our STM content strategy but also at service issues, including for example the future direction for our document supply service.
For the first time the Library has developed content strategies for broad disciplines (see Appendix 1) rather than our more traditional approach of geographic areas. In addition, we have articulated content strategies for special formats of material (see Appendix 2). We hope that these will form a starting point for a continuing dialogue with our users and stakeholders about how we can best meet their needs today and in the future.
To meet the needs of researchers and respond to the accelerating changes in scholarly publishing and communication, we are shifting incrementally towards collecting more of our purchased intake in digital form. This change applies particularly to science, technology and medicine (STM) journals at present, but we expect it will increasingly impact on other disciplines and formats too.
Certain important aspects of our content strategy will not change, for example: we will continue to collect UK print legal deposit material and will collect digital legal deposit material as the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries Act is translated into secondary legislation; we will continue to collect material from a wide range of disciplines, including material from around the globe as needed; we will continue to collect a wide range of formats and languages, depending on the information needs of researchers in different disciplines; we will continue to sustain our role as a centre of excellence for materials from and about the Middle East, South Asia, Eastern Europe, and North America; and we will continue to devote approximately 10 percent of our acquisitions fund to retrospective purchasing, especially of heritage materials.
However, other aspects of our content strategy require us to shift our focus and reprioritise:
- Our historic collecting has reflected, to a large degree, the course of British history and Britain 's role in the world. We propose to realign our resource allocation to ensure that we also reflect the reality of 'Britishness' today. This means taking account of today's pattern of international research, and today's economic and political environment. For instance, we need to give greater priority in our collecting to China, India, Anglophone Africa, and some South American countries. We also need to ensure that topics that are of particular importance to the UK are supported, for example, international security and environmental change.
- We will increase our focus on certain areas of the social sciences, including, for example, international law, politics, economics, and social policy.
- We will strengthen our focus on non-textual materials, for example:
- We will define our approach to primary research data 4, including developing partnerships with key data repositories.
- We will give greater attention to our visual and audio-visual collections as a whole and, in particular, deepen our holdings of historic and contemporary photography.
- We will increase our focus on electronic resources. One example of this is in the area of 'grey literature' (e.g. conference proceedings, reports) where we need to respond to the rapid shift of these materials from print-based publishing to online-only distribution.
- Within the area of manuscripts and archives, we will build on our strengths in traditional materials and in addition increase our focus on the challenging area of e-manuscripts, for example by collecting digital archives from key literary, political, and scientific figures.
- We will review our acquisition of overseas newspapers and ensure that our purchasing of them is fully aligned with areas in which we collect in particular depth, including the centres of excellence referred to above (Middle East, South Asia, Eastern Europe and North America).
To implement the changes we have identified thus far within the context of a flat real-terms acquisition budget we need to continue to drive down costs associated with acquisition as much as possible. By doing this, through ongoing streamlining of our procurement and processing arrangements, as well as by reallocating funds across the breadth of our collecting, we are confident that we will free up sufficient resources to apply to the growth areas we have outlined."
To read the full strategy, go to /aboutus/stratpolprog/contstrat/