Person:

Shenton, Helen

What are the core competencies that a national library needs to address the preservation of digital material? What skills are needed, by whom, when, to do what? Are the skills available externally, or is it better to develop people within the library? How are preservation philosophies and IT philosophies attuned? How is the preservation of digital material managed in a matrical and distributed way within a large organisation?
This paper describes how the British Library (BL) is addressing the preservation of digital material, in particular how it is working on the preservation component of the Digital Library System (DLS) and how it is resolving the preservation issues as they arise during the implementation of the DLS. It includes how it is working with other organisations, such as Cedars, on digital preservation, and how it is opening itself to being studied as it tackles the subject, for example, by being the main case history in the Arts and Humanities Data Service's research work on 'The Management of Digital Preservation'. It will focus on staffing issues and practical issues. One of the quotes from the AHDS interviewees for the Workbook for the management of digital preservation, was 'a lot of talk, not much action'. This paper describes the transition from talking to doing across a range of activities demanded by digital development, from preserving bits and bytes, to conservation in preparation for digitisation.

The new Centre for Conservation at the British Library (BLCC) opened in London this year. This 2600 square metre, purpose-built Centre is connected to the main British Library by a new public terrace and is adjacent tothe new St Pancras Eurostar station opening in November 2007. The Centre houses state-of-the-art book conservation studios and sound preservation studios, together with facilities for an extensive training and public outreach programme. The public programme includes a permanent, free exhibition and education suite at the entrance to the new Centre, linked to the rotation of iconic collection items within the BL’s Treasures Gallery. There are to be free, behind-the-scenes tours of the conservation studios for the public as well as demonstrations, workshops and talks. The professional outreach includes partnering with the University of the Arts on setting up a new two-year Foundation Degree in Book Conservation, setting up funded internships for book and sound preservation, and steps to furthering the BL in conservation research. From the beginning, there were three main, intertwined elements at the core of the Centre for Conservation project, namely construction, fund-raising and a ‘change programme’. The paper describes the construction project and highlights features such as the ‘floating’ sound studios, the natural north light that bathes the majority of the conservation studios and describes how the needs of visitors and circulation were anticipated. Secondly it describes the nature of the fund-raising for the €19.65 (£13.25) million project, which was the first such capital fund-raising project undertaken by the BL. The money has been raised from a combination of public and private sources. The mixture of conservation, professional training and public access has been key to the success in raising the funds. Thirdly, the paper describes how the impetus for providing appropriate accommodation for those areas not incorporated into the St Pancras building in the late 1990s, was used as a catalyst for change. The space was designed to engender different ways of working and the very process of developing the project was used to develop people by working in different ways. This is a modernisation and ‘cultural change’ project, whereby the challenge has been to keep the best of the old (the artisanship, hand craft skills and technical expertise) and create the best of the new (updating conservation techniques, developing new skills commensurate with the needs of the collections, evolving organisational changes).

Anonymised report on some of the issues raised at an international roundtable on collection security of thirteen major research libraries and national libraries from Europe and North America. Recurring themes of case studies included: 1) perpetrator profiling; 2) relations with the criminal justice system; 3) systems; 4) looking out; 5) aftermath.

Over the past decade there have been significant developments in the storage conditions of library and archive collections. These range from using the thermal mass of a building itself to help control the environment within which collections are housed, to increased attempts at creating sustainable, “green” buildings to adapting elements from warehousing and the retail sectors to manage daily operational tasks. There is currently a considerable amount of collection storage activity going on world-wide. In Australia, two of the State Libraries and the National Library of Australia are designing new storage facilities, while in the United States the Library of Congress is building in two off-site locations. Denmark, after the recent cross-domain national Danish preservation strategy, is planning to spend several million Euro on storage for museums, libraries and archives over the next 5 years. The Deutsche Bibliothek is planning a new store in Leipzig, while the National Libraries of Canada and Sweden are also planning new storage facilities. In Britain, Oxford University Library and the British Library are planning new facilities; and Cambridge University Library is constructing a phased extension to its current building and exploring funding for a final phase. Perhaps more important, there are significant developments underway that will affect the storage of library collections in the future. These include not only the architectural aspect of how collections are stored, but also the publishing perspective about the future shape of what collections are to be stored and the organisational perspective of who stores material in the future. This paper makes some observations about trends in library buildings and trends in collection storage, and quotes examples of some recent building projects. Alternative storage solutions to actually constructing a building are considered. This is followed by observations of some developments that will affect what exactly will need to be stored, centring on trends in publishing and on research into the future shape of the publishing output to the year 2020, in both print and digital formats. This research is supported by expert views canvassed from international comparator libraries about their future collections. Brief mention is made of other professional and political developments that could have an impact on what libraries will be storing, such as collaborative storage. The current major building programme being planned at the British Library is used to illustrate recent technical developments, for example the adaptation of warehouse technology, the use of automated retrieval, fire prevention and fire suppression. Finally, mention is made of a couple of future possibilities, such as off-site robotic scanning.

The new Centre for Conservation at the British Library (BL) opened in London in 2007. It comprises state-of-the-art book conservation studios and sound preservation facilities, inextricably intertwined with an ambitious training and public outreach programme, all housed together in a beautiful, purpose-built, multi-million pound building next to the new Eurostar station at St Pancras in London. It is the only such centre to focus on the conservation of books and the preservation of sound. The presentation of the conservation of the BL’s holdings of the world’s cultural heritage and the public programmes were integral to the fundamental ideas behind the building, designed in from the earliest stages of the project. The paper describes the thinking behind this development and assesses the public engagement with conservation a year after the new building opened. The public programmes include a permanent, free exhibition on conservation and decision making at the entrance to the new conservation centre, linked to the rotation of iconic collection items within the BL’s Treasures Gallery. There are free, behind-the-scenes tours of the conservation studios for the public as well as demonstrations, workshops and talks to widen public access to the activities and concepts behind caring for the British Library’s vast collections. These developments at the British Library are considered in the wider context of trends in presenting cultural heritage. The paper concludes with developments in how conservation is contributing to international engagement and cultural diplomacy.

This paper is about cellulose acetate microfilm from the British Library perspective. It traces how acetate microfilm became an issue for the British Library and describes cellulose acetate deterioration. This is followed by details of what has already been done about the situation and what action is planned for the future.

Digital preservation is concerned with the long-term safekeeping of electronic resources. How can we be confident of their permanence, if we do not know the cost of preservation? The LIFE (Lifecycle Information for E-Literature) Project has made a major step forward in understanding the long-term costs in this complex area. The LIFE Project has developed a methodology to model the digital lifecycle and to calculate the costs of preserving digital information for the next 5, 10 or 100 years. National and higher education (HE) libraries can now apply this process and plan effectively for the preservation of their digital collections. Based on previous work undertaken on the lifecycles of paper-based materials, the LIFE Project created a lifecycle model and applied it to real-life digital collections across a diverse subject range. Three case studies examined the everyday operations, processes and costs involved in their respective activities. The results were then used to calculate the direct costs for each element of the digital lifecycle. The Project has made major advances in costing preservation activities, as well as making detailed costs of real digital preservation activities available. The second phase of LIFE (LIFE2), which recently started, aims to refine the lifecycle methodology and to add a greater range and breadth to the project with additional exemplar case studies.

Life cycle collection management is a way of taking a long-term approach to the responsible stewardship of the collections of the British Library and is one of the library’s strategic strands. It defines the different stages in a collection item’s existence over time, ranging from selection and acquisitions processing, through to conservation, storage and retrieval. Life cycle collection management seeks to identify the costs of each stage in order to show the economic interdependencies between the phases over time. It thereby aims to demonstrate the long-term consequences of what the library takes into its collections, by making explicit the financial and other implications of decisions made at the beginning of the life cycle for the next 100 plus years. Eventually it aims to combine the life cycle of both paper and digital collections, in order to reflect the totality of the British Library’s hybrid collections.