The British Library has added the 500,000th item to its long-term Digital Library System. The milestone item was a digitised copy of a newspaper originally published in 1864 and scanned as part of the Library’s 19th Century British Library Newspapers project, which recently made more than 2 million pages of historic newspapers available online. [Subscription Required].
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Steve Green, Head of the Digital Library Programme at the British Library said: “The task of collecting, preserving and providing long-term access to the nation’s digital assets is in many ways a daunting and complex undertaking. The sheer amount of material being published digitally is challenging enough in itself, but the wide range of different formats – many of which will inevitably become obsolete – makes preservation and future accessibility far from straightforward. The Digital Library Programme has made huge progress in the past few years and we now have the foundations of a robust and fully scaleable system that can handle large quantities of digital items, ensuring their availability for future generations of researchers just as our historic print collections remain available for users today.”
Currently the Digital Library System holds:
+ 386,000 items received through the Voluntary Deposit of Electronic Publications (VDEP) scheme
+ 23,000 British Library Sound Archive master files
+ 65,000 19th century digitised books
+ 2,000 electronic journal items
+ 29,000 newspaper items
Source: British Library
This entry was posted
on Friday, November 13th, 2009 and is filed under Digital Preservation, Digitization Projects, Libraries and Librarianship.
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