Features
Digitising the British Library
But this does raise doubts: you have to wonder if staff who presumably only have English as a second language are the best people to be checking a digital library of British literature. CSS, itself a German company, insists all its staff are proficient in English.
The Library itself provides an extra safety net by batch-sampling the files delivered from CSS and ensuring they conform to ISO standard 2859-1, which refers to sampling procedures. "It's impossible to individually examine every page delivered to the Library," says Fitzgerald. "We're very happy with the quality and consistency of the files being delivered to us."
The Library estimates that 30TB of storage will be required to accommodate the entire output of the collection when it's finished in late 2009. And unlike its unique collection of books, the Library can ensure that copies of the scanned manuscripts are kept across multiple locations. The digital library is currently backed up offsite in Boston, Yorkshire, and a site
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However, it's the task of reaching the living rooms of potentially millions of curious readers that's currently preoccupying the Library's technical team. Perhaps wary of the way the 1901 Census site was overwhelmed by sheer weight of demand upon its infamous launch, the Library is load-testing its website before publishing the digital collection. Microsoft, of course, should have no such problems - and by allowing its technology partner to host the online collection before it goes live, the British Library not only mitigates the risk of failure, but can also keep a lid on the bandwidth bills.
The digital collection also allows the Library to protect something that's far more valuable than the bandwidth: the books themselves. It claims the need to handle the original texts will be "reduced significantly"; even visitors to the Library's London headquarters will be able to search the collection via its knowledge-management system. "There's only a small proportion of our holding that we don't give access to for physical reasons," says Jensen. "But this [project] doesn't mean we won't give physical access to material in the future."
What it does mean, however, is that millions more of us will be able to discover rare, fragile and fascinating texts from the comfort of our web browsers. And if that's not a site worth bookmarking, what is?
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