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It has also pushed to take copies of all publications 'born digital' - in 2003 the Library lobbied Parliament for legal deposit to be extended to electronic materials, including websites. Of course it also stores a vast range of other cultural artifacts.

Unlike Google and its Library Project, which has the ambitious (some would say vainglorious) goal of creating 'a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages', the British Library is somewhat more pragmatic in its ambitions.

To digitise all of its vast archives 'would be like trying to eat an elephant,' commented Aly Conteh, Digitisation Programme Manager at the Library. This is why the library has concentrated on iconic works, such as can be found in its Turning Pages application.

Taking advantage of the 3D graphics capabilities of Windows Vista, the book application contains exact scans of historical books and documents, such as the Magna Carta. It represents what electronic editions of old manuscripts can achieve. As well as virtually turning pages of a book, the user can zoom in on sections and explore ancillary information, including audio commentary. In other words, technology is supporting the 'material culture' of the book - there is more to an artifact than just a straight reproduction of text.

Developments on its next major publication - the Codex Sinaiticus, which is the oldest complete manuscript of the New Testament - are 'still in the pipeline', I was told. The disparate physical document will be 're-unified' in this digital version.

But it isn't just manuscripts from ancient times that get digitised. Neil Fitzgerald, British Library Microsoft Digitisation Manager, pointed out that the British Library, on a daily basis, serves the ad-hoc digitisation requests of the wider public. For example, to pay to scan particular pages in a book or magazine, with prices varying on the resolution of the image involved.

Another

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aspect of the British Library's work on digitisation is the range of specific research projects it undertakes. At any given time there may be 10 to 15 projects underway, in various states of completion and with various forms of sponsorship.

I was shown around the Mellon Foundation-sponsored International Dunhuang Project. This is digitising ancient Chinese scrolls that detail the commerce, and culture, of the ancient East-West trade route, the Silk Road.

Looking ahead, the work of the British Library can only increase in this important area. As more of our daily lives involve electronic - digital - means of communication, the responsibilities of cultural curators can only grow.

One new initiative, for example, involves the archiving of emails across a narrowly defined period of time, to create a snapshot of everyday messages that will otherwise stand a good chance of being lost to future generations.

High culture or low culture, digitisation will still remain an issue for cultural curators to store a record of current, and otherwise ephemeral, times.

What became apparent on the tour, however, is that technology is not the key issue. 'Our guiding principle is that the integrity of the material is paramount,' stressed Neil Fitzgerald. While camera models may have changed and the number of images scanned per hour increased quite sizably, this is not the whole matter. Issues of curatorship account for the vast majority of variable in the equation. These can't, or won't, be compromised by the organisation. The part played by technology is still relatively small.

For example, I was shown the archetypal, painstaking scanning process - a volume or manuscript laid open under a camera's spotlight. The man working on the document pausing to process the book, page by page... No combination of software and hardware can radically change this task.

Apparently some people are underwhelmed when they see such details of the operation. The fact is, however, that 'digitisation' has never involved technology as a magical short cut, taking in material culture at one end and streaming out ones and zeroes at the other. There is an important place for technology, but it should always be subservient to wider curatorial concerns.

Other British Library projects:

One project, announced back in 2004, made digital copies of nineteenth century newspapers accessible online. The £2m project covered 100 years of news from titles which are out of copyright.

Last year, the British Library presented Mozart in electronic form. Specifically, Mozart's Verzeichnüss aller meiner Werke (Catalogue of all my Works) was made available over the Internet for the first time.

It is also working on a 'Sounds Familiar' project, capturing regional British dialects for posterity.