Behind the scenes: The British Library and digitisation

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 1 May 2007 at 15:11

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.