Skip to main content
Home > What's New

Press Release - The British Library - Providing services beyond the Reading Rooms

 

25 May 2004 

 

Sir John Bourn, Head of the National Audit Office, told Parliament today that the British Library is responding well to the opportunities and challenges of providing services in the electronic era, that the Library has undergone significant and beneficial organisational change, and that it has made important recent improvements to the services that it offers beyond its reading rooms. At the same time some aspects of the service could be made more user-friendly and the Library needs to remain vigilant in ensuring that the full benefits from its programme to convert material to digital form can be sustained in the long term.

 

Due largely to the advent of the electronic journal and the development of new publisher business models, the Library’s Document Supply Centre has seen the volume of its business decline by almost a third between 1998 and 2003. The Library has responded to this challenge well by embarking on a major programme of modernisation so that its services continue to be valuable to customers. It remains an important part of the United Kingdom’s research infrastructure and supplied 2.76 million items to customers in 2002-03.

 

Customers hold the Library’s document supply service in high regard, particularly for its speed, customer interface and breadth of collection. However, some consider that the service could be made more user-friendly, especially in the area of catalogue searching.

The price of the document supply service has increased significantly in recent years. This is partly a result of the Library ensuring that it recovers its costs at a time of falling demand, but also due to increasing copyright charges (which are outside the Library’s control). The system for setting prices is complex and users would welcome better explanation for the charges they pay.

 

Over two million people access the Library’s website a year. The Library’s site (www.bl.uk) performs well in assessments of its accessibility to people of all physical abilities. In terms of how useable the site is, the Library has improved considerably over the last few years, and follows best practice in a number of areas, though some users still have problems with layout and clarity of information.

 

An important aspect of the Library’s online services is its digitised collections, which consist of digital images of some of the most important holdings in its collections, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. These digitisation projects serve a range of audiences and have proved to be popular. However, as the Library is dependent on external funding for digitisation, it needs to work to sustain free access to such material as funding is generally concentrated on creating digital images rather than maintaining them. In addition to this, given the resources (in terms of effort and money) going into digitisation in the cultural sector and beyond, it is important that organisations carrying out digitisation collaborate to share best practice.

 

Sir John Bourn said today:

 

" The Library is providing an important range of services beyond its reading rooms, which are generally of a high quality. It deserves much credit for responding well to the increased competition to its document supply services and for the other improvements it is making to its remote services.

 

Digitisation has proved to be popular. For example, it gives us the opportunity to virtually "turn" the pages of manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. It is important that the Library and other organisations collaborate to exploit fully the great opportunities for providing materials of relevance to a wide range of users. In addition the Library needs to take care to ensure that access to digitised material can be sustained beyond the short to medium term."

 

Notes for Editors:

  1. The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is a Non-Departmental Public Body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It was constituted by the British Library Act, 1972, and is home to one of the world’s greatest collections, comprising more than 150 million items representing every age of written civilisation. The collections cover manuscripts, printed matter, sound recordings and digital materials.
  2. The British Library’s turnover in 2003-04 was £121 million. It acquires a substantial part of its collections through legal deposit. The Library’s Document Supply Centre is located at Boston Spa, Yorkshire and is the world’s largest collection devoted exclusively to document supply. Revenues from the Document Supply Centre contributed £17.4 million to the Library’s turnover in 2003-04.
  3. Press notices and reports are available from the date of publication on the NAO website,
    which is now at www.nao.org.uk. Hard copies can be obtained from The Stationery Office
    on 0845 702 3474.
  4. The Comptroller and Auditor General, Sir John Bourn, is the head of the National Audit Office which employs some 800 staff. He and the NAO are totally independent of Government. He certifies the accounts of all Government departments and a wide range of other public sector bodies; and he has statutory authority to report to Parliament on the economy, efficiency and effectiveness with which departments and other bodies have used their resources.

Press Notice 54/04
All enquiries to Mark Strathdene, NAO Press Office:
Tel: 020 7798 7183
Mobile: 07748 181693