Originally published July 18 2005
British library to go digital by 2020
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Spokespersons for the British Library said that they predict a switch from print to digital publishing by the year 2020.
Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, today predicted a switch from print to digital publishing by the year 2020.
"This is a seismic shift, and one that we -- and our partners in the publishing and information industries -- need 2020 vision to prepare for in order to maintain Britain's competitiveness across all sectors, from business to the arts, from science to education and culture.
"Our aim at the British Library is to develop the infrastructure to store, manage, preserve and provide access to digital material in the same way as we do for the 'physical' national collection that we and our predecessors have stewarded for the last 250 years.
We have worked hard over the past few years to secure the legislation we need (digital legal deposit), work in collaboration with publishers, other libraries and with technical partners to build the necessary systems to ensure long-term access arrangements."
The British Library's collection already covers every information format from oracle bones to kilobytes.
The Library will build on its work in collecting digital items, digitising existing collections, and archiving websites, to set up the infrastructure to hold the national collection of digital items in the same way as the organisation manages the 160 million item national collection of books, manuscripts, sound recordings, patents, stamps and maps.
Collecting and managing digital material needs specialist skills.
We will apply the skills of the country's top information management specialists to the digital collection."
The collection will include both items that were 'born digital' and those items in the British Library collections that have been digitised, such as Shakespeare's Quartos and 19th Century newspapers.
In 2003 the Library led a national campaign in support of a Government-backed Private Member's Bill to extend legal deposit to electronic materials, including websites.
The journals will be stored within a secure digital infrastructure.
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