Alasdair BallHead of Collection Acquisition and DescriptionThe British Library

26th April 2012

EDUG Symposium 2012

‘Classification: Leveraging the power of hidden knowledge’

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Welcome to the British Library

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But not as you may know it……

The British Library:

‘Helping people advance knowledge to enrich lives’

Conventional and high density storage buildings

Funding 11/12:£96m operational, £14m capital

Collection includes over 2m sound recordings, 5m reports, theses and conference papers, the world’s largest patents collection (c.50m)

Acquires and catalogues over 90% of the Libraries intake, totalling nearly 1,000,000 items per annum in both print and digital formats

Supply of bibliographic data products, including the British National Bibliography and journal alerting services

Business and IP Centre: Providing inspiration, and enabling protection of creative capital and business development

Provides corporate ‘back office’ functions (Finance, HR, IT)

Collection fills over 600km of shelving and grows at 11km per year

180Tb of digital material held in the digital library store

National library of the UK.Serves researchers, business, libraries, education & the general public

The largest document supply service in the world. Secure e-delivery and ‘just in time’ digitisation enables desktop delivery within 2 hours

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How we deliver value to the UK

High R+D Industries SMEs

Prof. Services Publishing Industries

Creative Industries

BUSINESS

Bespoke Services Research Services

Document Supply Reprographics Service

Postgraduate/Undergraduate

Scholars

RESEARCHER Reading Rooms Publishing

Bespoke Services Document Supply

Reprographics Searching Tools

Lifelong Learner

Commercial Researcher(Broadcasting e.g. BBC, Publishing e.g. OED)

EDUCATION On-site Visits

School Tours

Web Learning

School Libraries

Teachers

Students 11>18

PUBLIC

Exhibitions Tours Events Publishing

Lifelong Learner

Visitors (child + adult)

LIBRARIES Document Supply Resource Discovery Training Best Practice

Public Libraries Public

Librarians Lifelong Learner

University Libraries Researcher

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Influences and responses

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Building the 21st Century Digital Research Infrastructure

BL Digital library system

Large scale, highly resilient digital store (complete online copies at each location)

Continuous validation & correction Long term digital storage for BL content &

eLegal deposit/distribution

Long term access (digital preservation)

Edinburgh - 2009

Boston Spa

Aberystwyth

St. PancrasOxford Univ.

Cambridge Univ.

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Dewey – a huge investment in the organisation of knowledge

(or put another way, what does Dewey and 16,800 new cars have in common?)

• In April 2012 the total number of book records in our BL catalogue containing Dewey numbers (082 field) is just over 3,200,000.

• Assume it takes a professional cataloguer about 10 minutes to create a Dewey entry

• The intellectual effort invested in the BL’s monograph collection (represented by Dewey) amounts to about 538,000 man hours

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Or the equivalent of building 16,800 new cars!!

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Looking back ….. leveraging our collective historic investment

• Collection Analysis

• What do we hold, by subject

• Building collection strategies

• on strengths

• on weaknesses

• by subject

• Enable the researcher to explore our rich collections by leveraging the power of Dewey in a way that is consistent with user behaviour

• Leveraging the strength of Dewey as a coded, language independent tool

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Looking forward ….. Dewey in a different information world

• Collection Analysis

• What we are buying, by subject

• Measuring the success of collection strategies

• Dewey in a Linked Data world

• Dewey in a world characterised by increasing volumes of digital content

• Full text

• Articles/Chapters