Custodianship
We build, curate
and preserve the
UK’s national
collection of
published
written and
digital content
Jain cosmological diagram (painting on cloth, Gujarat, India 18th–19th century, Or. 13937) in the Treasures Gallery.
Photo by David Jensen.
10 Knowledge Matters: the British Library 2023 – 2030 Knowledge Matters: the British Library 2023 – 2030 11
This is the purpose which defines the British
Library, on which everything else depends.
Among the estimated 170 million items we
care for are books, journals, newspapers,
patents, maps, prints, manuscripts, stamps,
photographs, sound recordings, digital
publications of all kinds as well as over
20 billion pages of UK web content. This
remarkable collection grows every day,
driven by our Legal Deposit mandate to
collect everything published in the UK,
whether physical or digital. Our role is to
develop, preserve and provide access to
this vast resource, for today’s users and
far into the future.
Eight years ago our ‘clear and urgent goal’
in custodianship was to address the
preservation crisis for our historic audio
collection and those of others across the
UK: a campaign we called Save Our Sounds.
We are proud that with the support of the
National Lottery Heritage Fund and others –
who funded the innovative Unlocking Our
Sound Heritage project with sound archive
partners in every nation of the UK – this
programme has been completed, with
more than 360,000 individual recordings
digitised and preserved.
Other vital digitisation projects have
flourished, and we have begun to migrate
this material onto a new long-term digital
preservation platform. In the meantime,
the collection has continued to grow –
both in partnership with the Legal Deposit
Libraries of the UK and Ireland and through
a remarkable, diverse set of acquisitions.
The latter includes our participation in the
successful collaborative campaign, led by
the charity Friends of National Libraries, to
save a unique trove of English and Scottish
literature, now known as the Blavatnik
Honresfield Library.
First among the challenges ahead is the
urgent need to address the scale and quality
of our physical collection storage. In simple
terms, we are running out of space – with
an additional challenge that some parts of
our collection are housed in buildings no
longer fit for purpose. With strong financial
support from the Government, we have
embarked on a major programme at Boston
Spa to build a new high-density, automated
storage vault and collection management
centre, and to renew other key parts of the
campus. Achieving this will future-proof vital
knowledge infrastructure well into the second
half of this century.
We face parallel challenges in the continuing
growth of our digital collection – from 0.49
petabytes in 2013 to 2.95 petabytes at the
start of 2023. The past decade has been a
period of intense development in our digital
collection management capability – a rapid
evolution in which our systems have only
just kept pace with the accelerating scale of
capacity required. We have reached a point
where our long-term ability to preserve and
enable access to born-digital and digitised
heritage collections depends on a major
programme of reinvestment in our systems
and the workflows that rely on them,
including those of key partners such as
the Legal Deposit Libraries of the UK.
As our collection evolves, so too do the
skills we need to care for and understand
it. Scholarship and specialist knowledge will
always be the foundations of our curatorial
skillset – but we also have a priority to
ensure that the cultures and practices of
curatorship and librarianship keep pace
Custodianship
with a changing world. As we build our skills
for the next generation, we will focus on
themes including: a continued increase in
digital fluency and awareness; responding to
an expanding range of formats, the ability
to communicate and engage with the public
and learners of all ages; the sensitivity and
confidence to address fully complex questions
around provenance and the history of the
collection itself; and the skill to ensure that
judgements we make about what to acquire
reflect the full diversity of the UK. Sharing
of professional skills, practice and knowledge
will continue to be a priority, including
with public libraries through our Living
Knowledge Network, other national libraries,
higher education and health libraries and
many more.
Our priorities for 2023–2030 to
support our Custodianship purpose are:
• Complete the renewal of our major new
collection management and storage
facilities at Boston Spa, safeguarding our
physical collecting capacity into the second
half of this century
• Upgrade the systems and infrastructure
required to sustainably collect, catalogue,
and preserve our digital collection, and to
support the partners we work with on
UK-wide preservation
• Continue evolving the practice of
curatorship and librarianship, together
with our partners, to keep pace with the
changing needs of our diverse users.
Below left: Unlocking Our Sound Heritage in action.
Photo by Sam Lane; Below right: The Lindisfarne Gospels
on display at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle. Photo
by Steve Brock; Above: Notebook of Emily Brontë’s
poems, 1844–1846, Add MS 89488, from the Blavatnik
Honresfield Library.
Research
We support
and stimulate
research of
all kinds
Multi-spectral imaging. Photo by British Library Digitisation team.
14 Knowledge Matters: the British Library 2023 – 2030 Knowledge Matters: the British Library 2023 – 2030 15
One of the founding principles of the British
Library was to put the UK’s outstanding
national library collection at the service of
research and innovation of all kinds. The goal
remains to support the creation of new, open
knowledge, across the fullest possible range
of disciplines, from science and the social
sciences to arts and humanities, as well as
the vital interdisciplinary work that often
yields the truest innovation.
We do this through our Reading Rooms;
through free access, with expert support,
to physical and copyright-protected digital
content; through a wide range of online and
remote access services, including a growing
suite of unique datasets; and through special
research projects that push the boundaries of
innovation. We are as committed to serving
citizen researchers and private individuals as
we are to academics and career researchers.
This diversity of use has become increasingly
notable in recent years. In Living Knowledge
we spoke about people’s changing needs
and the desire for “more varied study
environments’’. The informal desk spaces at
our St Pancras building have become as iconic
a part of our identity as the Reading Rooms.
science has never been more central to
public policy, we will implement a new
science strategy to serve the scientific
research community, and raise public
engagement with science through
exhibitions, talks and events. We will build
partnerships with other institutions that can
complement our own resources and use our
convening power to connect science with
other disciplines and sectors. We will grow
our digital research capabilities including
AI and machine learning, and deploy
our collection and resources to support
environmental and public health research.
The transformation of our St Pancras site, at
the heart of London’s Knowledge Quarter
(one of the greatest knowledge clusters
anywhere in the world) will create a major
centre for both public and commercial
research in life sciences, data science and
other fields of innovation.
While our primary role is to support research
by others, we are also an active independent
research organisation. Our Living With
Machines project, in partnership with The
Alan Turing Institute, has pioneered new
AI and machine learning research, utilising
data from our digitised collection, to analyse
millions of pages of content on a scale
impossible for any individual researcher.
This evolution has been accompanied by
growth in online resources, both through
open access content – such as our EThOS
service for academic theses – and licensed
content available to registered Readers.
Alongside this we have participated in
original research, ranging from support for
collaborative doctoral students, PhDs and
fellowships, to involvement in the ground-
breaking Towards a National Collection,
delivered by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council, which is developing
ways to break down boundaries between
different digital collections.
Our task of opening up knowledge means
that improving access to everything in
our collection is more vital than ever. We
will make it easier for people to access
the collection, do research on any subject,
and develop information literacy skills to
confidently evaluate what they discover.
We will implement the next phase of
modernising our core research services,
introducing online registration for anyone
wanting to access digital content or become
a Reader, and improving our online catalogue
search function – which currently can be
complex. We will continue to work with
publishers and other rights holders to increase
the content that registered users can access
online, and we will work with partners such
as the Living Knowledge Network to connect
people with content in new ways.
Science has always been a core part of our
statutory mission, whether providing crucial
scientific research via British Library On
Demand or growing our collection material
that charts the history of science. Now, when
Research
We will build on this world-leading research,
working in partnership to improve access to
our data and new scalable, ethical machine
learning tools that can unlock value from
digitised collections.
Left: Living with Machines exhibition at Leeds City
Museum. Photo by Simon Dewhurst; Above left: Social
Science and Science Reading Rooms, St Pancras. Photo
by Mike O’Dwyer; Above right: Boston Spa Reading
Room. Photo by Drew Forsyth.
Our priorities for 2023–2030 to
support our Research purpose are:
• Make it easier for more people to access
the collection, with online registration,
improved search and increased volumes
of research content available online
• In a context of open research, help
people, including those less experienced
or confident, to use the information
they need
• Increase our support for scientists and the
public understanding of science, including
the development of our St Pancras site as
a major centre for life science and data
science research
• Develop and implement a new AI Strategy
and Ethical Guide to support the next
generation of our digital research.
Business
We help
businesses
to innovate
and grow
Swiss, founder of Black Pound Day in discussion with moderator Jacqueline Brown at Inspiring Entrepreneurs:
Building the Black Economy event. Photo by Abi Oshodi.
18 Knowledge Matters: the British Library 2023 – 2030
Knowledge Matters: the British Library 2023 – 2030 19
Knowledge matters to a competitive
economy: without free access to timely,
accurate information, and the expert advice
needed to interpret and act upon it, too many
businesses fail in their earliest stages. Support
for industry was at the heart of the Library’s
founding Act half a century ago, and it feels
more relevant now than ever before. Our
users range from large corporations accessing
hard-to-find research papers from our On
Demand service, to enterprising individuals
who walk into one of our national network
of Business & IP Centres (BIPCs) in
public libraries.
With the opening of our 21st regional BIPC
in Cumbria in 2022 we proudly exceeded the
target we set ourselves in 2015. Significant
investment from DCMS between 2020
and 2023 accelerated this expansion and
supported the opening of an additional
job creation and economic growth, will
depend on a sustainable funding model
underpinned by policy support at the highest
level. At the same time, the transformation
of the Library’s own physical spaces offers
a once-in-a-generation opportunity to
add new, purpose-built facilities offering
incubation and maker spaces for
entrepreneurs in both London and Leeds.
The expansion of the BIPC Network has
coincided with, and helped foster, a growing
community interested in new, purpose-led
business models, such as the circular
economy and social enterprise. Research
in 2022/23 found that 65% of businesses
using BIPC services had either a social or
environmental aim or both. Many of the
entrepreneurs we work with see themselves
playing a key role in the transition to a net
zero economy, particularly in terms of the
environmental impact of business. As trusted
sources of data and knowledge, libraries have
a special role to play here: the provision of
up-to-date guidance on these issues is as
vital for the businesses we work with as the
market research and IP advice which is our
stock in trade.
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Business
All the businesses we work with use
technology to some extent, but few
have the capability to make full use of the
massive wave of innovation in technology,
such as the use of bespoke algorithms
and machine learning tools. Effective and
ethical use of AI is increasingly a baseline
requirement for companies seeking to use
large-scale data and grow their online
business. We see an opportunity and
responsibility to act as a bridge between
the UK research sector (including our
partnership with the Alan Turing Institute)
and the small businesses we support, to
ensure they have the knowledge they
need to thrive in an increasingly technology-
dominated landscape.
Our priorities for 2023–2030 to
support our Business purpose are:
• Sustain our expanded Business & IP
Centre Network so that we can support
entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds
across the UK, including those in our local
neighbourhoods
• Provide start-ups, businesses and social
enterprises with the knowledge they need
to contribute to the UK’s goal of sustainable
economic growth and a net zero economy
• Work with partners to ensure that the
businesses we support benefit from access
to relevant expertise in ethical AI and other
advances in technology.
80 ‘BIPC Locals’ to provide further reach.
The Network relies on collaboration, working
with the Intellectual Property Office and local
authorities to provide a trusted service in
the heart of communities. Our 2023 report
Democratising Entrepreneurship 2.0 provides
vivid evidence of its powerful impact: 18,175
new businesses created (between April 2020
and March 2023) by a uniquely diverse
cohort of founders, with a business survival
rate over the pandemic of 95%, far above
the national average. Every £1 spent on the
service generated a return of £6.63 of value
to the economy. Alongside our work with
start-ups and SMEs, our British Library
On Demand service has continued to
serve larger businesses with much-needed
research content, and it played an important
role in the pandemic by providing rare
medical research papers for the life
sciences sector.
Our most pressing challenge,
after a decade of growth and
impact, is ensuring a stable
and financially secure future
for the network of BIPCs
which our partners, with our
support, have built up from
Glasgow to Devon, and
from Bristol to Norfolk and
beyond. The Network’s
creation has been like a
start-up project itself – driven
by an entrepreneurial spirit
and raising funds to enable
growth. Like the businesses
we support, however, we
face the inevitable challenges
associated with scaling up.
With 21 Centres established,
and a further 80 locations
served through branch
libraries, the maturing of the
Network, and its support for
Left: Map showing the BIPC National Network;
Below: BIPC at Bristol Central Library. Photo by Luca
Sage; Above: Jayni Gudka, CEO of Unseen Tours
speaks at an event during Global Entrepreneurship
Week 2022. Photo by Sam Lane.