Alasdair Ball Head of Collection Acquisition and Description The British Library 26 th April 2012 EDUG Symposium 2012 ‘Classification: Leveraging the power of hidden knowledge’

2 Welcome to the British Library

3 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

5 How we deliver value to the UK High R+D IndustriesSMEs Prof. ServicesPublishing 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

6 Influences and responses

7 Building the 21 st 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 Boston Spa Aberystwyth St. Pancras Oxford Univ. Cambridge Univ.

8 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

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

10 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

11 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