British Library's Digital Library system passes half-million milestone

The British Library has added the 500,000th item to its long-term Digital Library System. The milestone item was a digitised copy of a newspaper originally published in 1864 and scanned as part of the Library's 19th Century British Library Newspapers project, which recently made more than 2 million pages of historic newspapers available online.

In eight pages of densely-packed text, The Birmingham Daily Post dated Monday 19 December 1864 offers a vivid snapshot of life 145 years ago. Along with accounts of an 82-year-old man who died after falling out of bed and two men before the courts for bigamy, the paper also reports on President Lincoln recommending to the US congress the passing of a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, and ‘a number of the worst 'roughs' of the town' who pelted churchgoers with snowballs after several inches of snow had fallen.

The digitised newspaper joins hundreds of thousands of other items including e-journals, digital sound recordings, born-digital material received through voluntary deposit arrangements with publishers and more than 65,000 19th century digitised books. The Digital Library System within which these items are now stored has been developed by the British Library to enable long term storage of the digital material that forms an increasing proportion of the nation's intellectual output.

Steve Green, Head of the Digital Library Programme at the British Library said: 'The task of collecting, preserving and providing long-term access to the nation's digital assets is in many ways a daunting and complex undertaking. The sheer amount of material being published digitally is challenging enough in itself, but the wide range of different formats – many of which will inevitably become obsolete – makes preservation and future accessibility far from straightforward.

The Digital Library Programme has made huge progress in the past few years and we now have the foundations of a robust and fully scaleable system that can handle large quantities of digital items, ensuring their availability for future generations of researchers just as our historic print collections remain available for users today.'

Currently the Digital Library System holds:
• 386,000 items received through the Voluntary Deposit of Electronic Publications (VDEP) scheme
• 23,000 British Library Sound Archive master files
• 65,000 19th century digitised books
• 2,000 electronic journal items
• 29,000 newspaper items

A growing proportion of this material is available through the Library's Reading Rooms at St Pancras.

'The fact that we have just added our half-millionth digital item to the store is an indication that our digital capability is maturing – particularly in relation to comparatively straightforward items,' said Steve Green. 'Our next priority is to develop our processes for handling more challenging materials such as archived websites and the more complex XML format e-journals. While the amount of material we hold in the Digital Library System is still small by comparison with the totality of the Library's digital collections, the groundwork we have established through having a functioning and resilient digital store takes us substantially closer to our goal of a full-scale digital library facility, and a national library that's a genuine hybrid of print and digital.'