Meet Jamal Mohamed, the British Library’s Community Project Coordinator.

‘We had show and tells related to indigenous African knowledge of medicinal plants’

I'm a member of the Community Engagement team, who try to be a bridge between the library and the community surrounding the building. We focus our efforts on four political wards: Somers Town, King's Cross, Bloomsbury and Regent's Park.

I started a taster session programme where we take items from the collection and build mini exhibitions around them for communities that might not see themselves represented in the wider exhibitions. In the last batch I ran we had show-and-tells related to women in the East European collection, indigenous African knowledge of medicinal plants, and Punjabi folk tales.

I ran a session for Ramadan about Islamic collections that we have here at the Library, and people loved the fact that different collection areas were represented. We had items from India, the Middle East and Africa. For each session we include 10 to 15 items.

If a local group comes to us and they want to tour the building, we'll help arrange it. If a group wants to see an exhibition, we'll sort out tickets for them. If a group wants to come and use a space to host their own project, we'll try to accommodate that and find space.

 

‘I’ve been volunteering since I was 12’

I’ve been volunteering on and off, since I was 12, for the Somali Youth Development Resource Centre (I’m half Somali). They were created to tackle inequalities in terms of education and crime in the Somali community in Camden. When I graduated, in 2020, I worked with them part-time on the mentoring scheme. We started online, on Zoom, but before I left we managed to get it back into two schools in Camden and I was delivering sessions every week.

I studied public relations and that’s all about building and maintaining relationships. I went on a work placement in the summer of my second year at a commercial PR agency but it didn’t feel like the work I wanted to do. So I continued at the SYDRC and through that I found out about the job here at the Library.

 

‘Without the conservators, items would just crumble away’

People have made me feel very welcome here. Especially colleagues who aren’t responsible for directly engaging with people, but who share their time and expertise to help my team on our projects. Without the help of the curators and the reference specialists, we wouldn’t be able to run the taster session programme.

The reading room staff, the reference specialists, the front-of-house teams; they're all amazing. And the conservators: without them, items would just crumble away and be damaged.

 

‘I really appreciate the level of respect this item’s been given’

My favourite items in the Library’s collection are slabs of wood, about a metre in length. These wooden slabs were used in rural Somali villages to teach Arabic or the Quran – the teacher would write on them and hold them up for the class to see. One of them had a verse from the Quran on it. The way it was handled made me feel proud and pleased because it was treated with so much care. It was in a really nice box. I was told to be careful with it, in terms of not allowing any food or drink near it, and not allowing people to touch it, because it’s a very delicate and important piece.

That really struck me because first, I was like, how’s it ended up here? And second, I was like, well, I really appreciate the level of respect it’s been given. I asked, but it wasn’t on the system how it had got there. A lot of these things are basically taken as part of colonial history, or it was donated by someone.

 

‘We know a local storyteller who wants to run children’s storytelling mornings’

If you live locally, one thing to keep an eye out for is the Last Word community space, which will be coming to the piazza, hopefully, this summer. That will be an opportunity for us to increase co-curation and co-development projects with community groups, to programme that space and make sure that local people feel welcome and represented at the library.

We want to encourage community groups to lead on their own projects. We provide a space and some resources. We’ve had conversations with loads of people locally who want to run sessions. We know a local storyteller who wants to run children's storytelling mornings. We have a local creative group that want to run a sharing space. Hopefully we'll launch sometime in the summer.

Today we publish Knowledge Matters, the British Library’s strategy for the next seven years. It outlines the ways in which we as the UK national library want to do more for new and existing audiences, while adapting to the monumental changes that are already impacting both the knowledge industry and the wider world.

It comes as we celebrate our 50th anniversary – the Library began operations on 1 July 1973 – and reflect on five decades in which we have grown into one of the world’s great research libraries. The story of how we develop over our next fifty years begins with this document.

Looking back, looking forward

It’s easy to overlook that we are, in fact, a comparatively young organisation – roughly contemporary with several of the big software giants, rather than our longer-established peers in the heritage sector. As a research library, the growth and take-off of the knowledge economy over the past half-century has presented the most extraordinary opportunities for us to serve current and future generations of users, while also requiring us constantly to learn and respond – and periodically to refresh our strategic objectives and the goals we set ourselves.

Knowledge Matters builds on and shares many continuities with its predecessor strategy – Living Knowledge – which spanned the period from 2015 to now, and which saw us develop and extend our reach through both the Living Knowledge Network (LKN) of national and public libraries, and through the Business & IP Centre National Network, which now extends to 21 libraries across the UK. We successfully grew our digital collection from 0.49 petabytes in 2013 to 2.95 petabytes by the start of 2023, working in partnership with the national libraries of Wales and Scotland, and the other UK and Irish Legal Deposit Libraries.

We also initiated a number of major capital programmes, including the renewal of our Boston Spa site in Yorkshire and – in the longer-term – the establishment of a permanent British Library site in the centre of nearby Leeds.  We also plan to expand our iconic London campus at St Pancras – an ambitious vision for which we now have planning permission. Each of these programmes has a long and complex journey to implementation, but building on the solid foundations laid down so far, we look forward to further advancing these transformative plans over the coming years.

Adapting to a changing world

Along with the continuities, our new strategy also addresses a range of major trends in and around the sectors we work in; collectively these amount to a renewed commitment to serving as broad a public as possible – becoming genuinely ‘for everyone’ in the scope and accessibility of what we offer.

These include the acceleration of technological change, and especially the widespread application of Artificial Intelligence (AI), necessitating a further step-change in digital transformation to modernise our services and systems, and keep pace with the expectations of our digital users. In parallel, there’s a more urgent need that ever before for libraries to play an active role in fostering information literacy – helping people of all ages and backgrounds to evaluate critically the superabundant (and too often distorted) range of information sources now available online and via social media.

Living Knowledge recognised the value of high-quality physical spaces, events and collaboration, alongside the ever more interactive digital realm. Through the work we have done with local partners in communities both in St Pancras and Leeds, and also with Living Knowledge Network partners across the UK, we now have a greater understanding of the importance of place-making – investing in the real places where people live and work, and which are often sources of deep personal meaning and pride. This insight informs both our plans to further develop and sustain the national collaborative networks mentioned above, and also the major capital programmes, which have inclusive, welcoming spaces at their heart.

In a number of ways, the world is a more unstable and unpredictable place than it was when we published Living Knowledge, with economic turmoil, international conflict and the pandemic all posing sudden and extreme challenges to our society and our world. Great national libraries have a responsibility to act as beacons – to their users and their peers alike – and Knowledge Matters recommits us to international engagement, and the maintenance, wherever possible, of cultural dialogue, exchange and collaboration.

All of these changes are of course taking place against the backdrop of the global climate emergency and it’s right, therefore, that we’re prioritising sustainability in its broadest senses over the coming seven years and into the future. Not only does this apply to our own buildings, processes and carbon footprint, but also to the role that libraries can play in offering a trustworthy and accessible source of verified information – which will of course be essential in addressing this huge societal challenge.

Major themes to guide us to 2030

Our overarching mission remains the same: to make our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone, for research, inspiration and enjoyment. Having studied the above trends over the past 18 months, we have identified a set of key priorities that will apply across all of our purposes – whether these relate to Custodianship, Research, Business, Culture, Learning or International. Together they will shape what we deliver and how we will work in the future.

• Access, engagement and inclusion – ensuring that the services we offer, and the collections we hold, are truly ‘for everyone’.
• Modernising our library services - Investing in skills, processes, systems and capabilities to deliver the quality of library services our users deserve.
• Deepening our partnerships – collaborating with libraries and memory institutions of all kinds across the UK and around the world, to achieve more than we ever could by ourselves.
• Sustainability and resilience: - reducing our carbon impact and collaborating with partners to create a more sustainable future.
• New spaces, North and South – in Yorkshire and in London, delivering new, world-class physical spaces designed to welcome future generations of visitors and users.

Our Knowledge Matters strategy (PDF) contains more detail across all of these themes, and how they specifically apply to our services, our sites, our staff and our users. We are delighted to be able to share with you the next chapter of our journey as the national library, and look forward to discussing it further as we roll it out over the coming months.

If the past five decades of the Library’s development have taught us anything, it is the enduring value of having a vision – combined with planning, expertise, creativity and collaboration. Although the challenges may be considerable, if we can stay true to those principles and build on the work of our predecessors, we can face the next fifty years with confidence and optimism.

Roly Keating

Chief Executive, British Library

 

This month we are celebrating 10 years since a change in law, which made possible the preservation of published digital communications in the UK. Since April 2013, the British Library, as one of six legal deposit libraries for the UK, has been building a huge collection of newly published digital books, journal articles, archived web and other types of publication, many of which would otherwise have been at risk of loss. These are available for research and inspiration at the British Library, and other legal deposit library sites across the UK and Ireland.

Our collecting of ‘born digital’ UK publications is the newest part of our legal deposit mandate to collect as comprehensively as we can, and represent the breadth of experience, culture, society, science and politics in the UK. Legal deposit has existed for nearly 400 years, and is a responsibility on publishers in the UK and Ireland to make sure that copies of their publications are available at the British Library and the five other legal deposit libraries for the UK.

These libraries are the National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Cambridge University Library and the Library of Trinity College Dublin. The long history and inclusive aim of legal deposit means that you are able to access a huge and detailed collection of publications on all aspects of life from across the UK. For example, local newspapers (many of which are now available from our British Newspaper Archive); maps that can be used to research our changing landscapes; information about businesses; and government and official publications that document in detail social change and the growth of government and law. Legal deposit is a huge collaborative undertaking between the libraries. It relies on close relationships with publishers.

Collecting born digital publications

The change in law, which came into effect on 6 April 2013, meant that digital publications could also be collected under legal deposit. For many years previously, we had emphasised the preservation risks, especially for material that exists only in digital form. We were also aware of the great value of collecting and making available born digital publications. For example, it will not be possible to study the 21^st century without reference to communications that took place on the web.

Collecting, and making available, digital publications at a scale required by legal deposit, is a huge challenge. Working in close partnership, the six legal deposit libraries have had to develop whole new systems to identify, collect, preserve, describe and make available digital journal articles, books, maps, sheet music and official publications. This change has involved the creation of new types of collection, for example the UK Web Archive, or our experimental work in collecting new types of digital publication that are designed for mobile technology or user interaction.

In making this transformation, we have worked with publishers, their representatives and also other organisations working in book and journal distribution. This has been important as standardisation, for example of metadata and the structure of files for deposit, has a very big impact on whether and how far we can ensure that our processes work at the very large scale that they need to.

A vast and rich resource

We have achieved a lot over the past 10 years. Under digital legal deposit, we have collected more than 10 million journal articles and nearly 800,000 books. We make available 3 TB of digital mapping, including annual snapshots of Ordnance Survey large-scale mapping of Britain. The UK Web Archive is now one of the largest parts of our collection, containing millions of websites, billions of files and 1.3 PB (petabytes) of data. All this information is available to access at legal deposit libraries, and is preserved across the legal deposit library network.

These achievements matter because the web and other digital publications are often at risk of rapid change or loss. The digital archive that we are building holds in many cases the only surviving copy of millions of pages of digital content. These relate to events and subjects of great interest to current and future researchers. For example, our event-based collections in the UK Web Archive include general elections and referenda, international sporting events, and public health communication during the pandemic. These are available for use by researchers now and will be preserved for the future.

Over the past ten years, we have been able to learn more about the challenges of managing digital publications at this scale, and this includes access to publications. The law that requires deposit of digital publications also describes the terms under which those publications may be accessed.

This is important for enabling use in a way that reassures publishers of our commitment to protecting intellectual property. However, restrictions on access can be unexpected for readers and sometimes don’t take into account the ways in which authors and publishers intended their work to be shared (for example, using Open Access). Issues relating to access were a focus of Digital Library Futures, an important research project, led by the University of East Anglia, into the impacts of digital legal deposit on libraries and researchers.       

The changing landscape

At the same time, we have experienced radical changes in technology that have impacted on many areas of publishing and publisher behaviour. The publishing ecology in the UK and Ireland is rich and varied. It includes some of the best known and loved publishers in the world, and extends through a very ‘long tail’ of independent and self publishing.

Print on demand, crowdfunding platforms and a breath-taking number of book, zine and comics fairs across the UK and Ireland mean that the challenge of finding out about publications has become much more complex. Also, writers and artists are using technology in creative and innovative ways, making beautiful and engaging new publications that we need to learn how to collect and preserve. We will be showing some of these in our Digital Storytelling exhibition, opening on 2 June 2023.

A new framework for collecting

An anniversary is a time for celebration and for reflection. For our 10^th anniversary year, we have reviewed our priorities and values for how we develop legal deposit. These have recently been published in our Framework for Legal Deposit. This will shape our activity to 2030, and restates our commitments to sustainability, preservation and putting users at the heart of our planning around access.

We know that we have more work to do in improving the experience of using digital legal deposit, including our support for Open Access and for accessibility. We also know that we need to ensure that our collecting reflects the diversity of publishing, and voices represented, across the UK. This includes works published in new formats. We are able to reflect on how print and digital publishing is interconnected, and that authors, publishers and readers all make positive choices about the formats in which ideas are communicated.

Meeting these needs in a way that is realistic about the resources we have, and responsible about long term sustainability, is a challenge. Our partnership across the six legal deposit libraries, and the relationship that we have with publishers, are an important part of meeting that challenge.    

Ian Cooke

Head of Contemporary British and Irish Published Collections