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Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260 - 275)

WEDNESDAY, 21 APRIL 2004

MRS LYNNE BRINDLEY, MR PETER FOX, MR FREDERICK J FRIEND AND MS DI MARTIN

  Q260  Mr Key: Do you grant access to your digital legal deposits remotely?

  Mrs Brindley: I think that formally the case is, as I said, that there are no specific access rights under the existing legislation. Each will have to be negotiated under regulation. I think the publishers' view is that the access rights will be quite limited, and certainly the view is that it will be constrained within the physical environment of the Legal Deposit Libraries. The discussion that is going on in terms of resource sharing is around provision of a secure network between the legal deposit libraries to deliver to each site. Obviously, that is subject still to regulation and agreement with publishers. The question of remote access and the sorts of licences that we, as the British Library, negotiate now for supplying of article delivery service—remote access will have to be dealt with by licence. There is no anticipation that it will be open delivery to all. Clearly, we are mindful of the balance of interests of the researcher with the balance of interests of the publishers.

  Mr Fox: The current voluntary arrangement restricts access to people within the deposit library building.

  Q261  Mr Key: Have you got any plans for a secure network with the other deposit libraries?

  Mr Fox: Yes, we have been working with the other deposit libraries on developing a secure network. One of the issues that we have to resolve is how the legal deposit material is stored, whether stored centrally and made available to the other libraries, or whether it is done in a distributed way. That is a decision we have yet to reach.

  Mr Key: How do you archive that material? What do you store it on, and where is it? Do you do it in your libraries or do you sub-contract it to specialist businesses that store it in old quarries or something?

  Chairman: Porton Down!

  Q262  Mr Key: I was not going to say that!

  Mrs Brindley: We do store some microfilms but we have no intention to store digital material in that way. From the British Library's perspective, we propose to make investments over the next four years, substantial investments of about £12 million, and in the current spending review we are aiming to get a contribution to that from the Government, to ensure that we do provide that facility ourselves. The reason we would wish to develop that expertise and keep that in-house is that it is strategically important for the nation and indeed for the future security of science. Some of the challenges to both take in this material, which is in different formats, to keep it and provide access to it, and keep it in the long term, by which I mean hundreds of years, are very substantial. We are, however, working internationally; this is not a UK-only problem, although we are doing some of the leading work. We are working across the world, particularly with the Library of Congress and other major research libraries, to share our knowledge of some of the issues. We are technically building that infrastructure, and it will get stored on some huge terabyte storage devices.

  Q263  Mr Key: What about financing this? It is almost idle to ask whether you have enough money because you could always use more, but if you had more money could you use it, or is the expertise and number of people who are skilled to do this so limited that you have really got all you need?

  Mrs Brindley: No, it is very clear that for us the issue now is to accelerate. We have the expertise and the prototypes. We need to accelerate the building of this infrastructure over the next two to three years, and that is why we have put in a very substantial bid to the spending review, about spending £12 million over this period of the review. This is needed, critically, to underpin science. Without it, we will lose increasing amounts of scientific data, and it will mean that the UK will not be world-class in this area. I have to say that I have been heartened by the evidence from all parties in previous hearings—for-profit publishers, not-for-profit publishers, those from the library network—that it is a national role. Clearly, the British Library will take a leadership role, and clearly we work very closely with our colleagues and other legal deposit libraries.

  Q264  Mr Key: Are the publishers putting any funds into this project?

  Mrs Brindley: I think the publishers would regard their contribution in relation to the legal deposit itself.

  Q265  Mr Key: What are the relative costs of digital versus hard copy storage?

  Mrs Brindley: I think it is too early to give you any definitive figures on that, in terms of hundreds of years and physical storage. The long-term storage costs of digital are as yet unknown. I can certainly provide you outside this hearing with some of the evidence of the studies that have been done on the pros and cons of physical and digital storage, but they are all projecting into an unknown future.

  Q266  Mr Key: Are your archives backed up somewhere separately?

  Mrs Brindley: Absolutely.

  Q267  Mr Key: How reliable is the technology? One of the problems of librarians over hundreds of years is the destruction and deterioration of archive material. Is there a similar problem with digital archives? Do you lose 10% or 25% over a given period?

  Mrs Brindley: Clearly, we have to be extremely professional in the ways we store and archive materials. For example, as you would expect, we have archive copies stored securely in multiple locations. We have contracts for people to test out the robustness of our networking and getting into our networks. We have in place very substantial recovery testing procedures, and indeed we have contracts for disaster recovery. All the steps are taken. It is much harder for digital material than it is for print materials, but nevertheless we have to do it, and it is a much more active process.

  Q268  Mr Key: Do you feel that Britain is leading the world in this area?

  Mrs Brindley: I think Britain is one of the few countries that has now passed the legal deposit legislation for digital materials, so that is a very good start. We have expertise, but that expertise is also in the States and other countries. If we can implement this long-term preservation and access infrastructure in the next two or three years, then I think we will be in a very, very strong position.

  Q269  Mr Key: What do you think is the most significant thing that this Committee could be saying to government about digitisation and digital archiving?

  Mrs Brindley: You would expect me to be slightly biased on this! I hope that the Committee could strongly support the British Library's bid in this review, to ensure that we can sustain this record of science, and record of the intellectual memory of the nation, for the long term. That is a role in which we could play a leading part.

  Mr Fox: I would like to echo that. As you indicated in your earlier question, there is potentially a gap growing between what is produced and what is being archived, and we need to move quickly to ensure that gap is plugged, and for that we need support from the Government.

  Q270  Chairman: We have some other questions, which we will send you in writing, but I will finish with a last question. The library of the University of East Anglia has commented to us that "not only is the University of East Anglia restricted in giving access to its neighbouring research/professional/educational concerns, but also in our regional role as a major source of detailed scientific information/education to the public. This goes against the Government's desire to make science and its workings more open, available and transparent to the public. Hard copy provided equal access (provided you could understand it); on-line presupposes privileged access." Is that true?

  Mr Friend: True, and the answer to my mind is open access, when everybody could have free access. What I would urge this Committee to consider is the recommendation to government that any articles based on publicly-funded research should be freely accessible over the Internet.

  Mrs Brindley: I think though we should be clear that certainly the concern of the British Library in our remote document supply and inter-lending services are that through public libraries and the public library system, there is widespread access to both scientific and other materials. Last year we supplied, through the inter-library loan system, well over 160,000 such loans to the public libraries. Increasingly, though, we are looking to provide remotely streamlined access through a portal, to enable any citizen to get access to an individual article.

  Q271  Chairman: How long would it take you to get an inter-library loan? How much would it cost me?

  Mrs Brindley: The price of inter-library loan is £6.85 from the British Library. You can do it through the public library, and it is for the public library to decide what, if any, of that cost it passes on to the citizen.

  Q272  Chairman: That is a funny price; maybe another time we could work out how you calculate that. How long would it take me to get that article that I have been pining for?

  Mrs Brindley: Our ability to supply articles—we supply over 1.8 million scientific articles a year—is that over 90% are supplied within 48 hours from our Boston Spa operation. We can supply within two hours securely to the desktop as well.

  Q273  Chairman: Who pays for the Boston Spa operation?

  Mrs Brindley: The transactions, namely the articles supplied, are charged at the public sector rate of £4.10. It is normally done through the intermediary services of the library, whether it is a university library or a government library, or whatever, and that is usually—

  Q274  Chairman: I meant who keeps the building—the roof on—at Boston Spa.

  Mrs Brindley: We are supported by a grant in aid to enable the remote operations of the British Library to operate, but we are obliged under the Treasury's Fees and Charges Guide to recoup all of the costs including the overheads of each of those services.

  Q275  Chairman: That is roughly how much?

  Mrs Brindley: For an article supplied it is £4.10 for an article at the public sector rate, and the price of a loan is £6.85. You can clearly see that it is a vital adjunct to the discussion you have had on bundling and the big deals. There is a very long tail. We take about 35,000 journals a year, many of which are not in bundles, and there is a very long tail of titles which are not digitalised.

  Chairman: Thank you very much for your expertise and for coming to help us today, and I guess for your superb diplomacy under stressful conditions!






 
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