Digitisation at the British Library

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Bringing the world’s knowledge into the digital age

Introduction to the seminar:

The British Library is one of the great research libraries of the world, holding over 150 million items in all the common languages and formats of the world. The advent of the Internet and the ability to digitise large quantities of text and images and make them available over the Web has transformed ways of working in research and learning. For almost two decades, the British Library has undertaken a number of focused digitisation initiatives. More recently, we have entered the world of mass digitisation of newspapers and books. Using the experience gained from digitising 25 million pages of books and 4 million pages of newspapers dating from the early 17th century, the approach, challenges and lessons learnt will be presented. Strong partnerships with higher education institutions have ensured the resultant resources met pedagogical needs, the current approaches and possible future trends will be presented.

About the speaker – Mr Aly Conteh, Digitisation Programme Manager, British Library.

Aly Conteh is the Digitisation Programme Manager at the British Library, a post he took up in April 2003. He is responsible for the development and implementation of the policies, workflows and standards which govern digitisation of items from the Library’s vast collections. He has been involved in many digitisation projects at the British Library including projects to digitise 25 million pages of 19th Century books and 4 million pages of pre-1900 newspapers and hundreds of manuscript volumes. He serves on the Executive Board for the IMPACT project a large-scale integrating project funded by the European Commission as part of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). He is as a member of the European Commission’s Member States’ Expert Group on Digitisation and Digital Preservation.

Click here to watch the recording of the seminar: https://connect.le.ac.uk/p28002466/

Gabi Witthaus

Tags: Aly Conteh, British Library, digitisation, ukoer