The airy WiFi-enabled atrium of the British Library befits a modern national library at the beginning of a millennium that is already being called the Information Age. But it is in the smaller, anonymous back-offices that history is being made. Almost 600 years after the advent of the printing press, work is under way on digitizing important books, newspapers and sound recordings as a first step to offering unprecedented access to hard-to-access materials. The British Library has digitization projects going on all fronts: 19th century newspapers, archive sound recordings, manuscripts from Central Asia (as part of the International Dunhuang Project) and UK theses for the Ethos e-thesis service. With its mass digitization of 19th century English literature nearing completion, the British Library faces some tough decisions about what to digitize next. Three of its projects are funded by JISC, which is supporting 16 digitization schemes in the UK to the tune of £10m. Sound, moving pictures, newspapers, census data, journals and parliamentary papers are all in the process of digitization.
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