Tag: British Library

British Library FoI: how much do they make from reproduction of mss images?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still trying to find out just how much money the British Library make from charging for the reproduction of manuscript items online. I raised an FoI request here, and got an answer for all items (not manuscripts alone).  Click the tag “British Library” to see all the posts on this.

I note that the British library charges a fee to websites that use digital images of pages from manuscripts from the BL collection.  Please would you let me know, for each of the past 5 years (either calendar or financial, whichever is more convenient):

How many requests were made for use of BL collection images of these items on third party websites?

How much income was received by the BL in consideration of the use of BL collection images of these items on third party websites?

The reply: 

The table below indicates the number of requests for rights to reproduce BL collection images of manuscript items, for which a charge was made, and the income derived from those transactions for the five years in question.

  2004/2005 2005 / 2006 2006 / 2007 2007 / 2008 2008 / 2009
Number 772 845 959 527 664
Income 138,277 GBP 121,162 GBP 105,592 GBP 95,175 GBP 122,578 GBP

These figures are interesting, but still don’t indicate what proportion of this was on websites, as opposed to in printed books (which I suspect make up most of it).  I’m not quite sure how to find this out, tho.

UPDATE: I queried this, and got back the reply that they don’t hold that information on their systems!  That is, they levy charges but have no idea how many people are paying them, or if anyone is.  How very, very British Library.

I wonder if I complain to the Information Commissioner, whether they will get told to “go and find out”.  If there are 600 a year, it would hardly be a great task to look through the lot.

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Placing stuff online – how much the British Library make from charging people for this

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My Freedom of Information request to the British Library got a reply a couple of days ago.  I asked:

I note that the BL charges a fee to websites that use digital images of pages from manuscripts from the BL collection.

Please would you let me know, for each of the past 5 years (either calendar or financial, whichever is more convenient):

How many requests were made for use of BL collection images of these items on third party websites.

How much income was received by the BL in consideration of the use of BL collection images of these items on third party websites.

Looking into the finances of one of our public research libraries can only be interesting and illuminating!  I got back an interesting reply that didn’t quite answer the question, as regards manuscripts, and instead gave figures for all items in the collection.  I think someone read my question a bit too quickly, perhaps!!  So I’ve asked them to review it.

They sent the reply in a non-searchable PDF, unfortunately.  (Curiously they stick a copyright notice on the information – habit, I suppose). Here’s the reply.

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 – REQUEST 0929

We have considered your request and provide answers to your questions in turn below.

‘How much income was received by the BL in consideration of the use of BL collection images on third party websites.’

The revenue generated by charging for rights to reproduce images of items in the British Library collections for the previous five financial years (April to March) was as follows:

£                               2004/5     2005/6       2006/7         2007/8          2008/9
Total revenue    296,889      273,528     274,496        278,287         352,748

The number of requests for rights to reproduce images for which a charge was made was as follows:

  2004/5 2005/6 2006/7 2007/8 2008/9
Requests 1952 2090 2270 2770 1728

In certain cases, we waive the charge for rights for reproduction of images. Our records do no enable us to produce precise figures for this period but the approximate number of these is in the region of 800 per year.

This is very helpful, and quite interesting, all by itself.  Only a handful of requests each year, to one of the world’s richest libraries?  That feels wrong.  But who is doing the paying?  The sum is not really that high, for a major government institution, and probably can be broken down further.  We need more info, that’s for sure.

I will keep you updated!

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How much does the BL make by charging websites to display images of mss?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

If I buy an image of a page of a manuscript from the BL, I can’t put it here without paying the BL some huge fee a year.  So of course I don’t.  So I don’t commission the photograph either.

Imagine if it cost nothing.  Wouldn’t we all tend to use these images?  Wouldn’t we all buy more images?  We would, wouldn’t we?

So all this access is being stifled.  Well, I wondered how much the BL make from this.  After all, if they don’t make any money, they shouldn’t be doing it.

I’ve just placed a Freedom of Information request here.  Let’s see what they made over the last five years.  How many licenses they sold.

I bet it’s very few. 

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British Library still doesn’t get it

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The BBC has a belated but fawning story today, Just click for a century of news:

The British Library has put two million digitised pages from 19th century newspapers online, taking research out of its dusty reading rooms into people’s homes.

The pay-as-you-go service brings a century of history alive from Jack the Ripper to WC Grace. (etc)

Ah.  So, “just click”, eh?  What use is this to most of us?  Access for the privileged only, it seems.  Can you imagine any of us paying for this? 

But there is more, and worse, at the British Library site, where the new government “Digital Britain” report is discussed.

Digitising content

Dame Lynne said: “I welcome the fact that Lord Carter specifically referenced the British Library’s Nineteenth British Century Newspapers digitisation programme as an example of how new business models can enable national institutions to work with commercial partners and funding bodies to make millions of pages of historic content available online to researchers and the public. We are sitting on a goldmine of content which should be considered integral to the UK’s digital strategy. To support Digital Britain we need to deliver a critical mass of digitised content – sustained public investment, along with the innovative business models cited in Lord Carter’s report, will enable us to achieve this.”

I’ll bet she does.   Who else would endorse the idea of selling access, but the man who has just proposed taxing internet access? 

The reference to access for  “the public” is tacked on, as an afterthought.  The British Library, indeed, doesn’t exist to serve the public — in the opinion of all too many of its staff.  The vision of universal access to information and education is debased into a vision of more income for themselves.

There needs to be a culture change at the British Library.  The people who see the collection purely as a windfall to be exploited for their own budgetary gain need to be eased out.   An open-source public service attitude needs to replace it.  And it will.

It’s easy to get depressed by how out of touch the management of the British Library is.  Yet the pressure for open access grows stronger all the time.  The very idea of charging for this will seem absurd or disgusting in 10 years time.  Every year a flood of new staff will enter the British Library, carrying their iPhones with their built-in digital cameras and their WiFi-enabled devices of various sorts; and will try not to laugh at the policies they find.  These people will bring about the revolution.

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British Library to mass-digitize its manuscripts?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Tiny snippets, these, but here I found a report on a conference in February, which included the chance remark:

Will this community thrive? Ronald Milne of the British Library told me he was amazed at how web-active the papyrologist community is. Incidentally, Juan Garcés presented this work excitingly within the context of a recent decision by the British Library to mass-digitise its entire collection of pre-1600 manuscripts.

Meanwhile here is a conference due to happen in July 2009.  Among the papers to be delivered is:

Juan Garcés, Codex Sinaiticus and the mass-digitisation of Greek manuscripts at the British Library.

Hum.  If the British Library is really to digitise all of its manuscripts, that could only be a good thing; indeed a very good thing.  But the devil is in the detail.  I will see if I can find out more about this.  Who is Juan Garces, I wonder?  A search reveals this:

Juan Garcés is Project Manager of the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Projects at the British Library, where he is currently managing both the Codex Sinaiticus Project (http://www.codexsinaiticus.org) and the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project. After studying theology in Giessen and Marburg, Germany, he received a doctorate in Biblical Studies from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, in 2003.

He has since gained experience in the field of Digital Humanities as analyst, consultant, and adviser on digitally-based research projects, particular in the field of Greek texts. Before coming to the British Library, he was employed at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, which recently awarded him an MA in Digital Humanities. He is one of the founding members of the Digital Classicist (http://www.digitalclassicist.org/), the organiser of the Open Source Critical Editions workshop, and co-author of the forthcoming article ‘Open Source Critical Editions: a Rationale’ (in: Text Editing, Print, and the Digital World, eds. Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, Ashgate Press, 2009).

Frankly this sounds pretty good.   A man with a background in Open Source, and digitisation.

My only worry … the BL has a history of creating digital items which it then sells access to, instead of making available to the general public.  It would be a tragedy if such a potentially useful project was prostituted in that way.

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EthOS – the first useful service from the British Library

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have often commented on the British Library, on its greed, obscurantism and general uselessness as a public service.  Nor have I any reason to suppose this worthless institution has reformed.

But for a change, thanks to Ben Blackwell, I have discovered a new service that may conceivably be useful to us all.  Evidently not everyone at the BL is a fool; for this one is a very good idea indeed.  This is a new service called EthOS. 

EthOS is a database of UK PhD theses, rather like the UMI database in the USA.  Universities with a bit of gumption contribute the theses, and you and I can download them.  Yes, that’s right; you don’t have to be in further education to use this service. 

Access to the theses is actually, free, or at least partially so.  The BL want to charge for this.  You have to “place an order” for anything you want to look at, and go through a checkout, as if you were at Amazon.  They quote prices, and do everything as if this was a bookshop (!)  Thank heavens Google Books didn’t engage in such a farce!  Then a link is made available, and you can download it.  Mind you, they’ve made such a dog’s breakfast of it that I haven’t managed to do so yet!

This is the first useful online service that the BL have ever provided for the nation.  I imagine that they will screw it up.  They will have an attack of the greedies, and charge for it, and it will vanish behind a network of “charges” and privileges, etc; all paid for by taxpayers, naturally.  But for the moment, this is useful.  Yes, really it is.

UMI is pretty useless to us all, since only universities can access the stuff without being charged pretty steep prices.  But EthOS means that we can actually look at what our tax dollars are paying for in UK research.

I’m going to award this a couple of cheers.  It is a Good Thing, as 1066 and all that used to put it. 

Yes, they’ve mucked up the interface.  Yes, they’re still salivating over the idea of charging the public for stuff the public has already paid for.  Yes, it’s clunky.  No-one can detest the BL as much as I do.

But the idea is fundamentally sound.  This is precisely the sort of activity that the National Library of each nation should be doing; to make available easily and freely the research that we all pay for and which would otherwise languish, inaccessible, in unpublished paper theses.

There is a search facility.  I tried Tertullian, and Eusebius, and up came results.  But… not all our state-funded universities have cooperated.  Notable absences are Oxford and Cambridge, curse them.  Whether this is from obscurantism or greed I don’t know.  But this service is so manifestly a sensible idea that they will have to contribute in the end.  Let us hope they don’t make their participation conditional on excluding the ordinary man.

PS: I’ve found after, after scouring the help, why the thesis wasn’t available, and just said “Download file being prepared”.  Apparently only theses with a little blue icon next to them in the search results are immediately available.  You have to wait while the others are scanned!  Of course this isn’t apparent to the newcomer and… wait for it… they make you tick a box agreeing that your idle exploratory request for a random thesis can’t be cancelled!

I wonder if they try and bill me for digitisation?  If so, I look forward to them trying it on in court!  Every new user will make this mistake, so I wish them luck!  Bad interface design, boys, bad interface design.

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British Library – taking, not giving

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A story at Slash.dot tells us that the British Library chief, Lynne Brindley, is worried about how websites vanish.   In an article in the left-wing bible, the Guardian, she says that she wants to keep copies of all websites in the .uk domain, so that they don’t disappear forever.

There are several aspects to this story that ought to be more clearly stated. 

Firstly, there is nothing to say that this archive will be available to us.  The last time I looked, it was purely for the benefit of BL staff, and perhaps those few who live close to the building.  Anyone else could take a hike.  “Copyright” was the excuse; but some time back Mrs Brindley got an Act of Parliament passed to enable her to do whatever she wanted in this area.  If she didn’t arrange for a provision for public access to an archive of publically accessible websites, it’s because she didn’t want to.  I’d want to see an explicit commitment to access before I applauded.

Secondly, rather than collecting the material that others put online, when will Brindley actually make the British Library’s holdings available online?  This is especially the case for the medieval manuscripts, which almost no-one can handle and are resolutely kept offline and unphotographed.

As ever, it seems that the British library management is interested only in serving themselves, and not the national interest or the public who pay for them.

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