Humanities One, Rare Books If Really Necessary

Open Letter to Chief Executive

2007-02-05T19:59:00.000Z

“Company,” Kant said, “is indispensable for the thinker.” And company is what the British Library provides thinkers like no other intellectual space I have ever experienced. Not even Wikipedia.

Company in collective learning – sensed and felt in any of the reading rooms each day; company – often unexpected, illuminating and inspiring – through the knowledge to be found in books, journals, recordings and magazines stored here. And, finally, company sharing thoughts with just a few of the people who seek some of this knowledge each day, met over weak coffee upstairs or down. Or even outside.

In a way, hearing the news about threats to the library’s budget and its ability to provide that company, is like discovering that one’s home has been threatened with a compulsory government purchase in order to build a super-casino. The British Library is such an important room in the mental house of my life that I can’t imagine it closing early, or not having the book, let alone failing to evolve with the digital times, or charging.

At first, with doom-laden newspaper articles and Margaret Drabble, this seemed another of the BL’s occasional teapot tempests; like last year’s dubiously orchestrated campaign to limit the reading rooms to Tristram Hunt and A.N Wilson. That debate served only to illustrate the narrow perspective so many still possess about reading, about research and scholarship versus – say – the entrepreneurial and the needs of the would-be thriller writers flecked around the place; ultimately about access to knowledge itself and just who should benefit from it.

If modernity’s free-market dictates we arrive early to get a desk between March and July, then so be it. If that same mentality says cut back services, abandon the vital processes of digitization and the digital itself, then we are no longer really an evolving civilization, more a careless theme park, and the BL is set to become just the best bookshop for browsing in London (even if Waterstones’ cocktails are better). This can never be enough. Only the truly superficial or the serially-sloppy special adviser could ever think so. And this latter group, I would argue, will be pleading for a Reader’s Ticket as soon as their temporal brightness falls, and it is their turn to write the acid memoirs. Recent political history is not all on the Guardian website. I should know: I helped to build it.

I am lucky; part of the generation in the late eighties and early nineties that witnessed and participated in the extraordinary birth pains of the internet. It was, we told the cynics over and over again, a revolutionary force. As important as printing, photography and telephony; perhaps all three rolled into one. I once lectured the Librarians Association over a stormy weekend in Lancaster about the brilliance of the search engine and how they (librarians) must evolve to keep up – or die. I think they have. Evolved.

How ironic then, fifteen years on, for the library to be in the midst of such a fight with the Treasury on the day that Bill Gates dropped by and Microsoft Vista was launched in the courtyard courtesy of free sweatshirts and a concert by The Feeling.

The British Library isn’t just a building or two; not even the sum of its extraordinary collections and dedicated staff. Not the amalgam of its high profile sponsors and its seasonal exhibitions; its lectures on everything from poetry and microscopes to Doing Green Business. The British Library is a celebration of words and ideas; of language and languages; and of infinite possibility most of all. It is enough to say (it used to be, at least) that it modestly inspires, as knowledge always should – and always can, when allowed. How many parts of Britain do that right now?

And these days we have a real comparison to make: we are all wi-fi enabled at our desks, in one or two or rare. We can compare the best of the digital, the Wikipedia-Google world, with the BL catalogue, the analogue, with connections made on the page as well as via the hyperlink. I’ve spent the past year here, writing novels, researching my next project using all kinds of information found in words, online, through sound (even in exhibitions); there isn’t a day when something in this library doesn’t amaze me. Neither is there a day when something discovered online is not given added weight and ballast by reading a book or a journal.

Of course we all use both ways of learning and discovering now. The merging of the digital and the hard-copy is an intrinsic part of the fabric of modern information. I hope to watch new forms of knowledge dissemination, the visceral and the virtual, grow ever more potent in time. I don’t want to see it happen in New York, Paris and Delhi first. I don’t live there. The company of smart ideas I seek is in Britain. On the Euston Road. I’m not just angry about job cuts, or charging, or culling books; I need the British Library to be on the cutting edge of the digital world too; otherwise I work in a museum, not a laboratory for contemporary thought and playful connections.

I expect to redecorate my house every few years, not to be constantly pulling down a few bookshelves and throwing away some of my precious bound history. And I expect my government to fund our leading house of free public “knowledge” to standards way beyond the study in my house; to ensure that its long-term and well-nurtured inhabitant, ideas old and new, is allowed to grow up, keeps on the page, as my consultant friends might say. To do this the British Library must be open to all, must be open to all notions of “publishing” (an increasingly tricky concept, and not one which can be skimped over or ignored; certainly not under-funded) and must retain its ability to amaze those who are lucky enough to get a seat.

In The Rules of Civility George Washington wrote that it is better to be alone than in bad company; well, the company of the British Library has always been the best. It would be far more than a shame if our search for knowledge and inspiration increasingly sees us alone because the company is at best partial, and at worst priced out of reach – or simply closed. Even worse if this part of the Euston Road were to become, in Edward Gibbon’s words, “Crowds without company, and dissipation without pleasure.” That sounds suspiciously like Westminster on a dull day of thoughtless cuts and political short-termism.

My other tutor is in Budapest

2007-02-05T14:50:00.000Z

Workers and Spies

2007-02-05T13:00:00.000Z

pastel labours...

Looking On From Hum Two

2007-02-05T12:45:00.000Z

But in the summer it is more colourful...

So the story so far...

2007-02-05T12:32:00.000Z

From a series about the BL...more to follow, and celebrate.

This from The Independent

British Library to start charging
By Marie Woolf, Political Editor
Published: 28 January 2007

Its archives hold the Magna Carta, Beatles manuscripts and the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Visitors to its fabled reading room in the British Museum included Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw. But the future of the British Library as a world-class, free resource is under threat fromplansto cut up to 7 per cent of its £100m budget in this year's Treasury spending round.

To survive, the library proposes to slash opening hours by more than a third and to charge researchers for admission to the reading rooms for the first time.

All public exhibitions would close, along with schools learning programmes. The permanent collection, which includes a copy of every book published in the UK, would be permanently reduced by 15 per cent. And the national newspaper archive, used by 30,000 people a year, including many researching their family trees, would close.

Scholars, writers and politicians have responded angrily. Award-winning author Margaret Drabble, who is currently using the library for research, said: "It would be a very great mistake and tragic to make cuts. It is a great national institution and it is used by scholars from all over the world."

Ex-Monty Python star Michael Palin, who is a patron of the library, said it was a "precious and thrilling resource" that needs to be looked after.

Since 2001, the library, now based in St Pancras and sites around London, has made savings of £40m and reduced its workforce by 15 per cent.

However, the Department for Culture says the expected cuts will mean that more savings need to be made. A spokesman said: "The cultural sector has had huge real-terms increases in funding since 1997. Clearly, this cannot go on indefinitely."

The plans have also caused consternation in the House of Lords. The broadcaster Lord Bragg said the library was of "massive importance in a society... that depends more and more on information, creativity and brains. It needs to be nourished, not hobbled".

Lord Avebury has written to Gordon Brown, who will preside over the Treasury spending plans, saying: "It is difficult to fathom the mind of a Government that sets out to wreck a world-class public institution, as you would if the British Library is forced to make these cuts."

So join the London Library

2006-05-31T13:05:00.000+01:00

But the past 12 months have witnessed a catastrophic collapse in its working environment. The studied calm of the reading room has given way to a hum of mobile phone ringtones, chit-chat and pubescent histrionics. It is difficult to get any work done. As one letter of discontent to Brindley puts it: "Many new readers are simply idling away the hours in the library in time-honoured undergraduate fashion, when one of the great characteristics of the BL used to be a sense of communal hard work and endeavour by professionals of all ages."

Tristram Hunt is no relation

But there are researchers, translators, academics and doctoral students who need the world-class resources of the BL. And they are being squeezed out.

Perhaps this is the new motto of the moaners.

AN Wilson

2006-05-31T11:02:00.000+01:00

Seen about the library off and on, and looking a little like an earlier incarnation of Dr. Who, AN - or is it Andrew - is the epitome of bad (or just no) English timing. In fashion, literary styles and subjects; and naturally enough, in his weekly Evening Standard column (wherein London becomes a giant project for English Heritage to sort out). Just as the numbers thin here and peace and calm return to Hum 1, Rare Books etc. etc. so man of the street "AN" writes in yesterday's Standard:

...migrant scholars are in for a shock. They will find that there is simply nowhere for them to sit....

Two months ago: sure. Now, it's fine again: and wild strawberries are growing in the courtyard, and biographers of Betjeman (I rest my case) can research in peace. They can even write their ridiculous Evening Standard columns if they must.

Facts, "in the way", good story and "never let": Rearrange it yourself.

spring fever (etc.)

2006-05-27T01:04:00.000+01:00

On the way to the BL: March

2006-05-27T01:00:00.000+01:00

The Front Page Blues

2006-05-26T00:09:00.000+01:00

Yesterday the Queen, in yellow (perhaps a joke about the Yellow Press) came to the pre-party, though it’s said she didn’t check out the Royal stuff; tonight it was a pride of newspaper people. This morning - in the courtyard - a young woman posed for the snappers atop a ten feet cube made of tied tabloid bundles. From tomorrow the public can visit; and for the past two weeks the BBC’s flagship news analysis programme, Newsnight, has featured a promotion for the exhibition in which a range of celebrities choose their favourite example of the editor’s art. The Front Page – the British Newspaper 1906–2006, is undoubtedly getting a lot of publicity for a show at the British Library.

There are, naturally enough, some serious omissions in this mash of seminal “Hold it Hildy” moments. I talked with Ms X of the Daily Y about them yesterday over lunch in the increasingly Italian Café Duo. Where, I wondered, was the thrilling: “Merchant Ivory DVD Inside”? What about: “Free Flights to France”? Or: “Eurostar pour Rien”? Where was: “Free Educational Supplement”? Or: “Your Eight Page Guide to Personal Finance”? And of course: “Extra Sudoku Today”.

And what about web front pages? (After all, since 1997 or so, it is websites that break the news – albeit for a short window of time before television and radio catches up)? Well, there are two terminals for visitors to check up on the various news sites, but no “Front Pages”. No Podcasts. No video links. No blogs.

Not yet. Just ink.

There’s a nice interactive News Room full of shiny widescreen Apples, where visitors can conceptualize their own FT or Daily Mirror front page, and then print it out. The editor, news editor, chief sub who talk to you, the page designer, are a little quiet though, a little too over easy-easy. No shouting in this newsroom. No coffee spills either.

The big news story we miss here is easier to spot than attempting the construction of a Sun splash or a “Berliner” blast: this is ancient history, a picture in pinstripes not Photoshop; the surprise is that none of the headlines are in Latin or Greek.

Hold the front page, and roll on modernity. This is one for the British Museum, not its super-soaraway “world’s knowledge” library.

Hold the front...

2006-05-23T20:00:00.000+01:00

While she did not visit the section on the royals, she said the exhibition, at the British Library, was "fascinating".

On reflection, the BL in Spring

2006-05-09T13:41:00.000+01:00

Writing: a few things I didn't learn at the Bossa Nova Business School

2006-05-04T21:18:00.000+01:00

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts –
They don’t end up as paupers

Toads
Philip Larkin

There are the Renaissance Madonna Readers and there are the Contemporary Sight-Line Readers. And within this fine distinction lies a visible secret of working in the British Library, and a small and high, if half-shuttered, window on the creative process.

The gaze of Madonna Readers, wearing glasses or not, is demure and resolutely downward in direction, concrete and concentrated; task-driven and almost devout. It certainly gives the impression of “Persistent” and Results-Focused. Of A Work Solidly in Progress.

The gaze of the Sight-Line Reader does anything but.

The Sight-Line Reader does have a book, or a computer screen, or a notepad before them, but is only part of their broader perspective. They are considering the object and the world, not just an idea of the world. The words of the world. They are somehow augmented.

Admittedly this world they consider is far from universal (though all the universe is in here somewhere, even the elegant one); it takes in only the other readers, and usually only half of them, their torso, their face, sometimes when close enough, the books they consume.

And then there is the architecture to look at, predominantly white, pale wooden bookshelves suggestive of Sweden and replete with standard tools of reference. (For the singular and specific the reader must order their choices by computer, then - later - when their desk-light comes on, journey the thought-silent catwalk of study through islands of desks and readers to the queues and formalities of Issues and Returns.)

My friend the Egyptologist cannot write here, only read; says there are too many distractions. And yet she is a Madonna style Reader (her posture and pose say serious hard-core scholar). So is the woman sitting next to me today, but then, on inspection, she is reading “Soulmates”, the Guardian newspaper’s online dating website. She is checking out virtual men, men with GSOH bios and unspeakably limitless capacity for fun in SE19, non-smokers preferred, whilst around her the Sight-Liners (well, some of them) are clearly checking out more tangible goods; we are sprightly with spring now, after all.

(And so the Egyptologist must be taught the palimpsest rules of the meta-library, and not just its bookish pleasures. We retreat to the terrace and talk turkey over coffee and roll-ups. I explain both Madonna and Sight-Line. I feel like Rex Harrison for a while, though don’t quite start singing standard songs from My Fair Lady…)

The author Will Hodgkinson wrote last year that Humanities (Hum) 1 is “common”, is dubbed Paperbacks by the cognoscenti, and is full only of good-looking tourists, not serious scholars. The action, he wrote, is in the posher Hum 2, while the grand operatic passions are to be found in Rare Books & Music.

So, troubled, I go up to Hum 2, which isn’t significantly posher or Hardback (neither its interior nor its inhabitants), though it is quieter and smaller. Perhaps Will is of the minimalist tendency, and dreams only art by Donald Judd and poems by Emily Dickinson? In fact I can’t really fathom Hum 2’s reason to exist, other than as an overspill for my trashy Hum 1. The reference books up here are largely about popular music, so I take out the Billboard Book of Brazilian Music, (for I know, from the Caetano concert, that Will H. is an expert of the samba and the bossa nova; in fact he interviewed Caetano on stage at the Barbican a few weeks ago, and wrote the notes to the Tropicalia show there too.)

Creativity, according to the psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, depends on the relationship of three things: a domain, a field, and a person. Domain is an area of knowledge. Field is about the gatekeepers of this knowledge (Nancy Andreasen in The Creative Brain, defines these guardians as “critics, collectors, museum curators, journal reviewers, funding agencies…”). One might add newspaper editors, venture capitalists, taxi drivers, and Hollywood script consultants, of course. Actually, one might add so many kinds of Madonna Reader…

In this model a Person is only made creative: when he or she “has a new idea or sees a new pattern of a given domain”, and then only when this “novelty” is “selected by the appropriate field for inclusion into the relevant domain”.

So how to be creative in the library? A domain of slow progress, and many footnotes and attributions, I suspect. How to be creative at all? And how to get approval from the gatekeepers? (That would be the publishing houses, fyi). How to decide in which creative domain to reside?

The psychologist Endel Tulving created a model of memory known as Episodic. Episodic because it is composed of a series of events that are sequentially ordered in time. And, as these events are about us we, thus, have points of temporal reference for them. They are autobiographical: about childhood before a sibling arrived; about a first kiss or job; about a place lived, a lover taken. Crucial to this is the time-linked nature of the memory, and this may, says Andreasen, “encompass both looking backward into the past or looking forward and ‘remembering the future’”.

Contrasted with this is Semantic Memory, the things we know (perhaps because of libraries, or school, or Google). These are impersonal memories and not as inherently time-linked as the Episodic. These are the things that generalize our meanings and conceptions; on the basis of which we (often) make immediate decisions in life. In posh Hum 2 terms, these are defined as a cognitive and not an autobiographical reference. In fact, sometimes this is known as Reference Memory.

Upstairs in my new and rarefied high atlas of learning I begin reading about Bossa Nova, which means The New Way or New Fashion. I start at chapter three of The Billboard Book Of Brazilian Music - which the Library “gatekeepers” have deemed worthy to be on the open shelves, and thus, I guess, is the standard reference work. So: this afternoon Brazilian music is to be my Domain. The chapter begins:

"Desafinado” (Off-Key), sung by João Gilberto with his very personal, intimate, whispering style, was an ironic reply to critics [aka, the Gatekeepers of Samba, a music whose prevailing style was then quite operatic] who had sarcastically called bossa nova “music for off-key singers".

I am – perhaps you have guessed – largely a Sight-Line reader. My new novel starts:

All I want, just for a moment, because otherwise I’m fully focused-in and tunnel-vision, is the power to send mental messages. To wirelessly network me to another human being’s neural circuits. You know the thing, launch an idea through the cool air-conditioned ether; without speaking in tongues, or thumbing out another cell-text and moving one step closer to major-league arthritis. I just want to spin some civilized thoughts and positive vibes around the ole synapses – mostly the left-brain stuff, strictly creative ballroom, the sexy side – and float them across the nine-inch wooden wall that separates me from the delightful geology scholar sitting dutifully opposite on seat 2059 of the Soichi Noma reading rooms in the Asian and Middle Eastern Division.

I wonder where that inspiration came from?

I find myself Sight-Lining with my gatekeeper-approved Billboard book (though not looking at anything, just thinking). I don’t make it to the second paragraph, instead have an Episodic moment thinking back to being four years old and hearing the song Desafinado for the first time. (It was on one of four EPs we had, just after Garota de Ipanema). Yes, I am thinking, it is off-key, but I thought all music was like that back then – another EP was Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, hardly an exercise in 4:4 time and the three chord trick. I search out (don’t know why) a quote I’ve stored on the hard drive somewhere for some Semantic Memory use, some time: it is by the four year old, Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, and in later life the author of Hereditary Genius and the man who popularized the phrase, nature versus nurture.

I read a little French and I know the clock.

And then I think about learning to read that year, ’63, in the Dolomites whilst my father was out climbing mountains. I go back to a latter passage in Billboard where “Tom” Jobim, the composer of “Desafinado”, explains:

Actually it’s not an off-key song. It’s crooked on purpose. It’s tilted. It could be a very square song…it’s a criticism of experts. The guy next door, he’s off-key but he’s in love with this girl, and he can say to her that because loving is more important than being in tune. Some people are always in tune but they don’t love anybody.

Like that a lot.

I look around, but don’t see anybody posh enough up here to appreciate the insight. So I send SMSs instead. And then I think of Olen’s world, so rightly recognized (again) by Dick Adler. Think about his literary universe and it’s off-key nature, its imagined episodic memories; the absence, largely, of Reference Memory – because, with a few exceptions such as (as Olen has blogged) Chernobyl, this stuff is - like – all invented. I try to work out if Olen is a Sight-Liner or a Madonna Reader (as well as an Armanist, rather than a Versacherite), and conclude that if we are both in Central Park, he is Laurence Olivier, and I am learning to be Dustin Hoffman. (The latter a studious and somewhat nerdy inhabitant of libraries, as you might recall from the early scenes of Marathon Man with Marthe Keller).

Marthe Keller’s character was a Sight-Liner, for sure. Never seen her in here.

The Egyptologist says that perhaps I’m spending too much time in the Library to be creative, what with all this theorizing and semiotics; tells me to go off and find one of those Soviet soldiers who witnessed Nijinsky’s Last Dance, and must now be about 80 years old. But then I’ve been traveling, pretty much constantly, for most of this decade: my recent Episodic and Semantic Memories as well as all the books read, the pages typed, googled information downloaded, playlists shuffled, have largely merged into one over-stimulated Input Dysfunction (as the psychologists call it)…Now I just have to turn it all into art or something…

…Something as seemingly simple as a bossa nova by Caetano Veloso.

I go out for another coffee. There are two cafés in the Library, first floor and second. The first floor is posh, Ikea beakers and pricey slices of Pecan pie and Danish Pastries. The second is studious, plastic cups, school diners, and flagons of watery free-trade coffee – it’s cheaper too, and the largely Italian staff just great. I visit the first when I’m with journalists, when we’re consuming and Sight-Lining and swapping tales; I use the second when something is flowing, however dysfunctional the input, or I’m a Madonna Reader. Today I can’t decide which to choose: I’m beverage or reader dysfunctional, I suppose. I make a break instead for the front courtyard: sunshine and pure Sight-Liner tourism. On the front page of someone’s Evening Standard I discover there are elections today, and giant French elephants on the streets of Piccadilly.

Should I get out more? I know for a fact that Olen doesn’t. And Kevin’s got his shoulder/ grindstone thing going; John is juggling journalism, non-fiction, family and tango…

To Library or Not? Now that is the question. Even if it is a little off key and musically economical; a little too “augmented fourth” for most of the librarians and scholars and Madonna Readers here.

If you insist on classifying
My behaviour as antimusical
I, even lying, must argue
That this is bossa nova
And that it’s very natural

Desafinado – Tom Jobim, Newton Mendonça

I look up and Sight-Line: opposite me a regular Madonna Reader is peering at an academic book titled Passionate Fiction. In the cloakroom the two attendants speak in a flurry of Afrikans. The only words I recognize are “porn magazine” and “Big Brother.” Later, and outside one of Bloomsbury’s many hotels, a Japanese man is shouting “One room, two beds” into the ether of his wireless headpiece. He looks and sounds utterly insane. On the bus a boy says to his girlfriend: “It’s not fucking hot.”

She replies: “Yes it is.”

He says: “I know, but I don’t fucking care.”

How glad I am to be wearing my Les phrases ironiques t-shirt by Agnes B today. Get home: find Kevin thinks I'm a Code Monkey. Retire to bed and pretend to be Leonard Bloom.

The End

Mayday, mayday

2006-05-02T22:46:00.000+01:00

Above taken about 4pm; it's symptomatic of a downward trend in the numbers looking for a desk in the reading rooms.

In fact there is a vivid calm in "Hum 1" after all the studenty excitements and long queues of April. Making it all but impossible to read: even today's choice, Madness & Modernism holds little allure.

Funny that.

Outside on the terrace a leonine author asks me where we met. "You once offered me a ride on your motorbike," I say.
"Did you accept?"
"I declined," I say.
(I realize later that the incident took place at least 16 years ago).
"Oh."
Leonine author returns to talking about her new Italian castle with a Scottish wind-power millionaire writing a novel about writer's block set during the Ashes. You could not, it occurs to me, make this kind of stuff up.
She's reading Arthur Rubenstein, and waiting for an idea. He has set a new deadline, and will finish in the castle.

We talk, inevitably, of Nijinsky.

British Library or MI6?

2006-04-28T11:11:00.000+01:00

Nice piece in today's Times about the first adverts for the foreign wing of the British Secret Service. The strap line that MI6 uses to position its "brand" is as: "The World's Intelligence".

Sound familar?

It is very close, of course, to our very own library's "The World's Knowledge." Closer than we might think, in fact (and despite the fact that someone in "manuscripts" has been sitting on the Complete Works of Osama Bin Laden for weeks now, I even tried to track the person down, badly, which I guess I means no SIS work for me just yet).

Dig a little deeper on the SIS site, and in the BL's Consultative Document, and surely the same pattern emerges: the world is changing very fast; different kinds of geo-political Brit are now needed - as the Times piece suggests - and there are still many holes in our collections (both as librarians and spies).

why?

2006-04-27T18:23:00.000+01:00

..Because the British Library is ac/dc; is at one post-modernist angle showing off all its cool stuff and, at another, is where tucked away in reading rooms we are creating all the next stuff. Sometimes the place can seem like an airport lounge or a conference centre; at others a centre of scholarship.

Some people are doing clever things here; at other times it is
so inspiring.

So Humanities One, Rare Books If Really Necessary is about all of the above, and the terrace too.

Logged to be blogged #1

2006-04-27T16:49:00.000+01:00

Academe is all around as ever (but more exam crazy than at other times of year and thus a little cranky and wired) but through the mists of collective neurosis I’ve spotted another book title for the ongoing collection of the weird and wonderful: Persuasions of the Witch's Craft : Ritual Magic in Contemporary England by T.M Luhrmann; its reader seems safe enough though, sometimes even smiles.

Perhaps I’ve just been cursed.

Witch’s Craft goes into this, the first Logged to be Blogged section, along with: The Book of Pontifs, Ecofeminism and the Sacred…The Hospital in Latin America 1492-1898 and Old Adam, New Eves…

April 27

2006-04-27T15:33:00.000+01:00

Download the British Library's future.

And so it begins.

Key changes proposed in the strategy include:

* Overseas collecting to take greater account of changing patterns of international research, with more priority given to China, India, Anglophone Africa and Latin America;
* Increased focus on certain areas of the social sciences, including international law, politics, economics and social policy;
* Increased focus on non-textual materials such as primary research data and visual/audio-visual collections;
* An accelerated shift to electronic formats in some areas – for example, ‘grey literature' and conference proceedings – to respond to moves from print-based publishing to online-only distribution;
* Supplementing existing strengths in manuscripts and archives with a greater focus on e-manuscripts – for example by collecting digital archives from key literary, political and scientific figures;
* Review of purchasing strategy for overseas newspapers to ensure collecting is fully aligned with existing areas of particular depth (Middle East, South Asia, Eastern Europe and North America).