 David, thank you very much for that introduction. Very nice to see everyone here, and how very nice it is to be back. I think it was five and a bit years ago, because I think it was sort of late autumn, I seem to remember, up in Newcastle. And yes, it was late 2012, and I was fresh out of the BBC, and I was looking at my notes and seeing what we were talking about then, and there were themes of openness, and rights, data, partnerships, the role of unique and distinctive collections. Lots and lots of things which show a lot of continuity, but the world has moved on over those intervening years. So to briefly set a scene before the conference really gets going, I guess I just wanted to reflect a little bit on the five years that have passed, and some of the changes we've seen both here and in the wider world, which of course has seen the death of the man who literally wrote the songs, Changes and Five Years. And today, of course, the death of the great historian of time itself. It's been a turbulent time. It's been a time of two general elections and a referendum in this country alone, which have already changed the landscape in ways we can't predict. In the university sector, we're seeing extraordinary change right at the top, the whole way that funding flows, governance happens, accountability happens, and of course, just chatting to colleagues today, even right now, quite a lot of activity on campus itself disrupting the life of students and institutions. So the world is never quiet, but it will be boring if it was. But for ourselves here in this institution, if I'm honestly looking back over five years, I guess I would want to begin my story with the reshaping of the British library's statement of vision and purpose, which was, I guess, an intellectual journey which partly began at your conference, David, actually, when I first really had a chance to reflect in the round about what institutions like this are for. And about halfway through that period, as you will know, we published something we called Living Knowledge. And back in Newcastle, I was reflecting on a contradiction I'd been told, I'd have to sort out one way or another. Is the British library a research library, or is it a cultural institution? Could I please decide? And I refused to make the decision then. And in a way, Living Knowledge is embracing all of that both and thinking. We are clearly not an institution, and very few of the institutions here are, that can be locked into a single definition. Audiences don't see us that way, users don't. And in a way, Living Knowledge was a slightly more refined attempt to set out a language, a framework, not talking about Gavin, not quite a brand, exactly, but towards that thinking of what the idea of a national library is. And it was particularly urgent, I think, for us as a team, or me thinking about it very particularly encountering, let's say, politicians who seem to view the British library with a degree of at best abstract goodwill, but they couldn't actually play back to us at all what a national library is for. So we set a language of mission. We talked about making our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone for research, inspiration and enjoyment. And we talked and debated long and hard about that word, everyone. It's the first time I think the British library had put it very, very center stage in a mission statement, and I think it has influenced our lives here. And then as you'll know, we created a framework of purposes, language of purpose around custodianship, research, supporting business, culture, learning and international activity, which I think really has changed our mindset as an organisation. It's holistic. It's like a cube. You can look at it any way. And for some people, we are just one of those things, but it's the totality that we feel has helped the library think its way through what we should be doing, what we can be doing and how we change. And we've also set ourselves some directions of change, becoming more open, more innovative, more creative, more responsive, maybe more adaptive to the world as it changes around us. And I've just been reflecting on that five year through each of those lenses, really, what people may have noticed, what you may have noticed and how it may affect the landscape. And if I may, I'll steer back to some of the big issues around our research library identity, because that underpins everything. But I guess it's fair to say if you're just a member of the public, whether in London or indeed around the country now, I hope. It is probably our, it is our cultural mission, which seems to have grown and become ever more visible, whether it's Magna Carta events in 2015 or very, very different exhibitions on the one hand, West Africa, equally the Harry Potter exhibition that just closed, utterly different in type, but both of them actively drawing in audiences and people who had never set foot in the National Library before. 70% of the audiences to our last exhibition had never come here before. And they weren't, they were coming here and they were exposed to medieval manuscripts and items from many, many cultures and we're very, very proud of that. This theater here, wonderful for conferences by day, now open to the public every night for events, talks, performances and becoming part of the conversation we hope of not just the city, but the land, because increasingly with our partners, we're trying to live stream events from this theater around the country. And some of you are particularly I'm seeing national library colleagues here, John Scali from National Library of Scotland. One of the interventions here we've been able to make is to create in the spirit of living knowledge, a living knowledge network of partners with our national library colleagues but in the public library sector around the UK, working with some of the most dynamic library leaders who similarly find parts of that living knowledge vision that inspires them, and whether it's working together on skills development or live stream of events or indeed Harry Potter where we were able to do partner exhibitions with them, which was still working on the stats, more than doubled, we think, the reach of that exhibition around the country, some 40 public library venues. And that's part of a program which we call, pick up on that every one word, everyone engaged. We're a tax funded library, tax funded institution. The collections we hold are of everyone and for everyone. And we feel in some ways there's almost no limit to the methods we should use, the partnerships we should strike to make that extraordinary collection accessible to as many people as we can. It goes hand in hand with our learning mission and thinking back to what's really changed in the learning landscape. Well, I'm sure the physical digital balance will be something you talk about a lot over the next couple of days. We have grown physical on site learning activities a lot here. I think over about the last eight years, we've grown from something like 7,000 school visits to nearly 35,000 on site visits last year. We're bursting at the seams. I don't think we can grow easily beyond that. But it's been in the online space where we've seen the really extraordinary growth. I think when I was in Newcastle, I talked a little bit about something that was just a twinkle in the eye, which we now call discovering literature, which was formed working with teachers, particularly GCSE students, bringing primary sources to A-level students, GCSE students then, to really inspire them with the humanity of authorship. They were bringing literature back to life and back to the human being, the hand of Jane Austen writing scripts and so on. It's been a huge success. We have about 10 million visits a year, 7 million unique users now. Gradually, we've been able to expand it so that it stretches all the way from Harold Pinter's archive on there now, right back to Beowulf as of this year. Getting out there message has also changed in our business mission. Some of you may know we have a business and IP centre here. It bewilders some of our stakeholders. They ask, why should a library be involved in supporting business? But it's actually, as you may know, in our active parliament to support industry, we were born out of that white heat of technology, the economic boom of the 1960s, and the whole mission of the British Library when it was founded was to put collections to work, not just for pure education, not just for academia, but where we can to support growth and innovation. And we now have a network of 10 business and IP centres in partner libraries around the country growing all the time. In 16 and 17, we helped 18,000 people actually set up businesses around the country with our partners. And very interestingly, there's something about brand library here, I think, unlike other forms of business support. The stats are showing a very consistent pattern. I think in that year, it was 55% of these businesses were owned by women. 30% of them will be AME business owners. Libraries have, if you like, low barriers to exclude people. People feel they can walk in. People feel welcomed. They don't feel judged. Even in this mighty edifice, we're doing everything we can to make it possible for people to feel this is their space and their service. And then internationally, the international side of the BL, you feel very, very deeply in a job like mine and Caroline's and everyone. When we look at these collections and think about the responsibility we have to share globally, the collections, as you'll all be aware, have the character they have because of the very particular nature of British history. And that is both wonderful and a challenge. So the work we do more and more proactively to share and engage has been a singular mission of the period since I last spoke to you. Interestingly, in a kind of organic way, we just counted, we've had nearly 400 international engagements of some kind or another this year. In the whole of the last year, we only had 250. There's something maybe in the post Brexit vote air, which means that a national library and its international connections feels all the more important. I think people reach for culture and other kinds of connections, intellectual connections, when politics seems to be driving them apart. So among the innovations that we've made, we're now working with festivals around the world. I hope in May, some of you may be able to come back when we host for the second year running the Jaipur Literary Festival in its British incarnation here, the Hall Literary Festival after that. On the European stage, we've taken on the chair for the last few years of the Conference of European National Libraries. And that was, if you like, a little bit of proactive thinking. We knew that politics was going to intrude one way or another in the European relationships. Didn't know exactly what was going to happen. But it felt like the right gesture to make. And boy, in the last three years, has that become more than a gesture. It's felt very, very vital for the identity of this institution to be part of that European community. And then just today, literally today, my colleague Phil Spence is over in Shanghai in China, opening the third of our sequence of exhibitions with Chinese libraries. Where after many years of partnership, I have to say, sharing and working with our Chinese collections and Chinese language holdings, we actually asked Chinese audiences what they wanted from the British Library. And of course, what we're now doing is taking the great items of English literature to China. Small half a dozen extraordinary pieces, whether it's a Bronte manuscript or a Shakespeare folio. And it's reached huge audiences in China. And again, at a time when economics and politics are doing their thing, it's been very inspiring to see literature and the word simply bringing people together around enthusiasm. So I have to say, I think the study of English literature in China to a high level probably happens statistically more than it does in this country. There's great, great awareness of our heritage here over there. But looking at the wider picture for us, it's probably those other two purposes where the underpinning ones, if you like, where we have seen an aggrappling with the biggest changes and where if I'm back here by any chance in five years' time, I suspect that the revolutions will have continued even more. In our role, our custodianship role in building, shaping, curating, maintaining, preserving the national collection of written published digital content. Two or three big shifts. One, of course, is digital with our fellow legal deposit university libraries, national libraries within about six months of Newcastle. We were finally unveiling at last the non-print legal deposit revolution. And thinking of five years, we're just coming up for the five-year government review of that. I think without revealing any secrets, it has been a success. The achievement has been phenomenal across the partnership. But we will continue to ask questions about the accessibility of this material. We are ingesting the UK web, a big snapshot of the UK web every year. But it is, of course, still only accessible to users on six physical sites. And as every passing year of the digital revolution passes, for us as library service providers wanting to make digital content as accessible as it can be, that feels tougher than ever. And that is a very, very live debate that we are grappling with. At the same time, we want to bring more and more of the holdings we have in physical form into the digital domain. And that has happened over the years in many, many ways. We work in partnership with commercial partners, with philanthropists, with foundations. And as part of living knowledge led by our head of collections and curation, Kristin Jensen, we now have an integrated program called Heritage Made Digital, where we are trying to take a coordinated strategic view, not just opportunistically of which partnerships we might strike, but also more strategically where within those extraordinary collections we want to invest on behalf of research, the global public, the UK public, to bring parts of our collection onto the web. It is a Sisyphean task. This is, we are still in the lowest single figure percentages of the British Library collections being available online. But where it does mean where we do have a very active partnership, whether it's with Find My Pass for Newspapers or the Cata Foundation for some of our golf holdings, that's fantastic. But we are taking now a more proactive approach. Two Centuries of Indian Print is an ambition. We've simply put out there to say that we hold the biggest collection of Indian printed books under any roof, probably anywhere on the planet, but certainly outside the subcontinent. But Indian scholars and researchers have to come here to access them. And we want to work, we call it Two Centuries because the earliest one is a Bengali book from about 1713-14, and we reckon we roughly hit copyright problems around that beginning of the First World War. But we want to try and bring all of those books in multiple languages, about 22 different languages, onto the web. And we've begun with our Bengali collections and have big ambitions to grow. And then on a smaller but equally important scale, if you go into the Treasures Gallery at any point in the next couple of days, please do, do check out the very small but beautifully formed African Scribes exhibition, which is revealing some of the extraordinary Ethiopian manuscripts in our possession, where the, again, the history of course relates to Britain's imperial history. Our job as a cultural organisation is to work closely, as we have done with partners in Ethiopia, not just to care for these items, not just to display them, but to celebrate them and digitise them and share them with the world. And a physical exhibition is obviously part of that. All of this, I should say, underpinned by huge investment in technology to support ever-growing digital holdings of, I think we can, Linda, can we say exponentially growing, born digital collection, and common standards wherever we can interoperable with other heritage digitised collections from around the world. All of that, all of that resource, it has a public facing aspect, but it is part of reinventing ourselves as the National Research Facility. And in our research purpose, thinking, I've been thinking hard coming here about where have been the revolutions and where have been the continuities since we last met. And there are vital continuities, interestingly. We talked in Living Knowledge about a slight phenomenon that as people become more screen-based and spend more time glazing at an illuminated glass screen, it does seem that in one measure that the need to be in a physical place and to be in a real place of communal concentration or study seems to grow, not shrink. Actually, human behaviours don't quite seem to be atomising in the way that was perhaps predicted. And sure enough, we've noticed that the more we digitise, the more digital our users become, somehow the longer the queue seems to be outside our front door every day. And even if actually we can demonstrate that the number of physical items being consulted is creeping down, perhaps unsurprisingly year on year, usage of the reading rooms here and the study facilities here is not merely holding steady but growing in many cases. And we have, as some of you will know, if you come here regularly, opened up more and more informal study spaces for people who want to be in a communal atmosphere of common study but without necessarily needing to consult a physical item that day, which also acts as a pressure valve on the reading rooms themselves. So something in that desire for the physical research space and the communal activity of it remains a big, big constant. Other phenomena, our own work as a research organisation has steadily grown. We just celebrated 10 years with other museums, cultural institutions of being an independent research institute organisation here with the great strategic packing of AHRC. The collaborative PhD programme that underpins a lot of that work has been phenomenally helpful for us when we talked about that cultural research contradiction. An exhibition like the Russian Revolution show that some of you have may seem as completely underpinned by that extra resource of original research some of the PhD students work fed directly into that. BL Labs, some of you will know the work of Adam Farquhar and his team, that's just going into its third incarnation and when we run the competition increasingly it's not just students or university or academic teams but it's businesses and artists who want to compete for the chance to work with digitised collections. And in terms of service provision back to research very directly we were just really beginning last time I spoke to grow the ethos platform. I think Sarah Gould is going to come here tomorrow and tell you a little bit about what's been happening there. But over our five year period we've seen 70% growth. We have 70,000 downloads a month and I think we're hopefully about to upload our half millionth the record. It's becoming a serious open access service that has been an example I think of early very very experimental innovation that now becomes part of the BL landscape. Now I talk about its openness. Openness in all its forms was central to the very first some of my very first remarks last time partly coming from the BBC where we're constantly wanting to be as open as we can and provide content for free at point of use preferably on the web where possible. Openness as a theme for us is built into our living knowledge vision. It is about the provision of research content. It also and no doubt many of the institutions universities you work with also though plays into something a little more institutional generally about opening up to new audiences about transparency about a more open behavior as an organization. But reflecting on the five years anniversary nonetheless in the context of scholarly publication and research we are just about coming up to the fifth anniversary of the of RCUK's open access policy and I suspect like you we will be looking with great interest at UKRI's review of OA to get a sense really and I think it's slightly too soon to say as someone said of the French Revolution where this particular revolution has got to or is headed. It is a distinctive one for the United Kingdom another very topical flavor to the UK doing something in its own way. It clearly has some remarkable outcomes. I think Torsten we're getting to or you've passed technically the 50% of new publication threshold in open form of one kind or another but there's a fair debate about whether the benefits are evenly felt or distributed and certainly a bit like communism in one country. It hasn't necessarily instantly led to a unified and seamless global revolution yet. So we are we're watching listening but letting it influence because there is a trend our next generation thinking for our research services Torsten Reimer joined us a couple of years ago and within the living knowledge framework complementing our vision of everyone engaged there being almost no limit to the public or the public's that we should try to reach and and speak to. We have a very broad program a directional program of change which we call everything available which is a way of rethinking and reshaping our promise to researchers as the National Library about how and what and to what level of quality and ease of access content of all kinds research material in particular should be made available and that piece of work I think you've heard from Torsten already on this at previous events and I'm sure we'll be revisiting it with you all over the years ahead but it goes on a journey through looking again at discovery and navigation at the user experience and again for my broadcasting background I think we have a way to go still to make the user experience what it what it could or or should be looking at in terms of content provision just in time models one of the great themes five years ago was connecting or collecting and of course we do both we're a collecting organization but there are increasingly ways where it's not just about the content we hold here but about how with the right relationships we connect people to what they need as seamlessly as possible they shouldn't see the mechanics working but they should see a great service at the other end new tools new interfaces text and data mining whatever it may be new models of content open access is a vital part of that new media formats of course we are grappling at the moment as you know with our huge sound archive and we want sound and audio heritage to be as central and discoverable and as interoperable as any of the printed text or written text that we hold and of course data which was looming center stage when I arrived I think I said data is will be at the heart is at the heart of the research landscape more than ever now I think all organizations feel themselves generally one way or another to be data driven in some way libraries in particular both of the way we run ourselves and in the content that we provide and research data now becoming a dynamic and living output in many cases as critical or more critical than articles or the finished article and requiring not just to be stored or made accessible but to be interpreted and preserved to be citable and to be authenticated its conditions of production to be revealed and so on a plethora of questions about that innocent idea of simply making data available we know that we have a particular responsibility as the national library to play a role in this debate although every university grapples with it of course in its own way and I think one of maybe one of the speed sessions I think it's today or tomorrow Rachel Katarski from our team here will introduce for those of you who've not yet seen it the the British Library's research data strategy trying to at least set the framework for how we see the questions of how you manage how you create data how you preserve and give access to it and this is categorically not just an academic or even just a professional question for us it's becoming a bit of an identity question for the British Library one of the big events in this five year span came in 2014-15 when the decision was taken we pitched for this and the research councils agreed it was the right answer for the Alan Turing Institute to be based on site here or have its headquarters at least on site here at the British Library and I think looking at the international national libraries world that has gained that has gained the attention of the world because we think it's a very rare instance where you have a national institute devoted to data analytics algorithms artificial intelligence and machine learning directly and deliberately co-located with the largest digital and digitized content and cultural collection in the land and already that adjacency that relationship is an independent institution by the way to initial transfer five universities many of them in the room now up to nine university partners and partnering liberally beyond that and increasingly becoming a voice in debate and we're working with them in this theater and elsewhere to dramatize and bring to life some of the ethical debates around policy debates around data we're working on specialist projects machine learning the Arabic texts sector-wide issues looking at heritage data as an issue across heritage institutions and with big projects in view to explore both some digital humanities ventures historical project we can do using some of our archives and also interestingly enough looking into the library sector itself and trying to make a more data-driven and analytical approach to the whole shape of our industry so that we actually understand the dynamics and the user dynamics and and so on now all of that is thrilling and positive and I believe that will actually lead to remarkable innovations in the future I think it's fair to say and it's probably been said that some of our ati discussions in this very room that we are nonetheless only just beginning to grasp the vast power that does get unleashed when culture and human behavior do get turned into turned into data and I can only say when we talk about the upheavals of the last few years I think maybe just to conclude thoughts here really I really really would not have imagined five years ago that the very idea that binds us together of there being such a thing as authenticatable knowledge and its advancement being called into question would ever have been possible but we really have seen some extraordinary I think phenomena out there in the world and data analytics being used at industrial scale to both influence and manage and mobilize opinion to undermine trust in many cases and active measures actually to undermine public confidence in my old area of work in institutional media and by extension institutions of knowledge more generally and I have to say it's been a matter of I've been really been really striking and I think collectively make us feel proud my observation really of how the library community was not remotely passive during this phenomenon and how clearly the library's voice has been heard educating reassuring reasserting values and I think that's why I want to emphasize this because I think values is one of the themes of your conference and quite rightly the values of libraries ensuring that that vital ideas about independence of thought of trust the authentication the healthy skepticism certainly but not allowing that to tip over into undermining belief that you can in fact validate evidence and find real sources that can grow knowledge so I have to say at times of upheaval politically and intellectually and the two are kind of intertwined at the moment I think the resilience of the library sector across all its forms and if you like the solidarity the connection that does at a deep level bring the research library community together with public libraries with national libraries school libraries even really really is more vital than ever because this is one of the great stable continuities at a time when many many other disruptions are occurring all around us I think I will conclude there except to say that in that sense of partnership and continuity the British library's own relationship David with your organization is a lasting and very deep one and long may it continue as member supporter joint problem solver and so on we have institutional connections at many many levels but I think at this particular conference I would be wrong not at least to note that for us for these past many years central to that relationship has been one individual an exceptional individual has been at my shoulder all during this period and who will and it thankfully still is but later this summer won't be one of the really exceptional figures in the library sector someone who is wise humorous thoughtful and expert and that is the chief librarian of the British Library Caroline Brazier so if we could just say who's hatred for her chief executive is now hitting the sky thank you that really is it from me thank you for listening and your engagement