 Felly, rydw i'n meddwl am yw Llyfrgell Cymru, a rydw i'n meddwl i'r Fflaenau Prydysgrifennu, ac rydw i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r gwaith yma yma yma. Rydw i'n meddwl i'r 8 yr ysgrifennu, a fyddwch chi'n clywed am y 50th anferstru o'r bwysig yng nghymru yng nghymru yng Nghymru. A'r rydw i'n meddwl am y ddechrau ar gyfer ysgrifennu, gtwinch一些 bryd ymwysig would be appropriate to celebrate that in advance, in a sense, by thinking through what our new vision ought to be in the years leading up to our 50th anniversary. So living knowledge is the name of the publication and it's going to set out our ambitions for growth and development over the next eight years, and indeed beyond that, yn ddaf yn y dwylo arall, a felly mae y cwmuned o'r ddechrau ffiythol瑕 Both y Llywodraeth a Ymddorol, dyna gyniwch ei chweithgwydau a llawio amryl, yn ffii'n mewn, dyna'r pwyl inniadol i i'r ddechrau mewn ffiythol, mae'n meddwl i'r meddwl amserion, mae'n meddwl i'r meddwl i'r meddwl i'r meddwl i'r meddwl i'r meddwl i'r meddwl i'r meddwl i'r meddwl i'r meddwl, this room knows very well but over the next decade we're going to see an enormous amount of change in information services, in research, in culture. I think it's our job to be able to respond to all those changes effectively so we hope that we will be able to go on being a truly creative and innovative institution and I'm very confident that we will manage ydych chi gyd Caerdydd i'r lleolwyr gair ar gael ar gyfer gweithrwyr wedi'i gweithio'r ffordd i'r unig ar gyfer gweithrwyr yng Nghymru, ac mae'r cydweithio'r gweithrwyr yn ysgrifennig. Roedd wedi cael ei ddweud ar gael yn cael 45 munud. A ddim yn gweithredu bod Peter Barron, gyda Google, yn y gallu yng nghyrchu ar y gwrth bonesi, i gynnig, yn y ddweud y gweithrwyr yn cael ei ddweud ar gyfer ddim yn iawn amser. I hope at the end of all of that, as many as you's possible will be able to say for another drink and a few more canapes. So I'm now going to hand over to Roly. Thank you. Thank you Tessa. Thanks to everyone for coming. Thank you to those of you who are allegedly looking at this on a live stream on the internet. Nice to see you all out there. And thank you too to Peter, Baron. Peter and I have a bit of history because the last time we worked together I was controller of BBC2 and Peter was a very distinguished editor of Newsnight, a very challenging editor of Newsnight. Since then we have both moved in different ways into what Tessa just described as the knowledge business. Sometimes seen as opposite poles of it and that's one of the themes I want to explore tonight. We are of course launching this, which I hope you have all found on your chairs, but I am shamelessly going to use it as an excuse to have an opportunity to, in a bit years in, to having taken on in succession to the great Lynne Brindley, the role at the head of this great institution, to reflect on what it is that I've learnt and felt and discovered about the importance, not just of this institution but the whole network that it represents. My theme is the library in an age of data and algorithms, those algorithms that drive Peter's business. Just to say people do ask me perhaps more frequently than I might have expected. In the age of Google, of great search engines, of information on screens, does the whole idea of the library still even make sense? It's a serious question at a time of constrained public funding and what we collectively believe libraries are for and what they are will determine in what form they survive and I hope thrive in the years ahead and that's across the public, the academic, the research sector and indeed the national library sector. So let's bring that little bit of opposition to life. The debate that we have, Tessa mentioned that Google and we are indeed partners, we are, we are both part of what we've called the knowledge quarter of London, this extraordinary region around us. That's us just to the left of St Pancras railway station and in a few years time, Google will have their headquarters roughly there and if you want to bring to life the choice people allegedly have, they could stand in front of St Pancras station and turn left or turn right for different ways of accessing culture, knowledge, memory and the digital age. If they turn left I guess they have an idea in their heads that looks something like this. And if they turn right they'll get that. And it feels a profound difference and it's a difference that all of us who work in this business have to worry about, a set of values that have encoded the idea of the library for decades or centuries on the left, intention perhaps with the new values that we live with all the time as we live our digital lives, our mobile lives, our social media lives, that sense of tension, push and pull or contradiction. And of course I'm here tonight to say I do not regard there to believe there to be any such contradiction. The role of the library is proudly to do all of those things and it's our capacity to bring those dimensions together. However difficult it is that gives the idea of the library such durability. And that really underpins the philosophy of the vision that we are publishing today. And amid all the complexity and all the debate and analysis around the precise role of institutions like these we first of all have tried to keep things simple. As you look through the book there will be some statements of mission first of all that we are here to make our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone for research, inspiration and enjoyment. A few words in that sentence but the word everyone is probably the most powerful and demanding and I will come back to that, we are a great publicly funded institution and over time yes in the age of connectivity and digital, that's our mission. And we structure what we do around six statements of purpose. Custodianship, growing, building, looking after that great national collection, I'll tell you more about that. Research, putting it to work, making it available for anyone who wants to do research of any kind on any topic. Business, it's there in our founding act, support for industry. Finding ways to actively stimulate new ideas, the innovation that leads to economic growth. Culture, engaging everyone with memorable cultural experiences, exhibitions like the wonderful terror and wonder exhibition on at the moment. Learning and education, something I think we're going to be stressing even more but we will not build the researchers and innovators of tomorrow unless we now expose them to the extraordinary treasures that we have here. And finally our international role, every national library has an international dimension by definition. This one perhaps more than others and we will work constantly to advance knowledge around the world and enhance increased mutual understanding. Another theme I especially want to come back to tonight. So this institution, I don't think I understood it when I came and I've had to learn and explore this and it's a young institution. I think that was the first thing that really struck me. People hear about national libraries and they feel a sense of history and of course that's true but it is in fact one of the great visionary post-war inventions. Arts Council, Radio 3, National Theatre, there's a small but very distinguished list and it was a courageous vision of a new kind of institution in the service of research and innovation and it did indeed bring together at its heart underpinning it the heritage collections, those enlightenment routes of the British Museum library and the British Museum archive collections, document collections. But it also conjoined it with a commitment to serve science and technology and research in the here and now. It was born out of that classic white heat of technology I guess of the 60s and went live in 1973. I often say we are in a way a child of the digital age, born with only a few years actually of Microsoft and Apple and on site here in fact since 1998 when Google was founded. And that building there was in the age before the web as close as you could get to it in terms of research infrastructure. That is Boston Spa in Yorkshire, the bit of the British Library Londoners don't really know about. But designed to be at the service through what we now call the document supply business of the library to make content accessible to every research library, every public library, the length and breadth of the land and in the days before connectivity and wires, lorries would go in and out every day. They still do, it's where the national collection comes in. There it is, the library at the heart of the system. Not what Londoners just think it is, not just that great heritage collection, but a working vision of how you put knowledge to work. And again we feel it was born using the tools of its time. This is a visionary idea whose real potential is only just coming into being now that we have the tools of modern technology at our disposal. Underneath it all though always first and foremost is the collection, this extraordinary national collection. There's a picture taken in Boston Spa, I might say. It's a very, very poor quality picture, but I'm very proud of it because it was taken on my blackberry and I tweeted it and it's about the only successful tweet I've ever made. The caption I gave to it with 140 characters was historic newspapers as far and as high as the eye can see. And yes indeed, this is inside the brand new, not yet formally opened, national newspaper building there in Yorkshire. It is a great project with a great commitment of public money to save and preserve the national newspaper collection. Some 33 kilometres, 750 million pages dating back to the late 17th century and it's growing all the time. If you go to Yorkshire you see the lorries arrive every day. It's like hay bales with newspapers and magazines still coming in every day. Now protected and preserved and robotically controlled to be discoverable and retrievable. And every month across the whole of the national collection some eight kilometres of new physical content comes in, some 6.8 terabytes of digital. No one really seems to be able to tell me, I have to say, how big this collection is. When I first came I was told it was 150 million items. The other week somebody told me it was 200 million items. So who knows what we do know is that it has something like 14 million books. Then there are journals, newspapers, magazines, manuscripts, archives, sound and music, video maps, patents, prints, stamps, photographs underpinned by a mix of the great founding collections. I'm looking at some of our founders even as I speak, those busts behind you there. Robert Bruce Cotton, Robert Harley, Hans Sloane. But accumulated over the years other magnificent private collections and of course the magic of legal deposit, copyright deposit by which every publication comes into the library every day. And the result of that is treasures beyond compare in the John Riplack gallery behind you. Left there I'm sure you'll recognise is the earliest dated printed book, the Diamond Sutra from 868, the Tang Dynasty and so on beyond that, the Lindisfarne Gospels Shakespeare. There is ephemera and there are treasures. There are items in it which are both ephemera and treasures. This is John Lennon's handwritten lyrics to In My Life, which as you can see was originally going to be about Penny Lane until Paul McCartney ripped off the idea. There are new kinds of archival collection coming in all the time which push our boundaries. Here's Wendy Cope's personal collection, one of the biggest literary collections we've had, 15 storage boxes we kind of know what to do with those 40,000 emails and word documents and we've had to really keep pace to know what it means to collect and preserve material like that. We need to develop new skills to capture the operating systems that are already becoming defunct in front of our eyes. And of course I mentioned publication and legal deposit but the great journey of the library over the last 10 years has been to envisage what that meant and keep pace with it. 10 years ago, the library began by permission collecting websites and making them available, the UK Open Web Archive. This is freely available to everyone and it takes a snapshot and it preserves websites exactly as they were when they were published, when there was a little bit of a controversy a year and a half ago about a political party which had allegedly removed an old speech from their website and didn't quite conform with current policy, researchers were able to find it on the UK Web Archive in its original form. A little vision of how important it is not just to collect but to preserve and to continue to make available. And of course in 2013 that went ballistic when officially finally copyright deposit was applied to the entire digital domain every ebook, every e-journal and indeed every website within the UK domain is now collected here truly beginning to develop the idea of the library as the national memory in a way that future generations will recognise. That journey from the Diamond Sutra to last night's website I suppose represents the extraordinary journey that the library has been on up to this point and many of those themes will continue. But as we were putting living knowledge together we have identified a number of major new challenges many of which will require all our resourcefulness, all the support of our friends in fundraising, in making the case, in bringing partnerships together and I will touch on that theme as we go through. Briefly a few of them, if the last decade was about rescuing and saving the national newspaper collection and we did, it was suffering, it was failing, the Collindale building, roof was leaking and so on we believe the next big challenge and some of you may have heard this on the radio today already is the audio heritage of the UK. The National Sound Archive is based here an extraordinary collection of some six and a half million recordings growing all the time I might say by voluntary deposit from the music industry and by the extraordinary work of oral historians and other sound collectors. It's on 40 or so different formats and some of those formats will be illegible now, we reckon, within about 15 years. The technology is simply fading and dying in front of our eyes. This is an instance where digitisation means preservation. It's an expensive, difficult business, they'll have to be triaged, we won't be able to protect everything but nonetheless we are building a partnership not just of us but of regional archives around the country to campaign on this, to raise public awareness, to fundraise so that the amazing work that our teams do here can actually be amplified to the benefit of the UK as a whole music, sound, voice, region and so on. Other big themes, the network of partnerships around the UK, the public libraries that we work with already there's six of them around the business and IP centre, it began here, I'm delighted to say next week on the next two weeks we'll be launching partnership business centres in both Liverpool and Sheffield to complement the ones already there in Birmingham, Manchester Leeds and Newcastle. We set out a vision here, we believe that should be at least 20 libraries by the end of the decade and by a hub and spoke model we want the influence of that to radiate out even to the wider public library network and I'm sure we'll be talking more about that. What else? We want to build on the growing success of the public programme, exhibitions, events. The library by the way didn't do any of these really, 15 years ago. Now the kinds of exhibitions we do here, the talks, the happenings, the engagement with the cultural life of the country is second nature to the kind of institution that we are. We want that to be heard and felt increasingly outside London with partners. Talking about outside London, Yorkshire, Boston Spa, originally and I hope forever the home of documents supply and the commitment to support research but you saw that newspaper building. That itself was a successor to a high tech storage and collection management facility we built previously. We believe the geography of Yorkshire, that original inspiration of having a national library centre facility right at the centre, the geographical centre of the UK. Its time has come again as increasingly historic print collections in city centres are less used but need protection and need to be made accessible. We are developing plans for a long term vision for Boston Spa which we hope will come to fruition over this next strategic period to become a shared facility to work with other partners across the cultural sector, university sector and other kinds of organisations as well. Other themes, self help and reliance and I'm not going to talk about this in great length and this isn't going to be the entire solution but this if you like is a symbol of how institutions like ours will increasingly need to find every piece of resourcefulness to raise the funds to support what we do. We will fight determinedly for our public funding but we will also build the new models that help us get there. I only mentioned this because I finished reading this book last night. It was as you may know the number one best seller several weeks running in Waterstones. It's part of the British Library crime classic series. It's been a huge commercial success and I think copies are available in the shop. It's by Eleanor Fargin's long forgotten brother Jay Jefferson Fargin. Bless him he wrote 60 books so I think we're on to something here. It was a truly delightful read but perhaps more seriously if we are looking at one or two of the themes in here that will come to dominate the activities of the institution over the next period. I think it may not be Mr Fargin but this near contemporary of his whose legacy really will be with us. This of course is Alan Turing and interestingly at almost exactly the same time as Jay Jefferson Fargin was writing a mystery in white Alan Turing was writing a paper called on computable numbers. 1936 and as I'm sure some of you in the room know that was the paper which first set out then hypothetical devices that were capable of any computation if it were representable through an algorithm. The insight in that paper there's a piece of intellectual heritage for you is the route from which Peter's company and indeed almost all innovation that we now live with derives and I mentioned Turing for two reasons partly because of that insight and because I think even since we wrote our last vision the power of data has become even more significant than ever but also because it was announced in December one month ago that the institute named in Alan Turing's honour the Alan Turing Institute a publicly backed institution dedicated to innovation in data science will be based here at St Pancras at the British Library. Oh there's his by the way his fictional semi-fictional incarnation of course. This is why the world now knows about Alan Turing but the British Library in partnership with the universities who form the consortium to run the Alan Turing Institute will have at its heart over this next period, the period of living knowledge, a new institution dedicated to the great revolution of our time which is the revolution in the creation, analysis and exploitation of data in all its forms and it's our job I think to ensure that that really does mean data in all its forms. We know the extraordinary insights that will come for medical science. We have colleagues from the Cric here next door of the Cric doing extraordinary work, bringing big data to bear on innovations there. We've seen it in the social sciences but also an organisation like this, a building like this dedicated to knowledge in the round. We believe it's vital that you use that innovation and insight to analyse, find new patterns in, new innovations in the national collection itself. I've talked about the born digital collections, the data set of the UK web itself and the library already has a role in making data sets more retrievable through the data science system but increasingly finding different questions to answer by looking at them as data rather than just text in their own right. Here's a little snapshot and as you have a drink afterwards you'll see the real thing by the way if you want to see a little bit of raw data. This is a very, very brief snapshot from a data set derived from the automatic book retrieval system of the British Library. These are actual books being ordered, retrieved, delivered in our reading rooms. I think this is about two minutes' worth and you'll see the video afterwards which is both simultaneously the visually dullest and most beautiful video I've ever seen because it's hypnotic and compelling and it reveals moment by moment the secret unconscious thought process of what really goes on here, a sheer diversity of human inquiry that is made possible by great knowledge institutions and it's ensuring that the age of data is pump primed with the full richness of human knowledge that animates us as we go on this next journey of the library's existence so that increasingly as not just our brand new digital collections but our historic collections become digital you can do more things with them. There's Lewis Carroll's manuscript of Alice already there in digital form but increasingly we will need to build on the extraordinary global partnership that we are already putting together of funding sources to unlock a global resource of knowledge in digital form which can then be put to use for those creative manipulations that I was talking about just to give a sense of the range because when I put this together I was astonished to see just how many ventures we are doing every single one of them I might say fundraised for, we don't put public money into this this is something where we in common with our sister institutions simply have to be resourceful the Tata Foundation in India helping to support a project to digitally reunify the glorious 17th century Moir edition of the Romayana two thirds of it here, the remaining thirds scattered across different institutions in India launched earlier last year with an exhibition in Mumbai but available free now online, a thing truly of beauty gulf history and Arabic science working with the Cata Foundation a team upstairs here digitising some half a million items both about the history of the gulf and the Islamic transmission of western science here's a 12th century edition of our comedies on water clocks Malay manuscripts, William and Judy Bollinger generously working with us on the National Library of Singapore to digitise our collection of those exquisite artefacts Hebrew this wonderful book of Esther is part of a project funded by the Polonsky Foundation and now gloriously working with National Library of Israel to make it even bigger so that ultimately one might be able to digitally reunify the entire corpus of Hebrew manuscripts not just our collections by the way but the other great collections around the world so that they all enter this realm Greek manuscripts, the Stavrosnyarkos Foundation this is a very very beautiful gospel book from Constantinople from the 10th century in the image of St Luke and the Iran Heritage Foundation working with us on our Persian manuscripts and so on a little tour of the memory and culture of the world all artefacts pretty much under our feet here but locked away perhaps for those privileged few whose orders might come up on that data set I showed you earlier but gradually piece by piece scanner by scanner finding their way into the global public domain to be discoverable, used and enjoyed and since we're talking about folk having big visions back in 1936 there's one of them again it was clearly a very, it was a prolific time I think for thinking back then and much of this was prefigured this was a set of essays that Wells wrote at the time imagining and he didn't know what Alan Turing was writing but nonetheless something was in the air foreseeing a time when we could actually begin to piece together something on a global basis that replicated the kind of cultural institutions you'd seen hitherto just within a single nation and by the way Wells connected that very very directly to conflict and world peace he saw that as building bridges between nations so as those ideas really come to life I think it's been particularly moving for us in the last year to see one such if you like global encyclopedia, Europeana coming together of different libraries archives and museums across continental Europe coming together to commemorate the conflict of 1914-18 suddenly what maybe seemed like a rather abstract project took on something deeply moving formally competent nations working together to celebrate terrible events that happened a century earlier not just archival materials by the way from the official records but also family items we had a great road show in Boston Spa but we're also contributing very directly to this project this is from the India office records for instance wonderful image from Brighton Pavilion Hospital and these are some wounded Indian soldiers and they're enjoying a gramophone concert and at the same time a scotchpiper discorsing on the bagpipes adds zest to the party that bizarre little glimpse of cross cultural life and the fringes of World War I is now not part of just of European heritage but world heritage and what's intriguing is that what's happening here is an idea that's taking root in other continents in Trove National Library of Australia building their own model to bring together state library collections in America the digital public library of America still young just a couple of years old growing fast and connecting not just museums and libraries library contents but even private collections Google themselves intervening very interestingly and excitingly here with their cultural institute that provides a platform for cultural institutions to offer curated exhibitions in this space and so on that wellsian vision underpinned now by data, by algorithms, by digitisation is quietly but very very importantly becoming a reality and of course the vital thing is not just to publish or make accessible it's what you do with the content once it's in that form and that's the truly fascinating journey that we have been on and through living knowledge intend to go even further to give a few examples this is one of our historic maps one of our, did I mention we had six and a half million maps one of our six and a half million maps another collection that grows all the time but of course these historic maps are in analogue form and if you digitise them that's all very well but they only really come to life if you can link them to real contemporary geographical data and that's a project called geo-referencer that we work on with clocon technologies and periodically now it's become like a little global festival we release a batch of digitalised maps onto the web and invite people anywhere on the planet to tie them in geo-reference them to google maps so that you can do the manipulations spot the locations bring them together and once you've done that then all sorts of other things begun possible you can begin to apply 3D imagery you can begin to look at the contours and so on and that thinking one thing leading to another is what's so appealing I think about the world coming to life around us here that's inspired something different called off the map which we're now I hope going to be able to do every year working with game city in Nottingham where we release some content partly from our maps collection partly from our images collection and invite a competition for students working in the computer games business or sector to come up with virtual environments based on them in honour of terror and wonder behind you the theme was Gothic this is Font Hill Abbey of course William Beckford's extraordinary creation and if you're equipped with a nice pair of virtual reality goggles nice Oculus Rift device and I have seen the chairman of the British Library wearing an Oculus Rift you need to know I'm afraid I don't have a picture of it then you would be able to enjoy the winning entry which was this by a team from the University of South Wales calling themselves Gothulus Rift which is a fantastic immersive 3D creation that could never have happened without the stimulus of the collection so we're getting more scientific about that courtesy of the Mellon Foundation you'll be detecting a theme here we now have an annual competition called BL Labs where we invite people from anywhere in the world to unleash themselves on British Library digitised collections to see what can be done and to give one example title of the lecture some years ago we worked with Microsoft to digitise a large batch of 19th century, 18th and 19th century books in the library and many things have been done with that very important corpus but perhaps the most intriguing was the team this together led by Ben Osteen inside the library in the digital research team here and they created a simple algorithm called the mechanical curator which is a very simple minded creature this creature crawls through every single page of that corpus of digitised historic books and stops when it gets to a picture or an image, anything that's not text and it pulls out the image and lo and behold in almost no time at all we found ourselves possessors of 1 million and 64 fascinating images that had not been seen by human eye for a century and a half and different applications come from it if you're feeling lonely on Twitter you can follow the mechanical curator and he or she will send you one of these images randomly every hour it's very pleasing compare with a lot of other things you get on Twitter but boldly the digital research team decided and I say decided by the way I may be chief executive but I found out about it on the morning that we did it to publish all 1 million and 64 of these images to Flickr Commons just before Christmas to Christmases ago there they are a sudden gift to the world to the British Library and to unleash any creativity anyone on the planet felt like applying to it and of course one thing you'll see on the right there is it needs tagging they need understanding these images are obscure, they need information what are they of, what do they connect to, what can you do with them they're all by the way public domain and then intriguingly we then had a call from an American artist called David Normal he was a major installation at the Burning Man Festival in Arizona and no permission required but he was going to go ahead and do it and sure enough there was crossroads of curiosity, this is all within 6 months of publication those historic images have become this extraordinary image right at the heart of a great festival which will be coming I hope to the piazza now of the British Library we're going to try and bring it home in some way, who knows where this journey goes but it's not just about creativity and data part of the power of the tools that we now have is about restoring, preserving and sustaining cultures and that's in a way the theme that I want to move towards now increasingly what we are finding is that we have extraordinary privileges in this institution as you can tell we need to fundraise to do what we do but nonetheless the collections are known, they are understood and they can be brought out there but it's the forgotten cultures, it's the lost bits of global heritage, the ones that are vulnerable that are perhaps most important and again we touch on this in living knowledge, this year I'm very pleased to say we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of one of the most generous projects we do from the Arcadia Foundation, the Elizabeth Rousing Foundation called the Endangered Archives Programme, it's managed out of the British Library and it is about identifying archives anywhere in the world, not ours but which can then be digitised usually digitised on the ground with the items themselves preserved in situ but published via the British Library to the world forever and there's an element of training of course, consciousness raising but most vitally preservation and access, so far 77 different countries, 224 different projects on 3 million images and for myself stepping into the library a project like this is simply extraordinary, the world needs to know it and understand it even just there, these are very recent ones photographs from Syria and Lebanon, manuscripts from Ethiopia top right and Romania bottom left, on the right pamphlets and other propaganda material from Mongolia just after the end of the Soviet era, in other words recent archives that would not otherwise be preserved, other tales from this realm of culture disappearing before the age of data and technology made it possible to protect it, I mentioned the sound archive and the vital importance of saving those sounds and yes, of course they have an important regional aspect but things like this only come really into clarity when you actually talk about something specific, we were approached by Chris Kidd from the University, a social anthropologist from the University of Glasgow and he was working with the Batwa people who some of you may know about in the great lakes in Africa and Uganda who have been displaced, in fact as a consequence of conservation initiatives there but they've lost their tribal homelands and he wanted to find out where literally in the world any record of their heritage might exist and of course it turned out to exist here we had field recordings from the 1950s and he might say by the way we still make field recordings and he was able to find a recording of the almost forgotten Routwa language and this was a picture a few years ago this is Jeremiah Bungajare from the Batwa people who has just heard in fact what turned out to be his father's voice recorded for the first time, apparently he did a dance after he listened to it but that personal connection was quite extraordinary and it's just a glimpse I think of where these collections can go and collections are fragile and just to give a sense and I thought hard about whether I should include this but I think it's important and I want to pay tribute actually to my colleague Andy Stevens who's not here tonight but he's been our board secretary but has also attended to our international relations over the years, this image you may see the date down there is 2003, this is the Iraq National Library and Archives and that can show you how fragile collections and national collections can be and we through the offices of Andy and others played a role in helping them reconstruct that collection through digitisation of artifacts that we hold here particularly those India office collections we had material that relates to that so surrogate copies, maps, photos, books and indeed over time we worked with university libraries around the UK to actually help them restock with some physical items as well as social science journals that again bringing together heritage items and contemporary research materials, a galvanising effort through digital and physical means to help restore a collection and there National Librarian, my opposite number, Dr Saad Iskandair described that as he was talking about the role of a national library in those desperately difficult circumstances as one of national identity true citizenship and civil society and I might say by the way Dr Iskandair's institution came under threat again only last year when the ISIS troops came close to Baghdad so this is a real, this can be a real and present danger so as we talk about this extraordinary age of data that we are going into I think it is vital there by the way is the Iraq National Library back in business to think about why we are moved by that image and to reflect as well as all this connectivity on the vital power and importance of libraries as place, real physical places this is part of the very beautiful collection we have and some of them are at Reba of Colin Syngen Wilson's drawings for the building we are sitting in standing in right now a hard one building I might say controversial, expensive, built only of the finest materials because Sandy Wilson couldn't bear the thought that a national library for the people should be built to any standard less than a great university or indeed a palace and so it has proven to be but a thoughtful building a building full of symbolism and meaning and reflection he thought deeply and he had time actually with all the delays he thought deeply about what such a building could be this extraordinary tower here behind you there in the image houses George III's book collection it was on display in what's now the Enlightenment Gallery in the British Museum it sits there in pride of place here in this building a working stack still every day you will see the trolleys move in and out to retrieve items from it but Sandy had imagery in mind here he was thinking even of the cubar and mecca of a large black box that somehow attracts people to want to come around it and sure enough in this particular age we're finding people want to work in the vicinity of that extraordinary place it's full of little intellectual ideas emotional imaginative spiritual ones and for those of you digitally minded it was built around the most perfect user experience that Sandy Wilson could possibly imagine maybe that's why the building externally took a while to take root because it is built engineered conceived from the inside out to provide that perfect environment and what is fascinating in this digital age is that we are seeing more footfall not less it just appears to be and I think this came out also in William Seacart's recent report on public libraries and elsewhere that the more in some sense our lives become screen based the more importance many of us place on the physical encounter the human encounter the allure and fascination of the precious physical object and the space and often the public space where we can be both public and private together private study in a public space we have the privilege of living that idea I think in one of the great truly one of the great post war buildings but we are only part of a whole network of such buildings and spaces the length and breadth of the land of the UK and globally libraries in the age of the internet you might say that libraries as a network predated the internet and indeed may yet outlast it the other most powerful and resilient network of all a network of shared values and mission across languages faith political boundaries we are very very struck that we are launching living knowledge at the start of what will be our great year where we celebrate Magna Carta it's in conservation now it will be re-emerging very very soon and in this extraordinary year the 800th anniversary of the granting of Magna Carta will be thinking of course not just about power and the rule of law but also about rights and values and our idea of a good society and it seems to me that libraries and the infrastructure they represent are part of the infrastructure of a good society and their values of values we need to be able to articulate ever more strongly because that's the extraordinary thing about them whether they're big small academic libraries public libraries your local community library this place I have been struck stepping into this world of the commonality of values and beliefs that holds it together and I know it is an old set of values which is why I think they will last and everyone defines them slightly differently but nonetheless I would note that they include independence from politics commerce and religion those sensitive always to all three a commitment to freedom of research thought creativity and expression very a very meaningful value I might say in the week that we have just seen here in Europe a place of sanctuary and safety I think people sometimes come here because they feel safe and again the architecture protecting the physical is part of that that is certainly true of small libraries in vulnerable communities and trust trust in many ways but in the digital age I might say just to return to the theme of data a trust now and forever in a set of professional values that will ensure the authentication of data and information data big data small data highly contestable it can be manipulated abused the shape of data can be created for ideological reasons and unless you understand that and can treat it with all the clarity and trust of libraries historically you will miss it so that retention and protection of the knowledge infrastructure of the UK is what we argue for in the document we are publishing today yes we will fundraise yes we will partner but at heart at every level of government and across this is not just a culture ministry thing this is about the whole connecting of forces across the UK it requires sustained patient investment there is economic value there but libraries help societies to be wise as well as productive and wise societies nurture them as we put it in living knowledge today the UK's success depends upon the freest possible flow of ideas inspiration and information and libraries not just this one but the whole network big and small of public and academic libraries across the UK are the vital enabler of that thank you sir thank you very much for that thank you so much Roli for that I'm Peter Baron from Google as Roli said we are former colleagues and I'm going to be your host for a little bit of Q&A and I think we're also going to try to take one or two questions from Twitter as well so prepare your questions put your hand up please and a microphone will find you shortly so I mean a very very broad ranging sweep there Roli and I think I also detected a slight favouring of John Lennon over Paul McCartney somewhere in there as well we have McCartney lyrics through that but I think they'll find you but one thing I wanted to pick up was you touched on at the end which was there in the announcement today which was a run economic growth and you actually said that economic growth is dependent on free flows of information can you say a little bit more about that how you see the work of the British Library feeding directly into future economic growth we feed directly and indirectly but I think it came home to me well perhaps when I mentioned the Alan Turing Institute coming here and I was struck that the Chancellor himself wanted to make that announcement because I think he was seeing increasingly investments in knowledge as being investments in economic growth we're still by the way a great manufacturing nation a great physical nation and again that we must never seduce ourselves into thinking that we're somehow on a one way journey from the physical to the virtual but nonetheless the power of creativity originality if you look at the intellectual heritage of this country has always been Britain's edge what has been so unique wonderful and that's across the sciences and literature and all the arts and increasingly we've seen recently the launch of the creative industries federation to try and notice that there's a whole sector of almost the industrial economy that we hadn't noticed because it was entirely based on ideas and creativity and I think you and I know we both worked in different aspects of content related industries you need the freest possible as few barriers as possible to accessing information and in particular what libraries stand for even though there may be land blocked you may have to go there to find them but under these rooms you can find anything and the task there is to make that as open as possible we're seeing a revolution which we talk about in the book in openness of all kinds one of which is the open access publishing revolution where increasingly you're seeing as a point of policy research that has been funded by public money being published openly to the web so we just find ourselves I think at an extraordinary historic juncture with the combination of the web and the historic traditions and institutions like this where if we organise ourselves correctly then I think we are remarkably well positioned to go into a period of great creativity and growth. I have one just in from Twitter do you think the library ought to focus on being a top class museum of books rather than trying to compete with Google from Edward Small by Twitter well we collaborate with Google Peter we don't compete with Google and in a way your company has become a virtual institution that partners well and generously so that's not a competition it is a complementing of it and we complemented I hope in the talk it will make clear in many many different ways including making use of those tools and it's interesting when I came here people were very wary about that word museum and no this is not a museum but nonetheless I don't decrym museums either museums are in a way discovering what is library like about them and libraries that agree discovering what's museum like about us if you walk into the collections next door you will undoubtedly see extraordinary treasures and yes we want to celebrate them and deliver extraordinary learning experiences and wonderful exhibitions as any museum would but I hope you'll understand from the spirit of what we're publishing today the very title of it is about making things new things are alive and changing and creative and if you like we're neither a search engine nor a museum we're a library in the most generous definition of what that great historic word means we're creating the conditions for people to make connections to put things together intellectually or creatively that have never been put together before that's a very distinctive role we can work with museums we can work with you we can work with others great questions from the floor needy in the middle there please microphone on its way hello I'm Kira Easter I'm the president of the society of chief librarians I think those of us that work in and with public libraries really recognise the values that you've set out really and strongly welcome the direction that you've asserted libraries of all types public libraries do amazing things and have enormous potential for the future and it is a time as you know of huge change you've been involved with the secret report as you say with the publication of the secret report just before Christmas and coming and your report living knowledge coming hot on the heels what two or three practical things do you think we could do over the next 12 to 18 months to really show what libraries of all types can do that respond to the recommendations of the independent report and help you deliver living knowledge well in terms of practicalities coming out of the William Seacart report a task force is about to be set up and will be part of that I think your organisation will be and that has a set of very very practical endeavours including looking at the digital space, looking at growing skills across the sector but I think I hope it will be animated and we talk about the next 18 months with if you like a luring of mutual guard between the different stakeholders here my observations serving on William's fascinating report I see Joan of Trollop and others involved with it here tonight was that somehow everyone had imagined that someone else was somehow running the public library system and it was a dawning realisation that there is no such system it is a set of the same obligation placed upon different local authorities many of whom do brilliantly but nonetheless they are struggling financially to keep the kind of levels of investment they might once have been able to put into it but just inevitably the answer must be in finding better ways to work together across those boundaries and I guess we have a very particular role sitting I showed that very crude picture of Boston Spa the British Library symbolically at the heart of the UK but I feel that and I feel a sense of responsibility and although we have no statutory responsibility for the system as it were we are the British Library nonetheless I think it is right and I think we I hope will use living knowledge as permission to speak out more and to be more open to find new ways to work and we have just today I should say submitted a response to consultation to Birmingham City Council's consultation on the very very tough judgments there having to make in budget terms in Birmingham but nonetheless if you look at it the national system that extraordinary library in Birmingham has to be worth investing in and sustaining and protecting both in itself and as a talisman bit like this place for what a library can be. What might that mean in practical terms with Birmingham? Well there are we already work with them the business and IP centre is up and running and you'll see the British Library brand there I genuinely don't know whether there's anything bilateral but certainly systemically some of the things we're looking at in the CCART review is for instance around digital systems websites, the digital products we all use are we really acting efficiently across 140 different libraries, national libraries, university libraries to both think of ourselves as independent but also as part of a system and I have to say stepping into this industry if you want to call it an industry I have been struck by the library sector's potential to pull that off some of those national library partnerships we're talking about are exemplary because we can contribute to a project led by the National Library of Israel but it's still their project but nonetheless the content comes to life. What I think we're opening the door now to doing is versions of that in the UK so the proud localism of the library system here is protected but the sensible not just economies of scale but joint working that is best practice can also be brought in but it's very let's not underestimate how tough this is we are in an organisation here where for all the optimism and ambition that I've set out today we are facing in common with other cultural institutions a persistently and consistently reducing core grant in aid all the local authorities that run all the libraries are themselves having to make even steeper cuts so this requires resourcefulness of a very very high degree because the absolute amount of money is going down Next question, Bill Bill Thompson still at the BBC having failed to escape I thought your lecture and the document are incredibly inspirational and seem to mark the progression of the British library to a deep understanding of its role as the gateway between the physical and the virtual and that was incredibly well articulated that you link these two together so the book remains important but virtual access remains becomes very significant. You've talked a lot about libraries but I wonder whether there are also lessons for other cultural institutions for example the BBC itself as a repository of enormous cultural value for how it might liberate its archive and make its materials more available you seem within the British library to have achieved many of the goals that you set out within the BBC as controller of archive content is there stuff the BBC and other institutions could learn from what you're doing here Go on. Well Bill as you know I've got a bit of form in there two very quick reflections on that don't underestimate the great work the BBC does already do by the way and the genome project that you've got going finally is a fantastic piece of data publishing may I say but yes with those partners I set out the BL has I think is now doing really good work but it is with public to you know historic content public domain content the historic material the BBC is only 18 years old almost everything your organisation has is entwined with copyright in one way or another not just simple copyright but complex collaborative copyright so it is bound to be a long tough journey for the BBC to square the circle of simultaneously being a great memory institution which it is and also being a dynamic broadcaster but I do think we are at an interesting point where the BBC as a cultural institution and it's been great to see Tony Hall really stressing that role there can step forward and is stepping forward to become part of the solution and actually I was curious question about the public libraries I was delighted that the BBC did step forward to say that it too would support the work of the task force there because among the family of cultural institutions the BBC is one of the very very few in the world that cannot invest at if not at Google scale nonetheless at the scale of a large media organisation in digital tools and if some of those tools products resources and sustained commitment can be put at the service of those digital economies of scale that might support the whole system then the BBC really really will be making a profound difference I think to the benefit of libraries but also potentially museums and arts organisations and so on. There is a connection but I've also escaped so I'm now a chief executive of a company called Futurelearn which is open university owned provider of massive open online courses with an alliance of 40 UK and international universities now Rolly you were as the British library were also one of our first partners and I'm delighted that the British library has forged a partnership with one of our universities University of Nottingham and will be delivering its first course which is coming out of the propaganda exhibition later in this year and I think the potential to unlock the content and the curators within not only the British library but the whole library sector is something we're just scratching the surface of so why do you think the British library should be involved in the future of online education and what's your vision for it? It's quite a big question Simon but I think the why is deceptively simple and I say deceptively simple because I ran through our statements of purpose early on and for those of you who are connoisseurs of such things it is only really as of today that the British library has publicly stated its commitment to learning and education in quite that I hope clear form I believe very very strongly that we cannot be doing our job unless we use both the collections we have and the tools that are now available to express the learning potential and learning for all generations by the way this is not just about children or school children or students this is all of us wanting to educate ourselves in different ways so I think when I can only say sometimes you run on instinct but when your outgoing Vice-Chancellor Martin Bean proposed the idea of creating a British based company to try and deliver these online courses I just had an instinct that we had resources here that could be put in the service of such a venture we don't know by the way where this goes exactly what you now call MOOCs will never be called something else in a few years time but something is happening and we are now finding new forms of storytelling and yes what I think is pleasing maybe some other lessons from the past if you like the effort we put into curating a great exhibition like in this instance the propaganda exhibition can now no longer come to an end when the exhibition ends but we can working with companies like yours find ways to express its educational potential forever or certainly give it a very very strong afterlife so that is part of it another part I didn't talk about in the lecture but we also this year launched an online product called Discovering Literature where we are looking very very hard at the needs of in this instance GCSE students and maybe undergrads studying English literature because we've seen research which said they found authors historic authors abstract and hard to understand and get to grips with but we have the documentation here that can bring those figures to life so Discovering Literature publishes primary sources for educational purposes so it is it's Jane Austen's handwriting it's Charles Dickens scribbles it's next year we hope to moving to the 20th century Harold Pinter and others where you actually see the primary sources and the ephemera the newspapers the magazines the reviews the photographs the maps that bring literature to life so yes watch this space but a big area but another area I have to say where we cannot ourselves invest at scale in the actual products we will need joint ventures and partnerships to actually bring it to life you made a very passionate case for the physical space here but about the future of both the space and also the physical books is that something that is kind of guaranteed for the long term both remaining here but also continue to collect the physical items year after year let me quickly try and tackle a couple of those I mean I think there will be over time when it comes to literally the same piece of intellectual content some switch out from physical collecting to digital I think you're seeing it happen quite quickly in some areas of say academic journal publishing where we are you know already now beginning to take in digital copies not physical copies I think when it becomes to more literary or unique items I think the power of the physical remains pretty strong newspapers sit somewhere in between and over time I could imagine a move to more digital collecting but nonetheless I think it would be odd if say the history of a print great print product like the time somehow stopped at a certain point I think austerity will want to see an unbroken record of certain print items all the way through the we should also assume by the way that to some extent we reflect the history of publishing and it's not absolutely clear to me that publishing as an industry is retreating from the physical book quite as quickly as we might have imagined ebooks are extremely popular but are they plateauing perhaps they are something intriguing is happening I can only say that the British library crime classics while being exceptionally good value as ebooks are doing very very well indeed about bucking the trend slightly as physical objects so one way or another we are contributing to the stock of the physical there when it comes to the spaces and the building this building was commissioned to last 250 years I see no lack of likelihood in the basic fabric that it will do that and I can only say socially in terms of footfall and usage 10% year on year increase just in the last year alone to our public programs and footfall around the building every time we open up new spaces they are heavily used people want to be here as I said in the talk and of course as you know this part of London the knowledge quarter everything that is happening here we anticipate just organically the demand to have experiences in this space is set to grow not shrink so yes one of the programs coming out of living knowledge we hope it won't be a call on public money but it will be working with developers and architects and others will be to find the next stage of evolution for this extraordinary campus here the arrival of the Alan Turing Institute ultimately will I hope be part of an extension to this space which will also deliver enhanced public realm that will begin to bridge the gap for those of you who know the area between us and the Francis Crick Institute so that we truly go on that trend of openness that I was talking about this so it becomes not so much a fortress and more like a campus which I think is in sympathy with Sandy Wilson's original vision of it and I think we now have the capacity to think about doing it Great thank you very much indeed that was a really inspiring and compelling vision of the future of the library so thank you very much for that just to recap the crime classics are available in the shop actually it's closed now but we'll be available tomorrow and you and everybody else deserves a drink thank you very much