The National Library of Wales is very pleased to contribute to the inquiry into digital skills in the UK. The NLW is located in Aberystwyth and plays a central role in culture and heritage as one of Wales’s major national institutions. It is one of the great libraries of the world, with major collections spanning many formats, from books and other print publications in all formats to archives and manuscripts, literary and political papers, sound and moving images, newspapers, maps, artworks and photographs. It serves as a long-term memory for Wales and is also an important knowledge institution as one of the UK’s six legal deposit libraries.
NLW’s key objective by 2017 is to place the NLW at the core of the national information infrastructure of Wales. It will do this by increasing access to its collections, promoting skills, forming partnerships and collaborating with others, acting sustainably and responding to the rapidly-changing landscapes of information need and developing the technologies that support delivery and access requirements.
Over the last decade, the amount of digital content, both born-digital and digitised, has increased substantially. The reasons for this include:
Challenges to economic growth include the inability to locate and retrieve trustworthy and relevant information, the “digital black hole” which prevents access to digital information due to factors such as technological obsolescence, data corruption, lack of permission to use the data, inability to re-use data due to lack of standards and interoperability.
The ability to connect digital resources provides the potential for the virtual connectivity of disparate resources. In order to take advantage of this, and to enable compatibility, the NLW is working with other partners in Wales to develop a co-ordinated digital strategy. The strategy will place an emphasis on providing sustained access to culture and heritage through a unified and co-ordinated approach. The objectives are to support economic development through sharing, innovation, re-use, collaboration; to facilitate participation and learning through the development and transfer of skills and knowledge and to enhance social inclusion through the development of platforms to reach new audiences and data enrichment.
The NLW’s location in Aberystwyth means that increasingly, our primary means of engagement with the public is digital. While over 80,000 physical visitors come to the building in Aberystwyth each year, there are also over 2,000,000 digital visitors. This means that the NLW is able to deliver education, research, and community support digitally, and has had to adapt our methods of serving the public to engage with a disparate, international audience with differing levels of IT skills. The NLW has adapted many aspects of service delivery to suit digital users.
The NLW’s content is freely accessible as part of a strategy of open access to the documentary heritage of Wales. This is different to the policies adopted by other archives in the UK, and reflects the WG’s priorities on open access to heritage. The policy enabled the Library to make submission to the Hargreaves report emphasizing the value of freely accessible digital content for use, and future re-use, including data mining and analysis (“Big data”).
The NLW is home to a range of highly developed and scare skills within a bi-lingual institution. These skills are essential to support sustainable access to its collections and to support use and re-use
The NLW will provide trustworthy data, which is retrievable and delivered upon suitable platforms to support future workers. It will develop its own skills in digital curation by embedding them into the NLW, as well as assisting training others in the skills of retrieval, preservation and curation.
The NLW has been creating, managing and delivering digital content to a wide user community for approximately 20 years. This has led to the development of a great deal of in-house expertise in all aspects of the digital life-cycle. This is seen as an opportunity for upskilling staff and building capacity in-house: as we shift to ever-more digital modes of dissemination of our heritage, staff must acquire new expertise to keep up with technological changes. This ability to adapt to the need for new skills was reflected in our strategy “the agile Library”.
The Digital Heritage Strategy will support education and learning through the establishing standards to enable the discovery of information and resources and through the development of new and transferable information and resources, including skills in information curation, storage and retrieval and adopting standards to enable digital resources to be embedded in educational resources. It will enhance social inclusion by facilitating the discovery of meaningful information and enabling the collections to be used in ways which reflect the depth and diversity of Wales’s culture and heritage.
Given the reliance digital delivery of heritage content, the Library is well-placed to advice other sectors (eg, the education and business communities) on all aspects of data management. Frequently, advances in data curation and management are seen in the Library sector long before they have an impact on other sectors.
The Library has a large number of digital users, and statistics about their usage of digital content are available. They are used in-house for designing and delivering services, but could also be used as part of a wider analysis about digital information literacy and use by the wider public
The NLW’s Digido project was established in 2013 to develop new products and services based on the Library’s digital collections to strengthen businesses to local and global competitiveness. The businesses benefit from the NLW’s expertise and specialist knowledge on a range of issues from copyright and licensing, through to digital capture, digital storage and preservation to searing digital resources. During the life of the project, it is envisaged that 100 businesses will be assisted, leading to 10 new services and 6 new jobs.
The NLW has its own preservation infrastructure for the sustainability of its own content. It has been in consultation with other partners in Wales to consider the establishment of a trusted digital repository for external content. The TDR guarantees to actively manage content held within the repository, accept responsibility for the long-term maintenance of digital resources on behalf of stakeholders and for the benefit of current and future users and has a system which supports the long-term sustainability of the repository and the resources held within it.
Digital literacy is a prime area of interest for the Library. A recent project, Wales at War (walesatwar.org), funded by the Heritage Lottery Foundation, the Department of Education and Skills, and the Armed Forces Covenant Fund, is developing a project for school children to use digital heritage content to develop biographies of names on their local war memorials. These projects will develop digital literacy skills and enable the construction of historical narratives using digital content. Its outputs will be carefully evaluated and passed to policy makers.
The Library has a Research programme in digital Collections, which works with academics and representatives of other organisations around the world to develop a better understanding of the use of NLW content for research, teaching, and public engagement; to enhance and enrich existing digital content to increase its impact; and to develop new strategic digital initiatives.
Nonetheless, capacity at NLW is an issue. Due to budget cuts, the NLW has been trying to ‘do more with less’ to face the challenges of digital skills development, and supporting the delivery of digital content. Despite this, we continue to play a leadership role in the information architecture of Wales, providing support for all aspects of the creation, curation, use, and long-term preservation of digital content.
28 November 2014