About Us

Collect Britain is the British Library's largest digitisation project to date. You can view and hear a staggering 90,000 images and sounds from our world-renowned collections without ever needing to visit the prestigious building in London.

How did we do it?
The story starts with the British Library's curators, professionals who have an in-depth understanding of certain specialised subjects. They carefully selected the maps, manuscripts, topographical drawings, photographs, rare sound recordings and even long-forgotten advertisements and music-hall songs that chart the changing face of Britain and her people. Intellectual understanding of the material which the British Library preserves on behalf of the nation was then married up with state-of-the-art technology. Content management and software applications to represent and label the materials were blended with first class web design and editorial production to bring the artefacts to life.

The British Library’s Digital Studio
The British Library created a purpose-built studio where seven photographers worked full-time for over 2 years to produce digital images of the tens of thousands of items selected for the Collect Britain website.

The studio is equipped with high resolution PhaseOne cameras. The cameras have 7x10 cm exposure frames capable of capturing an equivalent pixel size of 7200x5000. Colour accuracy is 12 bits per colour and each of the primary colours - red, green and blue - is captured at 16 bits, giving a total depth of 48 bits. Conservation issues are paramount since many of the objects are both fragile and vulnerable to light. The Collect Britain studio environment has strict controls on temperature, relative humidity and ultra-violet rays. To minimise light levels, cameras have exposure sensitivity equivalent to a photographic rating of more than 800 ISO. This meant we could keep the lights down low while still capturing the perfect picture.

More technical low-down
The Content Management System is deployed on Compaq servers running Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server and using Macromedia Coldfusion MX as its application server. Metadata is stored in an SQL Server 2000 database and digital objects in a File Store. Collect Britain is among the first sites in the UK to use Adobe Systems’ Graphicserver to render different delivery versions of the TIFF images captured in our digital studio. All images are protected by digital watermarking. Most images are also delivered with Zoomify, a bandwidth-friendly solution which enables users to examine the images in fine detail.

What is metadata?
Essentially it's data about data. The term was first used back in the 1960s, long before the arrival of the Internet, to describe information retrieval systems such as the traditional catalogue in a library. Metadata assigns a set of 'tags' to identify each individual item and its location so the website software can find the documents the user needs quickly and accurately.

Collect Britain uses an extended version of the Dublin Core Metdata System (DCMES) which has emerged as the standard across the Internet. A team of specialist art historians & cataloguers wrote the descriptions and created the metadata. All you ever wanted to know about metadata, but were afraid to ask, is available on the Dublin Core website.

How did the British Library finance such a large project?
The British Library benefited from a grant from the Government’s New Opportunities Fund.

To see other projects which the Fund has helped, go to the New Opportunities Fund Portal. Collect Britain is one of a number of current projects launched by the British Library. To learn more about the British Library and keep up to date with its internet initiatives, go to www.bl.uk.

You can contact the Collect Britain support team with any queries at: supportcollectbritain@bl.uk.