How robots are preserving 300 years of old British manuscripts
British Library enlists robots to look after 300 years of newspapers archive
Not fade away... how robots are preserving old British newspapers
The British Library's main storehouse is a marvel. An unrivalled collection of human knowledge with more than 300 miles of shelves tended by robot librarians. But as its stock of millions and millions of titles continues to swell, it desperately needs somewhere to put them. The BBC took a rare tour inside its cavernous vaults, and found out about plans to ensure the nation's printed works are preserved.
"We have finite space, but infinite amounts of material coming in."
Alasdair Bruce pithily summarizes the big - and constantly growing - problem he and other bosses at the British Library face at its massive northern base in West Yorkshire.
From the outside, this repository which is intended to hold every book and publication published in the UK could not look less like a library.
Situated in Boston Spa, next to the football pitches of Leeds United's training ground and the barbed wire fences of a category C prison, the 44-acre facility is an architectural pick-and-mix of brutalist concrete, vast warehouses and even ex-World War Two munitions workshops.
Inside, though, three-quarters of the British Library's entire 170 million-strong collection can be found, including medical journals used by health workers researching Covid-19 treatments, electoral registers for families delving into their genealogy and decades-old newspapers used by police researching cold cases.
And, of course, books.
If something has come from a recognised UK publisher, it can either be found at the library's much more famous premises in central London, or here at its massive but somewhat non-descript Yorkshire base.
Each evening at the Boston Spa site, a lorry is loaded with books, newspapers and other tomes requested by members of the public at the library in London, with the titles arriving at its 11 reading rooms in St Pancras just 48 hours after order.
But, becoming home to seven million physical items in just the last 10 years, and requiring five miles of new shelving every year, the library's 550 staff at Boston Spa are currently fighting a losing battle against the constant wave of new publications - and the fear is that battle could be lost in a very short time.
Programme manager Mr Bruce says the library's site near Leeds, will be full to the brim in as little as two years.
A new solution is needed very soon.
The renovation plans will include a public viewing area in the new storage unit to watch the robot librarians in action
That is why Mr Bruce is now part of the team leading plans for the site's biggest redevelopment in its 60-year history. While it is a battle against the clock, it is one he believes can be won.
"We have between two and three years before we are full in all our stores," he says.
"That is enough time for us to create a new building to cover our storage needs until mid-century."
The brimming bookshelves at Boston Spa are a direct result of what is known as the Legal Deposit Act.
That act means a copy of every work which has been published in the UK as far back as 1662 is placed in the British Library - with that rule expanded to include digital publications such as websites and blogs from 2013 onwards.
The act is in place to ensure the nation's published output is collected systematically and preserved for future generations to provide inspiration for future works.
But the downside to that laudable aim is the sheer physical space required to house the nation's source of knowledge and inspiration.
The current solution at Boston Spa is two cavernous storage buildings, each maintaining a constant temperature and humidity, with an oxygen level 7% lower than in the air outside their sealed doors.
"If you tried to strike a match in here, nothing would happen due to the lack of oxygen," Mr Bruce says.
Standing on a metal gantry inside what is known as the Additional Storage Building, he is interrupted by the whizzing of a giant robotic crane - one of seven which covers the length and height of the 272ft (83m) by 79ft (24m) warehouse, pulling out barcoded crates containing requested titles.
The nearby National Newspaper Building is just as impressive, with room for 60 million issues of local, regional and national UK newspapers from the last three centuries.
But with additions constantly being made to the library's shelves, a planned new storage building at the Boston Spa site, providing an extra 137 miles of shelf space, looks set to be coming at the perfect moment.
Mr Bruce says: "It's literally going to be just in time, but it is under control so I'm happy with that."
Phil Spence, the British Library's chief operating officer, says the new building would certainly be a much better solution than one he proposed 15 years ago.
"When I joined, I said, 'why don't we throw out some stuff which has less value?' I was very quickly shot down and told everything has value," he says.
"Something that might seem obscure to me, or might not be the next cancer treatment, still has value.
"It could be people interested in tortoises or whatever. It doesn't always have to create economic value, it can create fun, inspiration and joy."
The new storage building is part of a £95m redevelopment of the entire site, which will also introduce renewable energy sources in a bid to become carbon neutral and the welcome refurbishment of existing buildings used by staff.
Speaking in the library canteen, shortly before heading off to a cyber security training exercise which imagines hackers infiltrating the digital archives, Mr Spence says: "We're sitting in a 1940s bomb workshop. They're not particularly comfortable and our staff deserve more.
"We're the biggest employer in the culture sector outside of London, but they're currently working in the worst conditions."
British Library at Boston Spa - A potted history
1941: King George VI and Queen Elizabeth attend the opening of the Thorp Arch Royal Ordnance Munitions Factory
1962: Four years after munitions production ends, much of the site goes to house the newly-formed National Lending Library for Science and Technology
1973: The library departments of the British Museum, the National Central Library and the National Lending Library for Science and Technology come together to form the British Library
1975: The brutalist Urquhart Building becomes its first purpose-built structure
2001: The British Library Document Supply Centre hits the landmark of 100 million documents supplied
2009: The Additional Storage Building opens at the site, with the ability to hold 11 million books
2015: The National Newspaper Building opens, following the closure of the Newspaper Library at Colindale in London
With the new storage space, the British Library also hopes to respond to criticisms of its lack of accessibility in the north of England, with even some residents in West Yorkshire oblivious to the treasure trove on their doorstep.
The library has promised that the renovation work will rectify this, with a viewing gallery planned for the new storage unit, along with school visits, tours, a new reading room and a restaurant for visitors.
A future ambition is to open a new British Library site at Leeds' landmark Temple Works building, turning the derelict mill into its public face in the North, with the scheme currently at the feasibility study stage.
While proudly admiring a huge model of the Boston Spa project, due for completion in 2026, Daniela Shedden, business change manager, says: "The vast majority of people don't even know we're here in Yorkshire.
"Yet, we've got so much to show here and we have bags of knowledge that you just don't get anywhere else.
"We want it to become an open space for everyone to come and visit."
The journey of a collection item
How does a collection item land on your desk in the Reading Rooms?
Is it elves? Is it wizards? No, it’s conveyor belts!
As soon as you put your order in, there’s a network of airport-style conveyor belts in the basements (1.6km of them in total) that send your collection item up to the Reading Rooms. At peak times, they can deliver up to 3,000 items a day to Readers.
Witness the journey...
Downton Abbey star Jim Carter described the conveyor belt system as ‘a brilliant modern version of Victorian engineering’. See what happened when he took a look around…
Over in our Boston Spa site in Yorkshire, our National Newspaper Building uses robotic cranes to retrieve newspapers.
How long does it take for a collection item to reach the Reading Rooms after you’ve placed an order? Scroll through the image carousel above to find out.
In a Yorkshire outpost of the British Library, archivists using the latest conservation technology are racing to digitise 300 years of newspapers before they crumble to dust – and that’s just for starters
There’s a warm, musty waft of knowledge in the air, a comforting scent of human experience rising from age-stiffened paper. Shut your eyes and you could be in a dilapidated secondhand bookshop. Open them and you are in a vision of the future.
A gigantic robotic vault, the National Newspaper Building in Boston Spa, near Leeds, is the British Library’s high-tech approach to safeguarding what it rather endearingly terms “the national memory” – 750m pages of news, covering more than three centuries of goings-on, as reported in papers across the nation. From political turmoil to humanitarian crisis, murder cases to local marriage notices, it’s all here. And it’s growing. “We’re adding something like 1,200 titles every week,” says Alasdair Bruce, manager of the British Library Newspaper Programme.
Preserving an ageing memory is no small feat. Conservators up and down the country are waging war with time itself to battle deterioration of our documents, be it Magna Carta, celebrating its 800th anniversary this year, or yesterday’s broadsheet.
In the dark void of the National Newspaper Building, the robots are afoot. Towering 20 metres high and stretching far into the distance is an imposing expanse of racks, heaving with trays bearing volume upon volume of newspapers, laid flat and strapped between metal sheets. Suddenly, an enormous autonomous crane zooms forwards, stops abruptly and, with a hydraulic gasp, shoots out an arm. Lifting a large metal tray off the scaffold, it deposits it on a conveyor belt and races into the dark. One of three poised for action, it lurks in the gloom, awaiting a command – robots, after all, don’t need the lights on. The tray and its heavy load are whisked away, making a swift right angle at a turntable, and exit through an airlock. A driverless shuttle car then speeds it to a workstation. Somewhere out there a researcher has put in a request, and the machines are on the case.
There’s more than a touch of the Interstellar about this, but then, there has to be. Newsprint has a delicate constitution: fluctuations in temperature and moisture could hasten decay. Hence the airlock – the void is kept at 14C and 55% humidity, while oxygen levels are held at 14% (air is typically composed of nearly 21% oxygen). At such low oxygen levels, the contents simply can’t go up in flames. Similarly, the materials in the walls have been carefully chosen to avoid damaging the newspapers.
It isn’t only a slick solution, it’s a smart one, too. Developed within a bespoke test-cell, the process is controlled by an elaborate computer system: each volume is barcoded and correlated to a particular tray and board, each tray is cross-referenced to a specific location. Human error is avoided by removing the humans – employees don’t come on to the scene until we reach the workstations, where the requested volume of newspapers is selected and sent to the reading rooms.
Inside, it’s an archival Russian doll – an antiquated mode of data storage nestled inside a technological cocoon. Outside, the vast, sleek edifice looms over the low-slung 1940s munitions buildings nearby. Opened in January, the National Newspaper building is part of the British Library’s £33m newspaper project to rehouse the newspaper collection, transferred from the archaic redbrick facility at Colindale, north London, and improve its availability.
But keeping the news fresh is a tricky business. “[Newspapers] are intended to be used once and then thrown away,” explains Bruce. Indeed, they are their own worst enemy. Acids – arising from additives, manufacturing processes or pollutants in the surrounding environment – chop down the cellulose fibres in paper, making pages increasingly brittle. Modern newspapers, made with groundwood pulp rather than linen or cotton rags, have shorter cellulose chains to start with, and are more acidic. Oxidation of the pages makes a bad situation worse, turning them yellow over time. And as the paper degrades, it releases a soft bouquet of volatile organic molecules; far from comforting, that familiar smell is the hallmark of decay.
Faced with the daunting task of preserving more than 750m self-destructing pages, the team at the British Library hope the new facility will be a sturdy stitch in time. “We have invested in trying to prevent the deterioration in the first place, by incorporating the humidity and temperature controls, and the low oxygen,” says Bruce.
The growing archive, which keeps a copy of every newspaper published in the UK (a legal requirement), and more besides, is a cumbersome, if beautiful, burden. But it also offers opportunities. As Bruce explains: “On one hand, the Copyright Act says we can’t dispose of the physical item; on the other hand, we don’t really want to, because it gives us flexibility for the future – to do different things with that hard copy if we need to.”
One of those things is digitisation. While many popular titles are on microfilm, to save originals from wear and tear (hard copies are allowed out only in special cases), access to these is limited to the British Library’s reading rooms. Niche publications, on the other hand, exist only in hard format and must be called up from the robotic vaults of Boston Spa. Online access lets us all have a gander from wherever we choose – albeit for a fee outside of the reading rooms.
In the bright, clinical environs of the digitisation suite, work continues apace. A team from Findmypast, a family history service collaborating with the British Library on creating the British Newspaper Archive, is beavering away at the scanning machines. Around 750 paper pages are digitised a day, from issues dating up to the 1955 copyright cut-off. Microfilm is also digitised, although quality is patchy. And with character recognition software making the collection more searchable, it’s proving a boon for genealogists. But it’s a lengthy process. “It’s taking 10 years to do 40 million pages,” says Bruce, though the pace could pick up as new technologies become available.
Technology isn’t helping only to preserve our cultural heritage: it’s also offering up new discoveries.
Housed in an old printing works overlooking Islington’s Spa Fields park, the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) bears little resemblance to the swish, automated interior of the National Newspaper Building. Yet it boasts more than 60 miles of shelving, and swaths of the city’s records and treasures, tucked up in bespoke cases, sleeves and acid-free boxes, and deposited in carefully monitored rooms. Among them is an intricate survey of the Ulster estates commissioned by Charles I – the so-called Great Parchment Book of The Honourable The Irish Society, dating from 1639.
Its grand name belies a sorry state. Burnt, crumpled and devastatingly fragile, each of the 165 pages is buckled like the carapace of a crab. “[The sheets] are so beyond repair it is not parchment any more – it is just pure gelatine,” says Caroline De Stefani, conservation studio manager at the LMA. Damaged in the great Guildhall fire of 1786, the precious pages have been stowed away for centuries. “With these very damaged documents it is always the idea that you keep them just in case, one day, you might be able to do something with them,” explains Philippa Smith, a principal archivist at the LMA.
Technology is offering glimmers of hope. Determined to salvage the contents of the Great Parchment Book, researchers at University College London turned to cutting-edge computer science, embarking in 2010 on a four-year project to develop software to virtually smooth the crumpled sheets and reveal their text.
It was a team effort. After developing techniques with a test model, conservators at the LMA carefully increased each page’s humidity to swell and soften the material. The creases were partially puffed out with padding, and the folio held fast with magnets as it dried. Then the researchers from UCL set to work. “For each folio, they took lots of different images and then stitched them together in a sort of 3D model,” explains Smith. “Then, that’s what they manipulated to try to digitally flatten the sheets.” As the virtual parchments unfurled, the spidery scrawl of officialdom became accessible for the first time in more than 200 years.
“This is leading-edge computer graphics,” says Professor Melissa Terras, when we smooth out a page on screen in her office at UCL. Director of the university’s Centre for Digital Humanities and co-supervisor, with UCL’s Dr Tim Weyrich, of the Great Parchment Book Project, Terras believes technology can do far more than make a mere online copy of a physical record – it can reveal hidden details and allow us all access to marvel at them. “We can use computational imaging to do stuff that we couldn’t do before,” she says. “That’s a bit simplistic; but it is to try to read things which are too damaged, or to help perceive things that the human eye can’t see.”
Fuelled by the falling cost of computing, development of new technologies and the push to increase access online, the field of digital humanities is burgeoning. And the technologies employed are becoming ever more sophisticated – as well as photogrammetry methods used in the Great Parchment Book project, Terras and colleagues are exploring the potential of a host of techniques, including multispectral imaging (MSI). Inks, pencil marks and paper all reflect, absorb or emit particular wavelengths of light, ranging from the infrared end of the electromagnetic spectrum, through the visible region and into the UV. By taking photographs using different light sources and filters, it is possible to generate a suite of images. “We get back this stack of about 40 images of the [document] and then we can use image-processing to try to see what is in [some of them] and not others,” Terras explains.
Starting in September, Terras will be leading an international project to apply MSI and other techniques to the masks of Egyptian mummies, to see whether the reused papyrus from which they were made bears writings from the past. “People are tearing apart mummies to try to get to these scraps of papyrus, given that recently discovered papyri fragments have contained lost works, such as poems by Sappho and Ibycus, and plays by Aeschylus,” says Terras. She hopes technology could provide a less destructive approach. “It is great lost works of ancient literature that you could find, potentially, in this.”
But there are hurdles to negotiate. While techniques such as MRI, x-ray fluorescence and MSI are well established in the lab, researchers must figure out how to get the best from the technology when it’s applied to manuscripts, images and artefacts.
“At the moment it is [a case of] ‘stick it under the camera and see what you can see’,” says Terras. “We need to understand what effects this is having on manuscript materials, but also understand the mathematical underpinnings.” Processing also needs scrutiny. “We have to be able to trust how we create these models, these other surrogates, or else we are basing our understanding of history on something the computer has created.”
Yet Terras is confident that, as the field matures, new insights will be revealed from MSI and other techniques. “History is a tale about loss as well as discovery,” she says. “When we have a physical remnant that we can’t read, it is one possible technique to try to unlock what has been lost.”
There’s plenty of work to be done. A study in 2014 found that, on average, only 17% of collections in heritage institutions across Europe has been digitised in some form. But if digitisation offers new opportunities it also provides fresh headaches. “Libraries, archives, museums don’t have the capacity to look after this digital data long term,” says Terras. And with standards for the documentation, archiving and accessing of data – official and personal – still being thrashed out, Terras is concerned we could be creating a timebomb. “There is a huge danger that future historians will be spending a large amount of time trying to piece together stuff which just doesn’t exist.”
It is a dilemma that the team at the British Library is acutely aware of. Since 2004, it has been crawling the internet to archive websites connected to British culture in its Digital Library System together with the digitised newspapers and other content. And as Alasdair Bruce tells me, safeguarding storage and access to the system for the future has been paramount, with degradation of the data itself also under scrutiny. “All of this comes back to the challenge we have as an organisation with any of this material,” he says, as we look out at the National Newspaper Building. “It is for ever.”
