A new chapter: Enter the information age

Making one of the world's most imp-ortant and oldest manu-scripts available online is no mean feat. But, thanks to how technology is revolutionising the library and information industry, Juan Garcés, curator at the British Library, is heading a project which will ensure the fragile leaves of the world's oldest Bible are digitised on to one website.

"Codex Sinaiticus is the Christian Bible in Greek. It's over 1,600 years old and because it is so heavily corrected, it's really significant in terms of the history of the Bible," explains Garcés. "So many scholars – and also non-scholars – can't wait to see it online, not least because the original document is held at four different locations across the globe."

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Completion looks set for next July, when each of the 800 pages will have been photographed sharply and from different angles. "Each page will also have been transcribed," he adds.

Phil Bradley, freelance librarian and internet consultant, says technology has literally transformed careers in the library and information industry. This doesn't stop with ground-breaking projects such as Codex Sinaiticus, he says. "I'd go so far as to say that every profession in the industry has had – or currently has – the potential to use technology to transform their role."

He provides the very simple example of podcasts, which allow librarians to create a library information tour. "If you imagine an academic library, this allows students to download the podcast and wander about at their leisure, learning what they need to about the space around them. It makes it far more interesting to get two students talking together on a podcast about, say, a catalogue than the librarian doing a single talk every time – and it frees up the librarian to do other, often more exciting, things."

Another more common way in which technology assists information professionals is demonstrated by the fact that in the past, if they were asked a question, they would do their research to come up with the answer and that would be it.

"But now information professionals can do things like create their own search engines and web pages without any great technical knowledge. The result is they can do things like create answers to questions that are still live, update people in new ways and answer the question in a range of different ways."

Not only is technology allowing people in the sector to achieve more than in the past, but it has also made it possible to collaborate to a far greater extent, says Bradley. "I can liaise with other professionals in the industry far more than I used to," he says.

Indeed, it used to be the case that two information professionals in two different organisations may have been answering the same kinds of queries, but wouldn't have been able to share content because it was tied up in one company's network. "Now it's easy to overcome that and any number of librarians can work together and create a resource greater than the number of them working," explains Bradley.

Particularly well taken up by information professionals is the use of blogs. "More and more of us share information this way. I spend a lot of time, for instance, wandering about the internet finding new resources and search engines and writing about them in my blog. Likewise, I'm now kept up to date about what's going on in the industry by hundreds of people I don't know."

There's a lot of talk about information overload in today's society, admits Bradley. "But that just means the coping strategy that people use to filter the information has failed. Those filters are information professionals' area of expertise."

Melissa Wyatt, library and information manager for the Royal Town Planning Institute, agrees. "People often say to me, 'I feel so stupid because I can't find what I need on Google'. But the internet is such a messy place and my area – planning – is changing all the time. My job is to help people to get to what they need."

Wyatt believes technology is key to her job for other reasons too. "The recession means that a lot of library space – physical space – is under threat. Technology means that need not matter as much as in the past. Just bringing our catalogue online, which I did when I came into the post, demonstrates this."

What none of us know at the moment, of course, is the long-term implications of all this. But even this topic has an information professional dedicated to it.

Digital preservation manager at the British Library, Rory McLeod says: "It's all very well to say we'll build up these massive online resources for the future, but we don't know how sustainable it is – how software will change, for example. It's my job to explore these challenges. It's not just an information management challenge – it's an environmental issue. As these libraries get bigger and require more energy, there could be issues there too."

Nonetheless, he is confident answers will be found. "We are a 300-year-old institution with some information going back 2,000 years and produced on animal hide. We will be around for another 300 years."

Britain's rich and varied voices finally go online

Jonnie Robinson is lead content specialist for sociolinguists and education at the British Library.

Do you call a bread roll a cob, batch, or scuffler? How do you pronounce the words cup and plant? And are you sitting or sat reading this newspaper? The UK is a rich landscape of regional accents and dialects. To celebrate the diversity of spoken English in the second half of the 20th century, the British Library is creating an online archive. "The British Library has a huge depth and breadth of collections ever since it's been possible to record speech, since the 1880s," says Robinson. "Four years ago, we started creating an online archive which was well received by the public, media and academics who – for the first time – had access to authentic speech in the UK. We then decided to extend it to include some sense of what the information tells us about spoken English."

Robinson and his team have put together a website called Sounds Familiar? which is primarily aimed at A-level students and undergraduates. "We now have 80 recordings – and over 600 audio clips – across the country from different social groups, ages, and from people in both rural and urban settings."

Why does it matter that the collection is online? "The last collection of sound recordings that wasn't online took 11 years to complete. It was incredibly expensive and involved a huge number of field workers. It was a great collection, but they are still disseminating some of the results to this day."

bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/index.html