The library service that is helping businesses succeed

It may come as a surprise to find that one of the biggest providers of such information, The British Library, has a massive operation in Yorkshire, as Business Correspondent Jonathan Jones discovered.

THE world's leading provider of information to business and academia is situated almost on the doorstep of the region's companies and universities.

The British Library Document Supply Centre, in Boston Spa, near Wetherby, houses about one hundred and fifty million items and serves more than 22,000 customers in 133 countries, from as far away as Australia to as close to home as France.

For more than 40 years, the 60-acre facility has been providing information to all business sectors, including science, technology, medicine, pharmaceuticals, academia and the information industry.

The site is one of the world's largest and most diverse sources of published information, handling about 16,000 requests for information a day, and subscribing to more than 40,000 titles.

Its head of operations is Ian Henderson, from Ingleby Barwick, on Teesside.

Each day he makes a 45-minute journey from his home to the site, sometimes travelling to its sister operation in Colindale, London, where he helps to archive every regional newspaper since 1870, including The Northern Echo.

The 50-year-old's diverse career has included spells as an engineer at Whessoe, in Darlington, Sellafield, in Cumbria, and as a management consultant at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Royal Sun Alliance.

He said: "The British Library at Boston Spa holds a vast quantity of published material, from books to journals and even PhD theses.

"In particular, we hold the kind of things you can't just pop into WH Smith for, including titles like Brain Monthly and Scientific Research in Higher Education, as well as your more commercial publications.

"We hold more than five million microfiche records, including a vast quantity of KGB papers, and a massive collection of printed music. In fact just about anything you can imagine, we stock.

"However, we do review what we take from time to time. For instance we have just stopped taking a Japanese publication called The Journal of Fish Sausage.

"We handle around 3.6 million requests for information every year, which if put in a pile would be as high as Canary Wharf in London."

The Boston Spa site owes its creation to two other nations, Germany and Russia.

Mr Henderson said: "During World War Two the UK needed bombs and bullets to fight the war. Ordnance factories were built in remote locations like Yorkshire, including one at Boston Spa, to meet the nation's needs.

"The Government said they would pull down the factories when the war was over but conveniently forgot to do so."

He added: "Then in 1957 the Russians launched Sputnik, the first satellite into space.

"Around 200 Soviet technical journals were in publication, but only 20 were available in the UK.

"The Government took the decision to make the Russian technical journals available to the scientific and technical community, and then expanded the concept to include world-wide literature collections.

"The redundant ordnance factory in Boston Spa was identified as a suitable site to house the collection, and became the new National Lending Library for Science and Technology."

The site, which includes about 80 miles of shelving, enough to stretch from the site to Tyneside, will soon increase in size, with planning permission already applied for.

Mr Henderson said: "Hopefully, we should be able to start work on a new building during 2004. It's being built to house a new legal depository for documents that used to be stored at the library's main site in St Pancras, London."

The site in Wetherby employs more than 1,200 staff, including 400 who work directly for Mr Henderson.

It used to have 120 photocopier machines, but has recently changed over to scan stations, 111 of them at the last count, to scan the documents electronically.

"That's how we deliver a great deal of our information, via a secure electronic system to clients wherever they want it," said Mr Henderson.

"Every document we hold is catalogued, even down to the colour of its cover, as we loan more than one million items a year out to businesses and we need to ensure that we get them back. We also hold things for the safe keeping of the nation as a whole."

For instance, The British Library, rather than the Patent Office holds the national collection of patents from around the world, including 50 million patent specifications from over 40 countries, plus numerous gazettes and support literature, and an increasing number of databases.

Mr Henderson added: "We can save businesses money by delivering focused information, to their deadline and budget, helping to support sustained growth.

"We've come a long way in the last 40 years. In 1962, we processed 299,314 requests. That has grown to about four million requests every year, today."