Editing British Library (section)

== Material available online ==
The British Library makes a number of images of items within its collections available online. Its ''Online Gallery'' gives access to 30,000 images from various medieval books, together with a handful of exhibition-style items in a proprietary format, such as the [[Lindisfarne Gospels]]. This includes the facility to "turn the virtual pages" of a few documents, such as [[Leonardo da Vinci]]'s notebooks.<sup>[22]</sup>

The British Library's commercial [[secure electronic delivery service]] was started in 2003 at a cost of £6 million. This offers more than 100 million items (including 280,000 journal titles, 50 million patents, 5 million reports, 476,000 U.S. dissertations and 433,000 conference proceedings) for researchers and library patrons worldwide which were previously unavailable outside the Library due to [[copyright]] restrictions. In line with a government directive that the British Library must cover a percentage of its operating costs, a fee is charged to the user. However, this service is no longer profitable and has led to a series of restructures to try to prevent further losses.<sup>[23]</sup>
When Google Books started, the British Library signed an agreement with [[Microsoft]] to digitise a number of books from the British Library for its [[Live Search Books]] project.<sup>[24]</sup> This material was only available to readers in the USA, and closed in May 2008.<sup>[25]</sup>  The scanned books are currently available via the British Library catalogue or [[Amazon.com|Amazon]].<sup>[26]</sup>

In October 2010 the British Library launched its ''Management and business studies portal''. This website is designed to allow digital access to management research reports, consulting reports, working papers and articles.<sup>[27]</sup>