Significant property: digital preservation at the British Library

As national library, the British Library (BL) has the ethical and legal responsibility to acquire, preserve and make available all printed material published in the UK. In recent years the national published output has included an increasingly digital component. Therefore, projects such as those on collection and management issues that focus on any part of the lifecycle of digital materials, are important for the development of essential steps toward their long term preservation. This can be seen in the range of projects at the BL, including small projects focussed on the initial acquisition in the life cycle through to major programmes intending to incorporate exploration of long‐term digital preservation strategies.