The British Library has announced that it is making 1,500 journals available for immediate download at http://direct.bl.uk. The move is in response to customers' growing need for instant digital access to research material.
A huge variety of titles will be added on June 1, 2008, ranging from science, medicine and technology through to politics, history, anthropology and literature. In recent years the British Library's collection of electronically stored content has grown steadily. The imminent addition of over 1,500 titles from such publishers as John Wiley & Sons, Taylor & Francis Group and Future Science Group will bring the total to over 7,000.
The British Library is known for delivering both popular and hard-to-find research materials for over 40 years, and is one of the world's leading document suppliers. The ingest and storage of content from major publishers in electronic form is a relatively recent development that enables customers to download articles immediately as DRM-enabled Adobe PDF files from the Library's secure servers. Beginning June 1, 2008, over one in three documents from the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents (ETOC) database will be delivered immediately.
