RLUK, SCONUL, Jisc, and the British Library have launched the UK Print Book Collection (UK PBC)

RLUK, SCONUL, Jisc, and the British Library have launched the UK Print Book Collection (UK PBC), a national initiative designed to preserve and provide access to scarce print monographs across the UK. The launch event, held on Wednesday 22 October, attracted around 130 attendees from a wide range of libraries. A recording of the event can be watched here. A second session (with the same content) will take place on Monday 10 November. Colleagues can sign up for this event here.

The UK PBC is a shared service supported by RLUK and SCONUL, the British Library and Jisc. It is administered by the British Library and underpinned by the National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK), operated by Jisc. 

The success of the UK PBC depends on as many libraries as possible signing up to supporting a national distributed collection of monographs based on a minimum number of seven retained copies across the participating libraries (seven libraries with a copy). Any Higher Education and specialist library in the UK is welcome to join. There is no fee. The only prerequisite is to contribute your bibliographic data to the NBK and refresh it regularly (support is available for any libraries needing assistance).

For more information, please visit the UK PBC website. The site includes the Memorandum of Understanding, which all members are asked to sign, along with other useful resources.

To become a member, please email ukpbc@bl.uk

By joining the UK PBC, you’ll play an important role in maintaining national access to monographs, whilst also being able to make confident local collection management decisions which will facilitate more effective use of finite space, and other resources.