Overview of the Organization

The British Library (BL) is the national library of the United Kingdom. Its work is supported by the expertise of more than 2,000 staff and by links with other organizations worldwide. The library provides:

• Internationally important reading room and inquiry services

• The world's leading document supply services

• Specialist information services in key subject areas

• On-line and Web-based services

• Essential services for the library, archives, and information world

• Library facilities for the general public.

The library's outstanding collection, developed for more than 250 years, contains more than 150 million items and represents every age of written civilization, every written language, and every aspect of human thought.

BL can be seen as the most complete of all the case studies, embodying aspects of each of the process elements described in Part 1 of this book.

Characteristics of the Testing Requirement

BL has a significant reliance on software systems to support its business for the purposes of:

• Maintaining very large quantities of information on document holdings

• Maintaining extensive lender personal details

• Recording details of document borrowings

• Maintaining on-line catalogue searching (involving millions of records)

• Supporting large-scale document supply.

The majority of these systems need to interoperate in order to inspect or exchange data and/or to invoke operations on other systems. The systems in use are of various ages, based on a variety of implementation technologies, and frequently supported on different operating systems and hardware platforms.