BlogBack: Ben Sanderson of the British Library on Microsoft's Vista Launch

Ben Sanderson, press officer at the British Library, responds to my previous post criticizing the Library for allowing itself and its Leonardo codex to be used for Bill Gates' promotion of Microsoft's new Vista operating system:

As a publicly funded institution, the Library has to supplement the money it receives from the government with sponsorship and support in kind from a variety of sources. In practice, this means that all digitization work has to be paid for out of fundraising/sponsorship/external support.

The Library has a beneficial relationship with Microsoft in a variety of spheres of activity: from the project to digitize 25 million pages of historic collections to the tools and technical support they have offered in work to build a national digital library.

In response to your charge that the Library "has been commercially co-opted" I would object that it is rather unfair to lift two quotes from the context of the "Notes to Editors" boiler-plate text attached to each of the linked releases. As you will know, such potted descriptions are part of the apparatus of press releases and, as such, typically supplied by the institution they describe.

"Potted descriptions," I like that. I think we call that "boilerplate" across the pond.