The Internet Library of Early Journals (ILEJ) owes its existence to the UK Higher Education Libraries Review, chaired by Sir Brian Follett, the report of which appeared in 1993. The "Follett Report", as it is generally called1 , discussed the implications of information technology in enhancing the work of libraries and proposed a programme of development in key areas of IT within the higher education library sector. These included electronic publishing (including digitisation), on-demand publishing, electronic reserves, resources access and document delivery. Approximately £15 million was made available over 3 years for phases 1 and 2 of the programme, and institutions were invited to bid for funding to finance projects within these areas. The ILEJ project resulted from a successful bid to the eLib programme by a consortium formed by the Universities of Oxford, Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham. The aim of the project as stated in the bid was to enhance usage of the holdings of research libraries by creating electronic copies of their contents, and to provide user access to a corpus of digitised images from three 18th- and three 19th-century journals. The intention was to provide a critical mass of material, and to investigate the technologies involved in producing such an extensive archive of digitised images.