Welcome to the British Library’s Digital Scholarship Blog! I hope that it will provide a vital forum for exchange among members of the research community and staff at the British Library who are working to support research enabled by digital content.

The Blog will include items written by the British Library’s Digital Research and Curation team, the Digital Scholarship Department, and teams across the Library who are engaged in related activities. The binding ideas will be about digital content, digital data, and ways to better support researchers.

Our activities to support digital scholarship are organised around four themes:

1. Digital content. Every day, we are collecting, connecting to, and even creating unique digital content.
2. Tools and services. We know that digital scholarship needs tools and services to support it, but we also recognise that the practice of researchers is changing rapidly. We are looking to enable researchers to bring their tools to our content as well as providing ways to discover, analyse, visualise, annotate, exchange and re-use it.
3. Engagement. Working with researchers is a real highlight of what we do! We put in a lot of effort to meet and collaborate with researchers in order to find out more about their goals, the content and data that they need, and the ways that they work with it. Engagement is at the heart of what we do.
4. Skills. We’re working hard to improve our own skills working with digital content and services. This a major push within the Library, and we’ll be talking about our training programme too.

I hope that you find this Blog informative, interesting, and perhaps occasionally provocative.

We really want your feedback! Please let us know how we can deepen the conversation, how we can improve this blog, and how we can better support research with digital content and services.

Many thanks.

Adam Farquhar – Head of Digital Scholarship, The British Library  

This video was recorded for a Digital Scholarship Department Open Day. For more videos, follow the Digital Scholarship @BritishLibrary YouTube Channel.