Digital scholarship blog

Enabling innovative research with British Library digital collections

27 February 2017

British Library resources on digital scholarship for PhD students

C5453-02a_Arundel_74_f.2v croppedFinding your way around the vast collections of the British Library can be daunting at first, but there are lots of resources and staff keen to help doctoral students get started in this post from Digital Curator Mia Ridge (@mia_out).

These resources were compiled for the digital scholarship sessions at the British Library's doctoral open days. We'd love to hear from you with questions or comments at [email protected].

Learning about our collections

Help for researchers - a great place to start with general collections queries

Collection guides

Subject pages

Discovering digitised content

Catalogues: http://explore.bl.uk for printed materials ('I want this' will list digitised items); http://searcharchives.bl.uk for archives and manuscripts

Digitised manuscripts, Illuminated manuscripts and Hebrew manuscripts

British Library sounds for music, drama and literature, oral history, wildlife and environmental sounds

Flickr - particularly rich in images from 19th century books

Wikimedia Commons

International Dunhuang Project (IDP) - manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road

Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) - international digitisation projects

data.bl.uk - text, images and catalogue 'metadata' datasets available for research and creative re-use

British National Bibliography metadata

Learning about digital scholarship

The British Library's Digital Scholarship pages list digital datasets, staff, case studies and projects

BL Labs Awards and Competitions are a great source of inspiration

The British Library's Digital Scholarship blog (you're reading it right now!) and twitter account @Bl_DigiSchol

Humanist mailing list

Events with online / in-person sessions include IHR Digital History Seminar and Digital Classicist

The Institute of Historical Research offers training courses or there's the Programming Historian

Finally, your university may be a member of a training consortium (CHASE, White Rose, etc) that offers specialist digital scholarship courses

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