Previous Living Knowledge posts have described the progress we’ve made on our major programme to expand and reorient our site at St Pancras. As well as delivering new spaces for exhibitions, events and catering, the programme also aims to create research spaces that offer new kinds of access to our extensive digital collections.

These collections include the billions of pages of content contained in the UK web archive, hundreds of thousands of digital publications received through Legal Deposit and digital content including data, audio and video.

We are keen to get as many ideas as possible on what a digital research space might offer, both from staff around the Library, and Readers and other researchers. These ideas will help inform our future plans, giving us fresh and innovative ideas for new ways of working with digital content – and new possibilities for the kinds of research and collaborative working that might be possible in a non-traditional setting.

View from inside the King's Library Tower, St Pancras. Photo by Tony Antoniou.

Please let us have your ideas!

If you are already a Reader at the British Library, or a researcher using other collections – especially digital collections – we’re keen to hear your ideas on a couple of subjects in particular:

• Meeting people at the British Library
• Making the most of your first visit

To contribute to these discussions, please sign up to our user community and explore the discussion threads currently underway. During the course of the next months, we will be seeding further discussion threads and posing challenges as to what users think a digital research space might offer.

The online forum will be available over the coming months, and we will assess all the ideas submitted and feed them into our Digital reading Room project. The best ideas will feature in a future blog post, reflecting on the ideas and feedback we’ve received.

Nigel Spencer

Research and Business Development Manager