Eleanor Bird, one of the British Library's collaborative doctoral students, describes her experience of meeting other BL PhD students and writes of the different ways they make use of BL collections in their research.

On Thursday 10th January the British Library (BL) hosted a day for its collaborative doctoral (CD) students and BL staff working across different areas. This was held in the conference centre and was organised by Liz Lewis (Engagement Manager for Arts and Humanities at the BL).

Having just started my PhD in Narratives of Slavery in Canada at the University of Sheffield (supervised at the British Library by Dr Philip Hatfield), I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to meet up with fellow BL CD students - past and present - to hear more about the projects they have been involved in, and about how they have used the BL collections in their work.

A particular highlight for me was the student presentation session in which we each gave a short three-minute talk introducing our work. It was really interesting to see how the students are working with collections in diverse ways. For example, Ami Pass (University of Lincoln) is utilising her strong background in science to evaluate techniques for preserving BL material. Meanwhile, Lauren Blake (University of Sheffield) is conducting oral history interviews on food activism and William Frost (University of Sheffield) is investigating English-speaking tourists’ experience in Norway, drawing from the Library's rich travel narrative collection.

It was an exciting and vibrant atmosphere which generated some very good feedback from staff and students alike. This was the first time we had met as a group and we hope this will be the first of many more.

Useful links

Find out more about our Americas collections here.

Read Phil Hatfield's personal blog here.

Find out more about how we work with Higher Education here.