The coronavirus crisis is dominating the attention of the global media, governments and the public. Never before can I recall a science story making front page news worldwide, repeatedly, on a daily basis, for an extended period of time.

Why is science important? Our world depends on it. The current pandemic has highlighted this. But it shouldn’t take a crisis to make the public aware that science and engineering underpins everything we take for granted in life – our health and our economy.

Public understanding of the role of scientists and engineers in the real world is currently being fuelled by news coverage on disease research and statistics, the need for diagnostic testing, potential treatments and vaccines, and urgent calls for medical equipment.

However, there is a long way to go and a lot more that can be done.

Both scientists and engineers have a much wider role in society that is helpful to this crisis than where media attention is currently focused. For example, agricultural scientists are helping to improve the resilience of supermarket food supply chains and engineers have much more to offer than ventilator production (e.g. building the first NHS Nightingale hospital in just 9 days).

I recall a time a few years ago, at an international agriculture roundtable discussion, where we debated the problem of how public opinion on food security wouldn’t change until such time that supermarket shelves were stripped of household favourites – a situation that no-one expected to come so soon, but one that the scientific community was already preparing for.

So why are scientists and engineers often overlooked under non-crisis circumstances? Because science is perceived as ‘tomorrow’s opportunity’. Even now, the media focus is on frontline NHS workers, because they are closer to what the public sees and understands about what is essential to healthcare.

This is not to downplay the roles of our doctors and nurses, who are indeed performing courageous, worthy and selfless roles, but it is equally important to recognise that without scientists and engineers (no food, drugs, tests, and medical equipment), frontline services would be powerless, capable of merely watching from the sidelines as more people suffer and die. And let’s not forget, science and engineering disciplines are also responsible for the internet, which this crisis has highlighted as another essential service, given the reliance on interconnectivity of everyone and everything in the modern world. Only science and technology hold the key to any long-term solution to this crisis, and indeed many of the world’s wider socioeconomic problems.

There has been much criticism about various governments’ lack of preparation, but if we don’t think about tomorrow’s problems today, we will never be prepared. We need to be more proactive during business as usual as opposed to just reactive during a crisis.

At a time when UK science and engineering is facing a severe skills shortage, increasing their media publicity in a way that affords improved social status (instead of portrayal as geeks or madmen), is especially important today, when roles in management and administration, sports and entertainment bring more accolades. If employment benefits were better aligned with productivity and value creation, incentivising highly skilled yet undervalued scientific and technological professions, this could help attract tomorrow’s scientific leaders. Such actions are imperative for the country’s future preparedness and global economic prosperity.

When this crisis is over, perhaps scientists and engineers will command greater respect in society, and they can work together more effectively with journalists and the Government to improve public understanding of science, which may in turn inspire a future generation of researchers and innovators.

How can the British Library Help?

The British Library is one of the world's greatest research libraries, and the nation's most extensive source of published scientific information.

Although the Library’s Reading Rooms are currently closed, you can access a wide range of digital resources on our website. Registered Readers can also access BioOne science journals and other content by logging into our remote e-resources.

https://www.bl.uk/subjects/science

https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/science-electronic-resources

https://www.bl.uk/voices-of-science

https://blogs.bl.uk/science/

https://www.bl.uk/visit/reading-rooms/science-reading-rooms

https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/coronavirus-covid-19-online-information

Dr Devaki Bhatta FRSC

Bioscience entrepreneur and member of the British Library Advisory Council

 

This April will see the opening of our next major exhibition Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women’s Rights. Anyone visiting St Pancras from this week will see the posters that have appeared around the site, and the spectacular tapestry that has gone up in the Entrance Hall (pictured).

This exciting exhibition explores how contemporary – and indeed ongoing – struggles for gender equality and liberation in the UK have their roots in the long and fascinating history of women’s activism and campaigning.

We decided to programme this exhibition following the brilliant celebrations which took place at many institutions as part of the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act. Although that milestone legislation gave some women in the UK the right to vote (and this was subsequently extended to all women in 1928), the wider fight for women’s rights is unfinished business, and the conversation did not end – or begin – there.

Bringing together items ranging from personal diaries, letters, banners and protest fashion, to subversive literature, film, music and art, Unfinished Business will show how women and their allies have imagined and demanded a better world with passion, imagination, humour and tenacity, putting women’s voices at the heart of the exhibition.

We know that one exhibition, however ambitious, cannot possibly tell all the stories associated with this riveting history and ongoing fights, but Unfinished Business does provide a tantalising snapshot of key moments, people and movements to encourage conversations and debates about which other stories should also be told.

Through the exhibition, our associated events programme and new podcast series, we will explore how women have campaigned for a fairer world, recognising how inequality is unequally experienced depending on people’s race, gender expression and social class. We hope visitors will take the chance to contribute their own voice, share their experiences and propose the changes they would like to see.

We will be revealing more details about the exhibition and how we are bringing it together over the coming months, with input from a fantastic curatorial team, our staff networks, and the exhibition’s advisory panel. We hope you will join us on this journey and let us know your thoughts on the fight for women’s rights – its past, present and future.

Liz Jolly

Chief Librarian

 

Research undertaken by British Library staff is often reported – even celebrated – on these pages. Imagine the careful research that goes into interpreting the manuscript fragments of medieval bibliophile and bookseller John Bagford, or putting on an exhibition such as Karl and Eleanor Marx: Life in the Reading Room, or indeed in supporting our contribution to UK library infrastructure activities, such as our recent Open and Engaged Conference.

As a national library, research informs and supports almost every aspect of our work, be it curation, conservation, preservation, digital innovation, cultural programming or learning. Whether it’s a major exhibition or a new way to discover or understand a unique part of our collections, it has been enabled by staff research.

Virtually all major museums, galleries, archives and libraries are in the same position. Although research is not our primary function, we all undertake significant amounts of research often based on our collections, and it’s important we make the outputs of that research as open as possible to allow future researchers to take advantage of and build on our work.

To make our research more visible, discoverable and reusable for further research, we’re excited to announce the launch of our Shared Research Repository.

The Shared Repository, currently a beta service, brings together the openly available research outputs produced by staff and research associates of six cultural and heritage organisations: the British Library; the British Museum; MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology); National Museums Scotland; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; and Tate. Each partner has their own repository and is responsible for their own content, but users can also explore the combined content using the shared search from the homepage. Articles, book chapters, datasets, exhibition texts, conference presentations, blogs and many more types of our research are now discoverable and downloadable by researchers worldwide. The repository currently holds just a selection of outputs to give a flavour of our research activities, with many more to be added in the coming months.

While UK Higher Education institutions have well established repositories (which are often essential to help manage their research submissions to the Research Excellence Framework research funding process), the research produced by cultural and heritage organisations is often not as visible as we’d like it to be. And indeed should be, since much of it is undertaken with at least some public funding in our role as Independent Research Organisations.

Even within our six current Shared Repository organisations our research is varied and wide-ranging. But browsing the first items already in the repositories also reveals interesting parallels and shared research interests, as in these examples:

• On the subject of written scripts: Pictish symbols: inscribing identity beyond the fringe of empire, National Museums Scotland 2018; Roman London's first voices: writing tablets from the Bloomberg excavations, MOLA 2016; The role of the wax tablet in medieval literacy, British Library 1994. 
• On the subject of archaeological research: Discoveries from La Manche: Five Years of Early Prehistoric Research in the Channel Island of Jersey, British Museum 2015; Excavations at Birnie, Moray, 2002, National Museums Scotland 2003; Lessons from the past and the future of food, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 2019.
• On the subject of paint: The effects of lead and zinc white saponification on surface appearance of paint, Tate 2008; The paint surfaces in the Psalter of Henry of Blois, British Library 1981; A Raman spectroscopic analysis of pigments from Dynastic Egyptian funerary artefacts, National Museums Scotland 2004.

If all goes well we’ll be looking at how we can extend the service both in the volume of content available, and the number and range of partner organisations including beyond the cultural sector.

Do visit our beta Shared Research Repository and explore the research outputs currently deposited. We’d love to have your feedback so please get in touch with our Repository Services team if you’d like to find out more: [email protected].

Sara Gould

Repository Services Lead