Are you a PhD student currently studying at a UK Higher Education institute? Are you looking for an opportunity to gain valuable careers experience, apply existing research skills, and develop new ones?

Yes? Then please take a look at the 17 projects being advertised as part of the British Library’s PhD placement scheme.

The below projects will be of particular interest to PhD students in social science research and policy.

(1) Exploring Food activism through the archives: the relationship between animal rights campaigns and food activism in the UK, 1950-2015

Working with the Contemporary Politics and Public Life team, this PhD placement holder will focus on the newly acquired archive of prolific animal rights campaigner, Richard.D.Ryder, with the intention of mapping the relationship between animal activists and food activist in the UK.

By cataloguing the collection and scoping out wider connections to other British Library holdings, the successful PhD student will help to inform future collection development, particularly as it relates to political and public life from the 1950s onwards, and the intersections between social movements, civil society and parliamentary politics.

(2) Exploring British Library collections through twentieth and early twenty-first century anti-poverty activism

Image: People’s Assembly March Against Austerity. Photo credit: RonF; The Weekly Bull, Flickr. Reproduced under the Creative Copyright Licence

The theme, anti-poverty activism, presents an exciting opportunity to explore the British Library’s holdings. The successful PhD candidate will engage in new research which spans across the Library’s collections; drawing on anything from personal archives, sound material and items of ephemera to images, newspapers and government documentation.

At the heart of this project lie questions about cross-disciplinary research methods; about both overarching and discrete connections between the different collections, and about the value the British Library’s holdings as a whole.

By identifying, and generating discussion about potential collaborative opportunities, the placement student will both contribute to the work of the Research Development team, and enhance their own understanding of cross-disciplinary approaches in relation to their own research career.

(3) Research on the British Library’s ‘zine collection to improve user access

‘Zines offer a fascinating insight into popular culture outside of mainstream publishing; however, by their very nature, they can defy standard cataloguing conventions.

This placement calls for a PhD student who already has knowledge about a particular area of UK popular culture, and who is interested in focusing on a particular genre, subculture or time period in order to produce detailed descriptions of a subset of the collection.

Work on this project will help improve the existing catalogue records, and make the 'zines more accessible to all those who wish to use them.

The placement offers the PhD student the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding about collections and custodianship, storage and conservation, and associated ethical and legal issues.  

Further information

The application deadline for all of the PhD placements is Friday 19 February 2016. Further information, including eligibility criteria and details on the application process, can be found here:

http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/highered/phd-placement-scheme

All applications must be supported by the applicant’s PhD supervisor and their department’s Graduate Tutor (or equivalent).

Please forward any questions to: [email protected]

Jane Shepard, Research Support Intern

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English, writes:

It's that time of year again when clubs, societies, institutions and industries reflect on the previous twelve months and nominate people, events or phenomena for special recognition. In November, for instance, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) stunned linguists and pedants alike by choosing a pictograph – the ‘face with tears of joy’ emoji as their Word of the Year; VLM reviewers deliberated the merits of Foals’ What Went Down and Tame Impala’s Currents for their Album of the Year; and on Sunday BBC Sports Personality of the Year was awarded to Andy Murray. So, in a year where, despite recent events on the football pitch, Jose Mourinho’s outstanding contribution to our sporting lexicon drew academic attention, here are my nominations for Sports Word of the Year 2015 selected from examples of interesting English usage in the British sporting press and media:

February (BBC online Cricket World Cup live update) [Tim Southee] sends down an absolute jaffa which cuts Dilshan in half

May (Guardian Sport): [Martin Guptill] made a brief and extremely eye-catching return to crowd-pleasing one-day stylings with this massive six to cow corner

June (Mike Selvey, Guardian Sport): Tim Southee joined a pretty exclusive club of Test pace bowlers who have conceded a gallon in both innings of a Test

June (ex-Aussie cricketer Jason Gillespie, Radio 5 Live): we’re not playing for sheep stations

July (Jim Maxwell, Test Match Special, Radio 5 Live): 120 looks a bit too skinny for Australia to defend

September (Robert Kitson quoting Orrel Director of Rugby, Ian Hollis, Guardian Sport): around here they still think union’s a game of kick and clap

September (Robert Kitson, Guardian Sport): he doesn’t care where he’s playing, who he’s playing against or what Twickenham alickadoos make of his appearance

November (Jamie Jackson, Guardian Sport): The victory was a triumph for Klopp’s gegenpressing ethos

November (George Riley, England vs. New Zealand Rugby League First Test, BBC1): if ifs and buts were chips and putts we’d all be Gary Player

December (John Rawling, Fighting Talk, Radio 5 Live): Dennis Wise a nasty little five footer

The dominance of cricket and rugby in this year’s nominations reflects the fact 2015 featured a Cricket World Cup, an Ashes series and Rugby Union World Cup, but golf and football also make the cut. Seven items are restricted to the discourse of their respective sports of which three are international cricketing slang: cow corner is an area on the leg-side boundary to which a batsman plays an ‘agricultural’, i.e. unconventional slog; a jaffa is an unplayable delivery; and if a bowler concedes 100 runs in a single innings he has the dubious distinction of recording a gallon – the less desirable equivalent of a batsman’s century or ton; kick and clap is used by British Rugby League fans as an expression of disdain for Rugby Union deriving from a typical Union crowd’s penchant for politely clapping repeated passages of kicking in contrast to League supporters’ enthusiastic encouragement of running and passing; alickadoo is used within Rugby Union circles, equally disparagingly, to refer to a somewhat out of touch ‘hanger-on’ or feckless club administrator; gegenpressing refers, in football, to the tactic of collectively pressurising the opposition immediately after a turnover of possession; and a Dennis Wise is golfing shorthand for a relatively short but annoyingly scary putt – a jocular reference to ex-professional footballer, Dennis Wise, who had a reputation for confrontation despite his diminutive stature. Two are idiomatic expressions: not playing for sheep stations is an Australian phrase roughly equivalent to ‘it’s not a matter of life and death’; while if ifs and buts were chips and putts we’d all be Gary Player adds a sporting twist to a well-known saying – Gary Player is a South African professional golfer and nine-times major winner; finally skinny refers here to an uncompetitively low run total.

Most importantly, the ten have been selected as they demonstrate a range of linguistic phenomena, from jargon and slang to dialect and proverb. Perhaps surprisingly not many are documented in conventional dictionaries or glossaries, so their presence in the BL’s newspaper collections and/or TV and radio archives represents an invaluable record for language scholars investigating developments in the English language. The OED (online) includes skinny as a colloquial form for ‘mean/stingy/grudging’, which captures the way it is used in northern dialect and one can readily see how, by extension, this might apply to a low score in cricket – sports reporters often refer, for instance, to a ‘miserly defence’. The OED also has an entry for alickadoo, categorising it as originally Irish English, while John Miller’s Essential Lingo Dictionary of Australian Words and Phrases has an entry for playing for sheep stations (2015: 161). Geoff Tibball attributes Dennis Wise to British journalist and presenter, Des Kelly, in his compilation of sporting quotations, The Bowler’s Holding the Batsman’s Willy (2008: 189) and the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (2005) includes the proverb if ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no work for tinkers’ hands as a ‘traditional response to an over-optimistic conditional expression’ – i.e. a common retort to someone wistfully saying ‘if only …’. Coincidentally, a variant of this also made an appearance on a recent episode of Coronation Street (16 November 2015) when Erica Holroyd comforted Liz McDonald over her latest calamitous relationship break-up: as me mother always says if ifs and buts were whisky and nuts we’d all have a merry Christmas.

To my knowledge, none of the other terms have been captured in English print reference works. An internet search for gegenpressing, however, returns 219,000 hits so this is clearly well established sporting jargon. As a former German teacher, I find it a particularly intriguing loan word as it contains a German element gegen [= ‘against’] blended with an English gerund pressing. Similar constructions occur in German sporting discourse even when unidiomatic in English – das Dribbling, for instance. Like other loan words in football (cf. tiki-taka and catenaccio) the relish with which it has been adopted by the British press not only speaks volumes for the charisma of Liverpool manager, Jürgen Klopp, with whom it is most closely associated, but also reflects our constant desire to adopt the latest European tactical innovation. Cow corner, on the other hand, transports me to my schooldays and a Yorkshire cricket master, who viewed any shot in that direction with utter contempt. Neither this nor jaffa warrant entries in print dictionaries, but both appear in Wikipedia’s Glossary of Cricket Terms; gallon is surprisingly absent, but is included in a rival online cricket glossary, while kick and clap appears in League Freak's Rugby League Dictionary.

So to this year’s winner: much though I sympathise, as a Castleford Tigers fan, with the sentiment expressed in kick and clap and was delighted to see Kevin Sinfield come runner-up on Sunday, deep down even football fans with no affiliation to Liverpool (myself included) have to admit we’re all rather excited about the arrival of Jürgen Klopp, so it’s got to be gegenpressing, hasn’t it?

 

Since launching the Spare Rib digital site in May, we have been hard at work seeking former contributions to the ground-breaking feminist magazine, which is freely available for researchers, campaigners and all those interested in the magazine via Jisc Collections, to let them know their work is online and check they are happy with its inclusion.

We would like to share an update on some of the work we have been doing.

Since early summer, the Library has employed a former member of the Spare Rib collective along with a specialist rights clearance officer (whose considerable experience includes consulting for Who Do You Think You Are?) to help us undertake diligent searches for  former contributors. Their work is overseen by a project board chaired by the Chief Librarian and which is supported by the project's curator and project lead.

Other colleagues in the Library have also been highly involved, bringing to bear collections, rights and digitisation expertise, as well as building enhanced IT systems to record this activity. Taking into account the work of all the teams, the time spent is equivalent to two years’ full-time work.

We have shared information on authors, photographers and artists with trade and representative bodies, including the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), the Society of Authors, Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS), Association of Author’s Agents, National Union of Journalists’ (NUJ) Photographers’ Council and the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies, and consulted numerous sources, including WATCH (Writers, Artists and their Copyright Holders), electoral registers and search engines such as Google. Others sources that we have used to attempt to identify rights holders, along with the groups and organisations we have reached out to, are listed on this earlier blog post.

Since May, we have reviewed the information that we hold on over 4,500 rights holders, and will shortly write for a third time to all those not listed in the databases held by the groups listed above and for whom we have not had a response; this amounts to over 800 rights holders, and over 1,600 letters and emails.

We remain unable to locate all authors, photographer and artists, so as well as asking those who believe they may have been contributors to check the online magazine to find their items, we have been actively posting lists of names of contributors on the British Library website. A list of those photographers, visual artists and authors for whom we have a name but no contact details is available here.

Importantly, we have been meeting regularly with the trade bodies and societies listed above,  and we are pleased to report that we arranging a workshop early next year on issues around mass digitisation with help from the Association of Author’s Agents, ALCS, BAPLA, DACS, the National Union of Journalists’ Photographers’ Council, the Copyright Licensing Agency and the Publisher Licensing Society. We look forward to sharing more information about this event shortly.

As ever, if you contributed to the magazine, and have not heard from us to contact [email protected] or visit our permissions site at www.bl.uk/spare-rib/rights

Please do contact us if you have any questions about the project, or can help us identify further contributors.

Polly Russell, Project Curator
Matthew Shaw, Project Lead

 

On the 29 May 2015, the British Library collaborated for the third time with the International Association of Visual Urbanists to bring together an eclectic mix of researchers and practitioners from various backgrounds, including the social sciences, geography and the arts, to think about and discuss the use of visual and multi-sensory research methods within urban research.

Presentations, films, sound art and panel discussions engaged with a fascinating range of different sites through a variety of historical moments. These included the voices of different generations of people who frequent a community-owned pub in Peckham, present-day absences in Palestine through the memories of Palestinians exiled in Poland, images of redeveloped Victorian-era railway viaducts in Manchester and experiences of Toronto via an archive of early postcard photographs.

The movement of people in and out of London was told in their own words through the medium of billboards placed around the city itself, links between the Thames Estuary and South West China were explored through an archaeological art practice, visual images of Hackney Wick were read as a reflection of the movement of people in and through the East End of London and modernist utopian architecture and social ideals were connected to contemporary housing aspirations in and around London through the practice of site-writing.

Jude England, Head of Research Engagement at the British Library, talked about some of the Sound, Moving Image and Photographic collections held here at the Library as well as the UK Web Archive, an ever-growing repository for UK websites.

You can listen to a podcast of the presentations below. Please follow the links to access the films that were screened.

Introduction [00:00:11]

Jude England, The British Library

Keynote Speaker [00:14:15]

Michael Keith, COMPAS, University of Oxford

Assembling the complex city

Chair: Rachel Jones, International Association of Visual Urbanists

Panel 1: Making Sense of the Past [00:51:08]

Chair: Paul Halliday, Goldsmiths, University of London

Sarah Turner, University of Kent [00:58:03]

Public House: A spoken word/ text/ opera/ film

Phil Hatfield, The British Library [01:16:08]

Toronto by postcard: experiencing a city through historic photographs

Dominika Blachnicka-Ciacek, Goldsmiths, University of London [01:32:08]

Following, mapping and performing memories of Palestine

Panel 2: Mapping Urban Temporalities [01:49:41]

David Kendall, Goldsmiths, University of London

Brian Rosa, Queens College, City University of New York [01:51:55]

Spaces of Infrastructure, Visuality, and the Post-Industrial Imaginary

Rebecca Ross, Central Saint Martins [02:13:46]

London is Changing in Context

Rupert Griffiths, Royal Holloway and Lia Wei, School of Oriental and African

Studies [02:32:55]

Between earth, air and water: reimagining urban peripheries through

abandoned defensive architectures and rock cut burial sites.

Jane Rendell, The Bartlett, UCL [02:55:58]

May Mourn

Film Screenings

Écoute (2015) – Karla Berrens

Estuary England (2014) – Simon Robinson

The Region (2015) – Felipe Palma

Sky Lantern – Rebecca Locke

Point/Vector (2012) – Rupert Griffiths

Gone but Not Forgotten (2015) – David Kendall

Panoramas of Time: Kaleidoscope 2 (2015) – Rachel Sarah Jones

Edifices of Separation (2012) – Tomo Usada

Registration open now!

Late News: We are pleased to announce that Professor Benjamin Bowling (Kings College
London) will also be speaking at the event.

Criminology and Criminal Justice are the focus of this year’s all day workshop on sources and methods in socio-legal research. Following last year's suggestions for themes of future events the British Library, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and Socio-Legal Studies Association have teamed up with the British Society of Criminology. The workshop will take place at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies on Friday, 20 November 2015.

The event, aimed at PhD/MPhil researchers, early career academics and policy researchers, offers a valuable opportunity to benefit from insider views of several UK collections that support criminological and criminal justice research, but crucially, also offers the opportunity to hear an international group of distinguished researchers in law and criminology talk about particular sources and attendant methodological issues encountered in their research. There will be opportunities for questions and discussion throughout the day which finishes with a panel discussion.

From the British Library, Jon Sims, will provide a glimpse of content and services that offer potential to support contextual studies of criminal law, crime and criminal justice, offering examples that illustrate the scope of the Library’s collections including news media, sound recordings, industry information, colonial public records, private historical papers, literary and pictorial sources. Beyond the British Library the day offers insight on the qualitative, quantitative and theoretical methods and data sources used by or found in the collections of the impressive array of speakers who have volunteered their time.  

From the Manheim Centre for the Study of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the LSE, Paul Rock (with Tim Newburn and David Downes) discuss the “large and worrying gaps in formal documentation” encountered during their research since 2009 on the official history of criminal justice (1959 to 1997) in context of the accumulation of records, and procedures of file selection and retention. From the National Archives (Kew), Nigel Taylor will discuss the context of Freedom of Information and Data Protection legislation, the EU Right to be forgotten ruling, compliance and inter-institutional dialogue surrounding decisions about access to records of criminal justice. Representatives from other UK national collections are Sharon Bolton, Data Curation Manager at the UK Data Service, who will be talking about finding quantitative and qualitative crime and criminological data sources and also highlighting associated resources such as case studies based on the data and teaching sets, and Stuart Stone, from the Institute of Criminology (Cambridge), talking about the world renowned, and strongly interdisciplinary, Radzinowicz Library.

On the theme of qualitative methods and the interpretation of texts, Lizzie Seal (University of Sussex) will discuss sources used for research on public reactions to the death penalty in mid twentieth-century Britain. Focusing on letters sent to successive Home Secretaries, she will compare these articulations of qualitative views with what sources accessible at the British Library - the Mass Observation Capital Punishment Survey, contemporary newspaper articles and oral history interviews from the Millennium Memory Bank - did and didn’t reveal. Linda Mulcahy and Emma Rowden (LSE and University of Technology, Sydney) focus on Court Design Guides published by the UK government in the aftermath of the Beeching Report which concluded that the court system was in crisis. They discuss the use of a Foucauldian methodology and analysis that highlights relationships between data management and emerging themes, discourses on status, efficiency and danger, the privileging of some court users over others, and issues around designated space.

Visiting fellow at Queen Mary, Adrian Howe discusses standard positivist and post-structural methodologies deployed by feminist researchers in criminology and criminal justice. She will be looking at the role of statistical analysis, which allows for particular biases in the collection of data,  in determining the scale and in raising the policy profile of domestic violence, and on the discursive production of crime by non-feminists researchers. Also from the University of London David Nelken (Kings College) asks ‘Whom Can We Trust?’ in discussion of qualitative methods in comparative research, briefly addressing issues such as conflicting accounts of events in context of approaches he has called ‘Virtually there’, ‘Researching there’ and ‘Being there’ and ‘second-order comparison’.

Paul Dawson, Research Manager at the Evidence and Insight Unit of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC), will discuss the use of police data, providing insight of the work of the unit through case studies, demonstrating data use and research within the Metropolitan Police Service, and offering advice about data access. Also in the context of policing and data access, Lisa Dickson from the Law School at the University of Kent will discuss her investigation of NHS disclosure to the police of confidential patient-identifiable information without patient consent through the Data Protection Act 1998. She will be talking about her use of Freedom of Information requests as a research method to secure the data, and about FOI responses as a distinctive and interesting source of research information.

On quantitative sources and methods, Nick Tilley (UCL) will be discussing the wide range of statistical sources available in criminology, what types of data are currently most commonly used, possibilities, pitfalls and practical problems for broadening the range of data sources, and other data sets that are often overlooked. Following on from this, Andromachi Tseloni (Loughborough University) offers an overview of common methods applied to the Crime Survey of England and Wales, asking what such analyses can and cannot tell about the issues examined. Continuing the focus on quantitative methods, but also the themes of policing data and domestic violence, Allan Brimicombe, Head of the Centre for Geo-Information Studies at UEL, will discuss the use of police recorded data to understand patterns of escalation to violence and homicide amongst repeat victims of domestic violence/abuse (DVA).

Booking information

This event is organised by the British Society of Criminology, Socio-Legal Studies Association, British Library and Institute for Advanced Legal Studies. The price of £90 (Students £65) includes lunch and refreshments. If you would like to take advantage of this great opportunity please visit http://events.sas.ac.uk/events/view/18733 on the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies events page for booking details, timings and access arrangements.

Book now!

The third lecture in our Enduring ideas series takes place on the 17^th November. Following Matt Flinders on democracy and Ha-Joon Change on capitalism, our exploration of the key concepts and ideas that underpin our understanding of society continues with Dominic Abrams on prejudice. Recent and continuing reactions to the refugee crisis in Europe highlight the importance of our understanding of the problem of prejudice. Professor Abrams will address questions such as whether a tendency to judge and stereotype is an inherent part of human nature, an inevitable aspect of society or something which could be prevented through better education and focused social policies. His talk will also discuss whether our tendency to pre-judge others means that any attempts to aim for sustained societal harmony in our increasingly diverse communities are simply far too optimistic.

Dominic Abrams is Professor of Social Psychology and Director of the Centre for the Study of Group Processes at the University of Kent. We’re delighted to be joined by Professor Dame Helen Wallace, a European Studies specialist, British Library Board member, and Foreign Secretary and International Vice-President of the British Academy.

The Enduring Ideas series takes place in collaboration with the Academy of Social sciences. It starts at 1830, in the Terrace Restaurant. Booking information is available via this link here Enduring Ideas. Look forward to seeing you there!

Update: Book now!

As it is World Animal Day, I thought I'd take the opportunity to introduce two animal-related events that are taking place next month at the British Library as part of the Being Human festival. These two events were motivated by our current Animal Tales exhibition which shows how animals have come to play such an important role in literature and in human life and culture more broadly.

The Being Human festival begins after the exhibition itself closes, but these two events are still linked to some of the themes of the exhibition. The first, on 13 November is ‘From Animal Tales to Animal Tags’ which is a virtual, drop-in event which hopes to involve interested members of the public in curating our online collection of images which is held on Flickr through tagging images of domestic animals. We have 1 million out of copyright images as part of our Flickr collection which are held under a creative commons license. The more the public are involved in tagging and grouping these images, the more user-friendly the collection becomes to researchers and other interested individuals and groups. If you have a Flickr account, or are able to set one up, it should be easy to participate in this event.

You can take part using your own device at home (e.g. via a tablet, laptop or PC) or can take your device along to one of the participating public libraries within the BL’s BIPC network (more details to follow), or our St Pancras site, to bring a sense of the collective to the event through tagging animals in this collection alongside other members of the public.

Image taken from page 81 of '[Travels through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire in 1793 and 1794. Translated from the German [by F. W. Blagdon]. MS. notes.]'

Our second animal inspired event, ‘Humans and their non-humans’ is on the evening of the 19 November at the Terrace Restaurant at our St Pancras site. This event will explore something very close to the hearts of many of us – the relationship between humans and our pets. For this event, we are very lucky to have a fantastic panel of experts to talk about different aspects of the human-animal relationship through the research they have undertaken.

From the biological to the sociological, this event will address issues such as: our emotional engagement with pets, pets as family members, pets as enablers and their role in health and, wider sociological questions about the changing nature of the human-pet relationship. Our chair for the evening will be Professor Claire Molloy, Director of the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University, who has written extensively about the representation of animals in film and other media.

Our speakers for the evening are Dr John Bradshaw, Professor Nickie Charles and Professor Daniel Mills, whose diverse expertise and interests will make this a informative and fun evening for all of us interested in the human-animal relationship. The event starts at 18.30 and will be followed by a pay bar until 21.00. It includes time for audience questions and is aimed at the public, so there is no need to come with any prior knowledge of the topic. This event is charged and can be booked via our What’s On pages. We hope to see you there!

Tel: +44 (0)1937 546546

Are you:

-an ESRC-funded PhD student?

-interested in social science research and policy?

-interested in learning more about the British Library’s collections?

-interested in working alongside expert curators?

-keen to learn about public engagement with research?

Then we may have a funded, three month ESRC placement for you!

Working at the Library is an amazing way to find out about the scope of the collections we have here and to be exposed to unique and unusual research materials that cannot be found elsewhere. The British Library has hosted a number of ESRC placements in the past, including projects on diverse topics such as sports archives, ageing and the body, migration, health studies and the use of the web in social science research. Previous placements have produced a range of useful outputs such as topical bibliographies, reports, webpages and events for the public and academic audiences.

There are 5 placements currently open to ESRC-funded PhD students. They are each funded for a three month period. These are outlined below. For more information and how to apply, please see full details on the RCUK website. The deadline for applications is 16:00 BST 28 August 2015.

We are also offering up to three placements for MRC or NERC-funded students and one placement for AHRC-funded students. For more details see the RCUK website.

Above: The British Library, aerial view. Public Domain image.

Outline of projects for ESRC-funded placements

Mapping the 20^th Century

Contribute to a major exhibition launching in November 2016 that will explore key aspects of national and international government policy, boundaries and identities through the 20^th Century. You will focus on developing part of the exhibition narrative that discusses the role of maps in geopolitical contexts e.g. boundary mapping used to establish new national borders; the role of mapping in communicating the work and supporting the existence of supranational bodies such as the UN, EEC etc. (One placement available, open to ESRC students).

Social Science Now!

Develop the concept for a public event that makes social science research and policy accessible, exciting and relevant. The intern will work with an experienced team to research, plan and deliver an event as part of the BL’s public programme. You will work closely with high-profile speakers to develop format and content, liaise with BL teams to engage in targeted promotion and post-event evaluation and other outputs (e.g. podcasts, videos). Time-permitting, you will also undertake research into a specific aspect of use of policy information in our collections relating to social science (One placement available, open to ESRC students).

UK General Election 2015 – the Web Legacy

The British Library is part of a consortium that has formed a collection of 7500 archived websites relating to the 2015 UK General Election. This is a unique resource for political and social research. You will be involved in improving discoverability and presentation of the collection using cutting edge web archiving tools; negotiating permissions from rights holders to make archived sites openly available worldwide as well as quality checking of gathered sites. You will have the opportunity to carry out research using the collection (e.g. analysing the role of the Internet in political communication) and to disseminate your findings through BL blogs and other routes (One placement, open to ESRC students).

American Foreign Policy - a User’s Guide to the BL

The Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library houses one of the world’s foremost collections of American books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers and sound recordings. You will develop a resource that will enable researchers to get the most out of the collections related to American foreign policy. The resource could take the form of bibliographies, case studies, learning resources or a web exhibition. You will also be involved in engagement and publicity work to promote use of this resource. (One placement available, open to ESRC students).

Asia, Africa and International Development

International partnerships are fundamental to the British Library’s activities, including those in Asia and Africa. As well as hosting vast collections from these areas ourselves, it is our aspiration to support cultural institutions across Asia and Africa whose own collections are at risk from war or civil emergency. More broadly, the Library’s international projects and partnerships seek to generate social and economic impact. This internship would involve drawing on the intern’s knowledge and research of current best practise in international development to produce a report to the BL with recommendations about how it could more actively and more usefully engage in this area. (One placement, open to ESRC students).