Hello, my name’s Andrew Longworth and I’ve recently joined the Digitisation Scholarship team as a Digitisation Project Analyst so I thought I’d write a short introductory blog post. I’m here as a maternity leave sub for the next 4 months and my main role will be to help curators and external sponsors kick start their digitisation projects. As you know there are so many fascinating and unique items in the British Library catalogue which we’re keen to have
digitised and it’s exciting to be involved in making these assets available online to people all over the world.

I’ll also be working on publishing our legacy digital content while I’m here. We have a range of material waiting to be ingested into our digital library system but some of it needs a little bit of preparation work before it can be made open to the public. To give a little bit of insight into this process, for those who might be interested, it involves checking it’s been catalogued correctly, it’s legally clear to be uploaded and it has full and accurate metadata. The issue of metadata is one that I find very interesting, and the seemingly never-ending desire for greater metadata quantity and quality in the world of digital scholarship is one that throws up many challenges and opportunities.

One of the other fun things about working in the Digital Scholarship team which I’m only just beginning to appreciate is that they’re involved in some really engaging events. About a week before my first day I managed to get myself along to the BL Labs Symposium where I was able to hear some inspiring presentations and meet some worthy competition winners. And what do you know, there’s a Digital Conversations event on today which I’d definitely recommend signing up for if you can.

All in all I’ve had a great introduction to the British Library and I’ve found everyone here to be welcoming, passionate and clever. If you need to get in touch or have some suggestions about utilising the digital collection please feel free to drop us a line at [email protected].