In January and February 2016 the Library hosted a series of open days for first year PhD students. We were delighted to welcome over 600 students to the Library, drawn from over 50 Higher Education Institutions in the UK and beyond. We appreciate the overwhelmingly fantastic feedback we have received. These events are a staple of our postgraduate programme, and an important component of the Living Knowledge vision to support and stimulate research of all kinds.

Photo credit: Tony Antoniou.

We are pleased to be able to use this blog to share many of the slides from the series – both with those who attended the events and with the wider postgraduate research community. The slides contain a wealth of information about our research services and collections, and feature presentations from guest speakers, digital curators, current collaborative doctoral students and our reference teams. Click on the links below to see slides from each event (not all slides are available due to copyright issues).

• Asian & African Collections
• News & Media
• Pre 1600 Collections
• Music
• Social Sciences
• Researching Law at the British Library
• 17th & 18th Century Collections
• 19th Century Collections
• 20th & 21st Century Collections

Our curators have also prepared the following guides, which we hope you will find useful:

• Handling collection items
• Useful resources for music researchers
• Finding resources in the Library

We appreciate there is a lot to take in on the Open Day – if you feel you would like to find out more, why not book onto one of our Library Tours or Conservation Studio Tours? At the end of this blog we’ve also included some links to pages you will probably be visiting fairly often over the course of your research.

Many thanks to everyone, from inside and outside the Library, who contributed to another fantastic series of events. And thanks too to everyone who attended – we really enjoyed meeting you and hearing about your research. We are looking forward to seeing you at the Library again soon.

• Explore the British Library – our main catalogue
• Archives and Manuscripts catalogue – for further unique collection items
• Electronic resources and databases – browse online by subject and format
• Digitised Manuscripts – digitised copies of manuscripts and archives, with descriptions of their contents
• EThOS – access over 400,000 PhD thesis records online for free

You can discover more about our collections and resources online on our Subject Pages, through our dedicated Collections Guides, and across our full range of Blogs. And finally, if you have not already done so, make sure to Register for a Reader’s Pass and learn how to use our reading rooms.

James Perkins

Research and Postgraduate Development Manager