05 March 2024
Helping your research
While our services are starting to recover from October’s cyber-attack, we’re continuing to highlight ways you can access our collection and expertise, and alternatives you may not be aware of.
Recent improvements
You can now order up to six collection items in our Reading Rooms, up from the previous limit of four. Our manuscripts limit remains at four as usual. You will need to come into the Reading Rooms to order items, and you can watch this film about how to access our collection at the moment:
How to use our online catalogue from British Library on Vimeo.
Online resources
Whether you’re looking for journals, researching your family tree or on the hunt for inspiration, you can find our collection and useful resources across multiple websites, including:
- The British Newspaper Archive (BNA), which has millions of freely available newspaper articles among it’s wider collection
- The Endangered Archive Programme website, which provides access to digitised collections items from around the world
- Jstor, where you can create a free account which gives you access to 100 free articles per month from their range of journal articles, books, images, and primary sources in 75 disciplines
- Images Online, which hosts thousands of images from our collection.
You can find more recommended resources on our website, and we’re adding more all the time.
Alternate ways to access our collection
Our curators have compiled suggestions for alternative ways to work while some of our collection is unavailable. Find out how to access:
- our Americas and Oceania collections
- our Asian and African collections
- our India Office Records and Private Papers
- our manuscripts
- our music collections
- our sound and vision collections
- web archives.
Ask us for help
Our Reference team are here to help, whether you have a Reader Pass or not. If you need advice navigating our collection at the moment or aren’t sure how to get started, email [email protected] and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.