British Library blogs

About our blogs

These blogs from our curators, subject specialists and guest bloggers express the thoughts and opinions of individual British Library staff members and guests.

Latest posts

Stories of the Prophets: an illustrated Persian manuscript by Nishapuri

08 August 2022 Asian and African studies

Fig. 1. Nuh (Noah) in the ark (British Library, Add MS 18576, f. 19v) Tales of the prophets (Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʼ) form a popular literary genre based on stories adapted from the Qur’an and other Islamic literature. Since accounts of the...

Burmese Script Conversion using Aksharamukha

05 August 2022 Digital scholarship

This blog post is by Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator for Asian and African Collections, British Library. She's on Twitter as @BL_AdiKS. Curious about Myanmar (Burma)? Did you know that the British Library has a large collection of Burmese materials,...

A Bibliographical Mystery Solved

05 August 2022 European studies

A while ago I was alerted by a colleague to a German item in our collections that appeared to have no catalogue record. It was bound with a list of books censored by the Austrian Empire in the late 18th...

A Case of "Archive Fever" (Cause: Due to Drafts)

04 August 2022 Americas and Oceania Collections

Jessica Mehta is currently a Fulbright Nehru Senior Scholar in Bengaluru, India, and was a 2019 Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library. I was fortunate to visit the British Library as an Eccles Fellow in 2019, just before...