Temporary suspension of Digitisation Services due to Covid-19 outbreak

Digitisation Services are currently suspended as the British Library has closed its physical premises to keep our users and all our staff safe and healthy.

Please do bear with us during this difficult period and regularly check here and follow us on twitter for our latest updates. Our Customer Service team will be offering a limited support service should you require assistance.

We send colleagues and customers our best wishes during this challenging time.

Images of some of our collections are already available to buy and download straight away through Images Online, so you should check there first before ordering from our Imaging Services.

For copies of contemporary research content, such as journal articles and book chapters, please use British Library On Demand.

What you need to know

Imaging-digitisation

Bulk digitisation

Find out how our digitisation experts can help you and your organisation digitise your archives

Digitisation of rare manuscript

Ordering images

All you need to know about ordering scans or photographs of British Library collection items

Digitisation of specialist material

Specialist digitisation

We have specialist expertise in handling a range of material types and managing complex preservation requirements

News

British Library St Pancras building

Coronavirus

17 March 2020

To keep our users and all our staff safe and healthy we’ve taken the decision today to close our physical sites in London and Boston Spa for the time being, and suspend our public events.

Digitising the Malmesbury Bible

British Library digitises 600-year old Malmesbury Bible

23 October 2019

The Friends of Malmesbury Abbey commissioned the British Library to digitise four volumes of its bible, known as the Malmesbury Bible, this summer. Malmesbury had one of the most important libraries in Europe in the Middle Ages and was home to 12th-century historian and monk William of Malmesbury.

British Library, St Pancras

Accessing British Library online content and services

19 March 2020

Our Reading Rooms and public spaces may be closed for the time being but over the coming weeks we will continue to offer as many online services as we possibly can so that the British Library remains open to everyone, wherever you are in the world. And we will be working hard to maintain this access during these unprecedented times.

Case studies

Digitisation of rare globe
…This innovative project makes a number of our most important globes available beyond the British Library’s reading rooms and exhibition galleries, to a wider audience and in a more imaginative way than ever before…

Using 3D photography the British Library’s rare and fragile collection of historical globes have been digitised and made available for the public to discover via augmented reality.

University of Warwick Microfilm Cases
…“It was really easy working with the BL to get our older theses scanned"…

The British Library worked with the University of Warwick on a project to convert more than 1000 doctoral theses from microfilm to digital using the Library’s state of the art microfilm scanner.

Imaging Services at work
…"British Library Imaging Services are uniquely placed to supply quality digital images of back catalogue and rare material"…

British Library Imaging Services and Taylor & Francis have a long standing partnership which sees Imaging Services supply digitised copies of the Taylor and Francis back catalogue.

Imaging Services staff scanning collection items
…A quick look at the British Library's extensive holdings confirmed they had what we needed to make the complete archive…

Guilford Publications made use of the British Library collections when digitising with British Library Imaging Services.

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