Nora McGregor

Nora McGregor
Position
Digital Curator, European and Americas Collections
Specialism
Digital Scholarship Skills, Digital Research
Department
Collections

Nora McGregor is the British Library’s Digital Curator for European & Americas Collections. She holds a Master's Degree in Library and Information Science and has extensive experience in design and delivery of digital skill training at a national cultural heritage institution scale, management of major digital/digitization projects, and exhibition curation. 

As part of the Library’s Digital Scholarship team, her work centres on digital scholarship skill development for staff. Since its inception in 2012, she has managed the design and delivery of the Library’s unique and ground-breaking Digital Scholarship Training Programme which prepares staff for the computational turn in humanities research. This bespoke training programme engages staff with a variety of interesting and inspiring training opportunities, helping ensure the Library’s capacity to support emerging areas of modern scholarship continues apace of digital transformations. Nora speaks widely on the value of investing in staff skills in this area, providing guidance to institutions around the world, and offering advice on ways to implement similar training opportunities.

She was recently awarded a £222,420 grant with partners Birkbeck University and The National Archives by the Institute of Coding (IoC) to co-develop a one-year part-time postgraduate Certificate (PGCert), Computing for Cultural Heritage, as part of a £4.8 million University skills drive.

She also collaborates on novel experiments which leverage digital methods to improve and open up access to digital collections in the cultural heritage sector. Exemplary projects include supporting state-of-the-art research into the Automatic Transcription of Historical Handwritten Arabic Texts, and crowdsourcing the transcription of Chinese & Indonesian printed card catalogues.

Nora currently sits on High Level External Review Committee for Portugal's INCODE 2030, a national programme on digital skills. She is also involved in a wide range of knowledge exchange activities and networks on the topic of digital scholarship such as the LIBER Digital Humanities working group, Turing Data Science and Digital Humanities SIG: Teaching Subgroup, Cyclades: Corpora and Corpus Linguistics for Digital Humanities Consortium amongst others.

Previous to the British Library, Nora held the position of Archivist at Rafael Vinoly Architects, an international architectural firm based in London and New York. In this capacity she spearheaded a major records management and digital archive project, overseeing the digitisation of over 700 linear feet of in-house documents and drawings that are of legal, contractual, and historical relevancy to the firm.  

Twitter: @ndalyrose

Publications

Exhibitions

  • Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research (Oct 2010 – July 2011)
  • Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight (Feb 2014-May 2014)

Articles & Papers

Subjects

Digital Scholarship

Undertake innovative research with our digital collections and data

Projects

Digital Scholarship Training Programme

Developing staff skills to support digital researchers.

Computing for Cultural Heritage

Trialing a new postgraduate certificate, Computing for Cultural Heritage, with The National Archives and Birkbeck University

Automatic Transcription of Historical Handwritten Arabic Texts

Helping advance the state-of-the-art in handwritten text recognition technologies for Arabic.

Crowdsourcing at the British Library

Learn more about crowdsourcing projects and initiatives at the British Library.

All projects