Explore articles, reports, data, book chapters and conference papers produced by our staff through their research activities

The British Library Research Repository is an open access repository for the research produced by staff and research associates of the British Library.

Research informs and supports almost every aspect of our work, be it curation, conservation, preservation, resource discovery, digital innovation, cultural programmes or learning. Our staff are active in their specialist research areas and collaborate widely. The British Library is an active partner in research projects, and we also co-supervise doctoral research in partnership with universities, covering a range of disciplines and subject areas.

The repository supports the British Library’s Open Access Policy for staff research, which recognises that our research has important value for others, and so aims to make it discoverable and accessible for everybody.

Repository aims

Our objectives for the repository are to:

• Provide reliable information about research undertaken by British Library staff, individually or in collaboration
• Provide a single point of open access to our full-text research outputs wherever possible
• Make all our research easier to find, and enhance the contribution we make to UK and international research
• Respond to the open access expectations and data sharing expectations and mandates of our research funders.

Material not produced by or in association with British Library staff is not eligible for inclusion.

What is in the repository?

The repository houses material such as journal articles, conference papers, books and book chapters, reports, datasets, images, exhibition texts and blog posts. If we’re not able to copy an item held elsewhere, metadata about that item will be added with a link to it where possible. Research performed at the British Library is broad, for example:

• Our public exhibitions involve many hours of work to prepare, including research on, and interpretation of, collection items, as for Karl and Eleanor Marx: Life in the Reading Room
• Large metadata files and digitised papers are often generated through the work of British Library Labs, such as these XML transcriptions of ancient digitised texts for training OCR
• As the national library we play a leading role in library sector research and practice, such as cataloguing, book conservation and digital preservation, as illustrated by this journal article on automated preservation planning.

Explore beyond the British Library with the Shared Research Repository

The British Library Research Repository is part of the Shared Research Repository, encompassing the research of a number of UK cultural and heritage institutions: the British Library, British Museum, National Museums Scotland, MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. These five research repositories have separate identities but can be explored together via a single search through the collaborative Shared Research Repository page. A single search across the combined content reveals collaborative research projects and interesting parallels between our separate specialist research fields. The British Library manages all these research repositories as part of the shared repository service.