Why should you apply for the job of Research Software Engineer in the Digital Research team at the British Library? Harry Lloyd tells you as he reflects on three and a half years in post. Applications open until 19th July.
10 July 2026Blog series Digital scholarship
Author Harry Lloyd, Research Software Engineer
In August I’ll be leaving the British Library to pursue a PhD in climate science. This is both hugely exciting, and a moment of sadness in leaving a job I’ve loved. I’d like the team to find the ideal candidate and thrive so this felt like a good moment, with the job advert live until 19th July, to reflect on the role and what I’ve achieved. Let’s start with what a Research Software Engineer (RSE) does at a library.
Research software projects at the British Library start with a conversation with one of our incredible Digital Curators, also part of the Digital Research team. The Digital Curators blend experience of the Library, understanding of digital humanities, and collection area expertise to mediate conversations between technical and curatorial staff. These scoping conversations lead into the start of the software development lifecycle. As an RSE you have both freedom and responsibility to guide these conversations from a technical perspective.
There is time to work on side projects. Mine included an audit of problematic metadata as part of the Library’s Race Equality Action Plan, a workshop on transdisciplinary approaches to tackling climate change, and a demo of how semantic search might work with the Library’s vast collection. The Digital Research team also run the excellent Digital Scholarship Training Programme, which you can expect to both benefit from and contribute to.
I’ve been an RSE in the Digital Research team at the Library since February 2023. Before that I was a scientist who had increasingly developed software for research. When the RSE role at the Library came up I felt that if I could write software for researchers in different scientific fields, I could probably write software for the humanities as well. The Library sounded like a very cool place to work, and I hugely valued the thoughtful approach the humanities bring to how research is carried out. I had some creative links, but I came into the field with a lot to learn.
There are a wide range of specialisms within research software engineering. I explain three of my projects here, and you can also look back on some of the projects that Olivia Vane, a predecessor of mine, worked on in the Living with Machines programme.
The Library has a long history of digital humanities work and Convert-a-Card is a great example of a project that continues to develop in exciting new ways. Centred around the task of converting the Library’s thousands of physical catalogue cards into electronic records, this project evolved from a crowdsourcing project into using OCLC APIs to find base records and speed up cataloguer workflows. I worked on software to transcribe catalogue cards, developed a front end to support cataloguing and a backend that extracted potential MARC records from OCLC services.
Much of my work has centred around working with metadata (though not all, see work on Huw Rowlands’ Coleridge Fellowship). Often this has involved extracting metadata from printed catalogues to enrich our main catalogue. Work with the “Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now at the British Museum [British Library]” (the ‘BMC’) took myself and Dr Rossitza Atanassova, Digital Curator, to the Digital Humanities Nordic and Baltic conference in Reykjavik in 2024. I developed software to convert raw transcription outputs into structured catalogue entries. This collaboration has also built over time, involving Rossitza’s Professional Practice Fellowship and Isaac Dunsford’s Digital Humanities internship at the University of Southampton, both in 2022-2023, as well as Jeanette Croen’s PhD Placement in 2025-2026.
The role intersects research and digital humanities, and involves a lot of experimentation. I recently took part in the HIPE-OCRepair 2026 competition with another Digital Curator, Valentina Vavassori. We used language model APIs to try and ‘post-correct’ historical newspaper and book transcriptions without reference to the source material. Valentina will present our work at the HIP-2026 workshop in September.
Most data I work with is text data, so it makes sense to consider generative language models. That said the characteristics of library data, the need for quality control, the ethical and environmental considerations, and the distance that language models put between you and more closely read methods of data analysis all preclude the use of AI without deep nuance. You can’t vibe code this role, but with care you can achieve incredible results using language models for complex text data that would be impossible otherwise.
I can’t avoid mentioning the serious cyber-attack in October 2023. This was a major hurdle when I was only six months into the role, removing most of our computing infrastructure and our ability to start new research. The Library is in a much better place now and, though the recovery continues, you can expect to work on far more modern infrastructure than before the attack.
Good software development practices are fundamental, but there are so many different career paths that could lead you to this role. Work in digital humanities, of course, but any experience of software development in research or industry, no matter the field will stand you in good stead. Two of the British Library values are to put users at the heart of everything we do, and to listen, innovate and adapt to a changing world. If the work I’ve talked about sounds fascinating, and you feel like you can approach problems with those values in mind, you’re probably right for the role.
I am sad to be leaving my wonderful team and a thought-provoking, eternally varied position. The Chief Innovation Officer of the National Library Board of Singapore described us as having ‘the best jobs’, and I wouldn’t disagree. There’s a whole world more work I could have done, but if you’re reading this maybe you could be the one to carry it forward. Apply, please: I look forward to seeing where you take it.
This blog is part of our Digital Scholarship series, tracking exciting developments at the intersection of libraries, scholarship and technology.
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