Digitise your collections with the British Library
Whether you’re an organisation that wants to share your physical archive with the digital world, or a researcher that needs a closer look at our treasures, we’re here to help.
What we do
- Support with getting your digitisation project started, such as scoping, funding advice and prepping your items
- Specialist scanning of all types of media
- Multispectral assessment to see beyond the surface
- Location photography, so your precious items don’t have to travel
- Images from our collection of over 170 million books, maps, manuscripts and more
- High quality printing
That’s just the start of our services. We take a holistic approach to every project, and will work with you to find the right solution to meet your needs.
Get in touch
We’re working hard to get our full digitisation services up and running after last year’s cyber-attack. We're still here to help with scoping, planning and preparing your project, and will have access to all our collections again soon.
Why digitise?
Why digitise?
Digitisation helps you to:
- Preserve your items for the future
- Open up your collection to people around the world
- Present your items in more accessible ways
- Boost income for your organisation
- Save on physical storage space
We’ve been digitising for over 30 years from our studios in London and Boston Spa. As the guardians of the nation’s treasures, we’re world-leaders in handling rare, fragile material. And you can trust our expert conservators to take as much care with your collection as we did with Magna Carta.
Our work
The Malmesbury Bible
Our location photography service meant that the precious 600-year-old Bible could be digitised without leaving its home in Malmesbury Abbey. The stunning images faithfully reproduce the colours and gold leaf of the pages, while revealing decoration that wouldn’t be possible to see with the naked eye.
The Royal Society of Chemistry
We digitised over 750,000 items from the Royal Society of Chemistry’s archives, so that they could share their collections with their members and new audiences around the world. This included scanning of over 1,000 glass lantern slides using our specialist equipment.
The University of Warwick
We worked with the University of Warwick to convert more than 1,000 doctoral theses from microfilm to digital with our state-of-the-art microfilm scanner. This project opened up valuable research to new generations of researchers, so that they could learn from previous studies and push their own work further.