 I'm Diana Newell, associate lecturer at the University of Kent. I have been researching art history for 13 years now, then went on to do a PhD on Crete in the late medieval and early Renaissance period. A PhD is three to four years, solid research full-time. There are certain resources which only the British Library has and certainly it provided a lot of detailed sources on things which I couldn't find anywhere else. I was trying to research the autistic landscape of the capital of Crete during the Venetian period. I found that there were a number of different sources that I could draw on in the library which were extremely useful. There were the maps, there were the plans, there were the views and there were also the documentary sources of people's contemporary experience of the city. So they all kind of wove together to create a picture of what the lost city was like. Once you're in the library you know you can get things very quickly. Within a day you can look at a lot of material and get a lot of research done. I kind of found myself coming in more and more as I got deeper into my PhD. As an art historian I'm always very keen to see the original thing. You get much more out of the original than you do any reproduction. To be able to handle them and to see how the books put together sometimes and to study the original material it's been very exciting. I feel like I've discovered things and put together a picture of things which hasn't been done before.