 I think one of the excitements as you walk across the Piazza into the British Library building is that you're really walking across the roof of basements full of books and journals, recordings which will only be known about properly if researchers find their knowledge path through those things. It is like a knowledge machine waiting to be turned on. That's what we hope social scientists will do. Find that knowledge path through an immense but fascinating resource. The first thing you can say about the British Library, it is a kind of a library plus. We definitely have faith in the word in the book, but it's a much, much bigger spectrum that you're talking about here. There are some surprising places that social scientists will be interested to find out about in the collections. I'm here today for a social science open day at the British Library for doctoral researchers. I really wanted to get a sense of what the library offers. Social science is so exciting, there's actually a lot to do with it, but it's massive and that's quite daunting as well. There is so much material here and of course that raises real challenges about what you're accessing and how you access that material. But if you think of the British Library rather than being one place but actually a series of different collections, the exciting thing is that we will usually have many different formats which will shed light on a particular subject and it's a question of locating those and then choosing where to focus, but they all inform one another I think. For me, interdisciplinary work, even within the social sciences is also extremely important and kind of the future. I think people are really thinking more and more about how do you use sort of big data sets with political ephemera for instance or trying to mix up the kind of sources that you use to ask new questions. So I think that the British Library is excellent for that and that's what I always encourage researchers to do. The reason why the Library has such kind of a vast and broad collection around UK publishing is legal deposit which is an obligation on all publishers in the UK to deposit one copy of their publication with the British Library. Now that covers mainstream books, academic books and journals, but also stretches out into news both national and local and regional through to the independent and small press. Even people kind of just producing a zine or a comic in their own room. If they're publishing it, if they're making it available then there is an obligation to deposit a copy of the library and we strongly encourage and support people in doing that so that we can make really as broad and as comprehensive a picture of UK publishing as we can. The Sounds website, sounds.bl.uk has a variety of collections presented in curatorial areas from music through to spoken voice material through to wildlife sounds. What's unique about the Library's collections is we have material across all sorts of formats so as somebody who's interested perhaps in the way English language has changed over the last 100 years they're able to access dictionaries, style guides, written descriptions but also sound recordings that were created as part of linguistic surveys that have kind of been documenting that. Can you tell us what you did when you left school? So they couldn't access all that material in one place. The Web Archive attempts to be a snapshot of the UK web space. Once a year we will try to capture something like four to five million websites that we can identify as being UK as well as that we build special collections, collections of news sites, collections on recent referendums and collections. There's material here that you won't now find on the live web but also it gives you the opportunity to look at change over time and that's one thing we've been quite active in terms of working with researchers to understand what their needs are for that and also how we can design kind of analytical engines to help researchers work with that kind of material. The Archives and Manuscripts department is responsible for collections that relate to politics and public life which of course is an enormous area so part of the challenge is defining what politics and public life are in the contemporary period and when we talk about contemporary we're talking about 1950 onwards so we're thinking about that sort of post-war period and what's happened around politics and public life and the sorts of materials that we take in is a huge range because we could be taking in the research papers of significant individuals and all we're also looking at important institutions and organisations which represent something significant about British political and public life in that period. Some of the things that I usually suggest to people when they ask me as a social scientist what are the resources I could use We have good data sets, good databases including censuses from all of the Caribbean and Latin American countries Newspapers are again a very good resource that I would ask social scientists to look at depending on their project Economic historians would find a lot of company records and correspondences related to British investment in the region and again not just historical but definitely mid to late 20th century resources. We see ourselves as a world library, as a library to find out things wherever that may take you in the imagination and in scholarship. You need a collection which has depth going back years. There is no other place like the British Library for doing that than the breadth and depth of the collections that we have.