 I'm Ruth and I'm based here in the history department at Lancaster University. My PhD it's a collaborative doctoral partnership between the university and the British Library. My research looks at attitudes to immigration in 19th century Britain. The British Library has a vast amount of newspapers in its collection. Many of the papers in the collection have been digitised over the years and I work with some of these in a digital format. Software allows us to look at the language surrounding immigration in these newspapers so we can see how the context in which it was discussed shifted over the course of a century. The collaborative aspect of the project means I get to visit the British Library in London on a fairly regular basis. I've also got a supervisor at the library who I meet up with to discuss my research and my progress. It's also meant that I've got a means of accessing a public audience, which is great because it's something that all PhD students want to do. They want to get their research out there and the British Library has a really exciting calendar of public events. I feel like I've had a really positive experience with the library so they have such an enthusiasm for their own resources and their ethos and just their mission of engaging with as many different people as possible. And they've provided an outlet and a sense of community that I wouldn't have been able to get otherwise doing a traditional PhD.