National Library of Scotland

Description

The National Library of Scotland is Scotland's national legal deposit library, established by Act of Parliament in 1925 as the successor to the Advocates Library, and one of six legal deposit libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Based in Edinburgh, with a moving image collection at Kelvin Hall in Glasgow, it looks after and shares Scotland's cultural heritage and supports research, learning and discovery, holding the world's largest collection of Scottish published material. It is funded by the Scottish Government and works in partnership with cultural and heritage bodies across Scotland and beyond. Its digital scholarship is delivered through Data Foundry, an open-data platform that publishes the Library's digitised text, image, map and metadata collections for reuse, alongside a National Librarian's Research Fellowship in Digital Scholarship supporting computational and data-driven research on the collections.

Data Foundry publishes the Library's open data as more than fifty named datasets across digitised collections, catalogue metadata, and map and spatial data, with rights statements applied according to the copyright status of the underlying material and the Library's own datasets released under Creative Commons dedications and licences. It offers Jupyter notebooks and tutorials for working with the collections, and the Library maintains open code and model releases on GitHub and Hugging Face, among them object-detection models trained on archival index cards. Computational projects run with partners include a text and data mining platform developed with EDINA at the University of Edinburgh, and exploratory high-performance text mining of the first eight editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica carried out with EPCC. The fellowship in digital scholarship has run annually since 2020, supported by the National Librarian's Innovation Fund and offering an award for a three-month period of research on the Data Foundry collections. In August 2026 the Library published an artificial intelligence statement setting out its approach to the responsible adoption of AI, covering how it employs AI tools, how it communicates about that use, how it collects AI-generated material, and how it allows its data to be used by others.

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Currently active

Yes

Offers funding

Yes, this infrastructure provides funding in the following categories:

Founding year

1925

Contact details

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Categorisation

Type

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Partner Infrastructures

Historic Environment Scotland (HES)

Historic Environment Scotland is the lead public body set up to investigate, care for and promote Scotland’s historic environment. It ensures the historic environment is cared for, valued and en… read more about Historic Environment Scotland (HES)

Edinburgh

British Library

Research is central to the British Library's role as the national library of the United Kingdom. It helps the British Library to share their collections and intellectual heritage with people across th… read more about British Library

London

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) vision is to inspire a world that increasingly values, protects and benefits from plants. We do this by carrying out research, supported by our Living Collect… read more about Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Edinburgh

National Records of Scotland (NRS)

National Records of Scotland (NRS) is a Non-Ministerial Department of the Scottish Government. Its purpose is to collect, preserve and produce information about Scotland's people and history and make … read more about National Records of Scotland (NRS)

Edinburgh

Partner Universities

University of Glasgow

Additional Partnerships

Glasgow Life; National Galleries of Scotland; National Museums Scotland; National Trust for Scotland; BBC Scotland; Sabhal Mòr Ostaig; Scottish Enterprise; EDINA; EPCC