Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert is the Digital Curator for Asian and African Collections at the British Library.

In her current role, Adi champions the use of the Library’s digital collections and data, with a focus on digital research methods, tools, and platforms. She plays a key role in sharing expertise, training, and advising Library staff in digital scholarship, while promoting the integration of digital tools and practices into curatorial work. Her interests span a range of themes, such as Automatic Text Recognition (ATR), 3D modelling, GIS and digital mapping, and crowdsourcing. She is also passionate about environmentally sustainable digital practices.

Adi holds a BA and MA in Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures from Tel Aviv University, and earned her PhD in Heritage Studies from University College London (2013), where she researched archaeological inventories and GIS in the occupied West Bank. She later conducted postdoctoral research at UCL (2014–2015) on MicroPasts, an AHRC-funded crowdsourcing project developed in partnership with the British Museum. She also served as an Honorary Research Associate at the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

Adi joined the British Library in 2015 as a Digital Curator (Polonsky Fellow) for the Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project, where she worked with digitised collections in a variety of innovative ways. She then served as Project Manager (Digital Learning) for Discovering Sacred Texts, an initiative celebrating the Library’s religious collections. In 2018, she became part of the Digital Scholarship Department, working within the Digital Research team to support Asian and African collections.

Her recent projects include Two Centuries of Indian Print, which digitised rare early Indian books with a strong Digital Humanities component; exploring and developing solutions for the automatic transcription of Arabic handwritten texts and Chinese texts; leading the Season of Place training programme, which introduced Library staff to digital mapping techniques; working with Wikisource communities on Asian languages; advancing script conversion with Aksharamukha for Southeast Asian languages and scripts; automating cataloguing with the Convert-a-Card project; and promoting digital sustainability at the Library.