Dr. Mia Ridge is the British Library’s Digital Curator for Western Heritage Collections. Part of the Digital Research team, she leads work on computational research, AI / machine learning and crowdsourcing, and digital public engagement with library collections.  

 With an international career spanning the Melbourne Museum, the Science Museum Group, and the Museum of London, she has spent over two decades helping cultural institutions unlock the potential of their data. 

In March 2026, the Museum Data Service (MDS) welcomed Mia as Head of Service for this transformative initiative. MDS connects together all the object records across the UK’s museums, making them easier to search and to re-use.  

She was Co-Investigator on Living with Machines (2018–23), a £9.2m AHRC/UKRI flagship project between the British Library and the Alan Turing Institute — one of the largest digital humanities initiatives ever funded in the UK. Mia built and led its entire public engagement programme, mobilising over 5,500 volunteers to analyse historical sources at scale, and co-curated the resulting exhibition at Leeds City Museum. She also secured and led her own AHRC grant as Principal Investigator for the Collective Wisdom project, producing a definitive handbook on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage.

Mia is a member of the LIBER Digital Scholarship and Digital Cultural Heritage Collections (DSDCH) Working Group.