Nora McGregor is the British Library’s Digital Curator in the Digital Research Team. She holds a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science and has extensive experience in design and delivery of digital skill training at a national cultural heritage institution scale, management of major digital/digitization projects, and exhibition curation.
As part of the Library’s Digital Scholarship team, her work centres on digital scholarship skill development for staff. Since its inception in 2012, she has managed the design and delivery of the Library’s unique and ground-breaking Digital Scholarship Training Programme which prepares staff for the computational turn in humanities research. This bespoke training programme engages staff with a variety of interesting and inspiring training opportunities, helping ensure the Library’s capacity to support emerging areas of modern scholarship continues apace of digital transformations. Nora speaks widely on the value of investing in staff skills in this area, providing guidance to institutions around the world, and offering advice on ways to implement similar training opportunities.
In 2019-2021 she co-developed a one-year part-time postgraduate Certificate (PGCert), Computing for Cultural Heritage, with partners Birkbeck University and The National Archives, and funding from the Institute of Coding (IoC) as part of a £4.8 million University skills drive. She also collaborates on novel experiments which leverage digital methods to improve and open up access to digital collections in the cultural heritage sector. Exemplary projects include supporting state-of-the-art research into the Automatic Transcription of Historical Handwritten Arabic Texts, and crowdsourcing the transcription of Chinese & Indonesian printed card catalogues.
Nora has enjoyed being an active member of the LIBER Digital Scholarship and Digital Cultural Heritage Collections Working Group for many years, greatly benefitting from its excellent and insightful workshops, research and networks.