Digital Library

Through our vision we have affirmed our ambition to be digital leaders and take a digital-first approach to all we do. This approach is surfaced through a wide range of our work, from delivering cutting edge learning resources and digital collections, to providing digital opportunities to engage with our Special Collections and Archives.

OneSearch Research Assistant

We launched a new generative AI Research Assistant on our OneSearch discovery service ready for the 2025-26 academic year.

The Research Assistant was developed by our vendors Clarivate and enables natural language searching of the extensive Primo Discovery Index of scholarly sources, including books, journal articles and conference proceedings.

The Research Assistant underwent a period of testing by our Faculty Librarian team and is now available to all students and staff at Lancaster University. To try it out, simply visit OneSearch and select the Research Assistant option.

For guidance on using AI appropriately within your learning and research, see the University's Principles for the Educational Application of Generative AI.

An academic delivering teaching stood in front of a large digital screen

Online Guides and Tutorials

The library invested in industry leading tutorial creation software and have used it to create guidance for students, but also staff and school/college students.

The Library Digital Skills developer worked with colleagues from CEDA to design and produce guidance for University Staff as part of the Curriculum Design Project. The Curriculum Design Toolkit consists of five very detailed sections designed to help staff make decisions about module design, to provide the best possible experience and outcomes for their students.

To compliment our visit offer to schools and colleges we also produced online tutorials for pre-university students on topics such as “Searching for Academic Resources”, “Introduction to Referencing”, and “Effective Time Management”. These appear on the Schools and Colleges Guide which has been accessed over One Thousand times in 2025.

LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning is a digital learning platform that covers everything from learning Japanese to coding with R, and everything in between. It compliments student learning, allowing them to also gain skills and certificates that they wouldn’t necessarily get in their chosen subject area e.g. a history student getting a Python qualification.

The platform has also given opportunities for professional development amongst university staff, with some departments incorporating it into training programmes with the help of the Library Digital Skills Developer.

From September 2023 to October 2025, over ten thousand users at Lancaster have viewed 256,275 videos and courses.

Thesis Digitisation Project

We are currently in the process of an exciting initiative in partnership with ProQuest to retrospectively digitise our historic print thesis collection. The digitised theses will be available via the ProQuest dissertations and theses service, PQDT Global which will promote them to the ProQuest global community of 3,600+ institutions and 4 million researchers in 100+ countries. PQDT also embeds content in key subject databases.

In support of the University’s open access policy to make its research freely available to all, the theses will also be added to the public facing Lancaster institutional repository, EPrints.

Electronic thesis deposit has been a mandatory requirement for students registered from October 2011 onwards, but there is a large collection of theses available in print format only, dating back to 1967 which are difficult for researchers to discover and access.

The aim of this special project is to promote the importance of graduate research and increase visibility and accessibility of Lancaster research theses with the overall goal to share knowledge and foster collaboration with a global audience. Theses are the result of originality, hard work and critical thinking and deserve to be disseminated widely to the research community.

“For me, if it’s [the thesis] not online in major databases it does not seem to exist. It seemed a waste to have done the work and no-one else benefit from it” Lancaster Alumnus

Between 2022 and 2025, the Library has sent 5,000 research theses to be professionally scanned by a company, Microform. The ProQuest content team is processing the digitised files and creating detailed metadata records including subject headings and keywords to enhance discoverability. The digital files are being added to the PQDT Global database incrementally. The thesis files and records are also made available to the Library to disseminate as open access documents which constitutes the next stage of the project.

Early investigation of the usage of the files on the PQ database is very encouraging – an analysis of the usage of theses awarded between 1967 and 2000 indicates that introducing older content to the current field of academic debate is a valuable contribution to research – older dissertations provide additional context for a theory that has been developed over time, and show trends that have taken place.

Religious icon by the artist Mary Jane Miller

Lancaster Digital Collections

Following the successful launch of the Davy Notebooks on Lancaster Digital Collections in 2024, we launched our next collection in March 2025.

Women's Iconography in the 21st Century raises awareness of women’s understudied accomplishments in Orthodox iconography, a practice of Christian sacred art that was historically male dominated. The collection preserves the work of women from across the world, including Armenia, Brazil, Canada, Latvia, Lebanon, Greece, Finland, Mexico, Russia, the USA and the Ukraine, as well as the UK.

The archive is part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Impact Acceleration Account Project entitled Contemporary Women Icons, led by Associate Researcher Dr Azelina Flint and Senior Lecturer Dr Brian Baker at the University’s Department of English Literature and Creative Writing.

Associate Director: Teaching and Engagement at Lancaster University Library Phil Cheeseman said: “This significant new digital collection is the culmination of a great partnership with the Library. It exemplifies our commitment to promoting University research, increasing the visibility of underrepresented communities and providing open access to collections.”

The collection was launched with a hybrid event held in the Library's Events Space. An in-person audience was joined by online speakers and attendees from around the world. We also hosted an in-person iconography workshop where participants learned about iconography practices from Dr Baker, and had the opportunity to create their own artwork.

Digital Engagement

Over the course of 2025 we've hosted exhibitions and participated in engagement activities around our digital collections and resources.

Digital screen and signage promoting the Library's Davy Notebooks collection on LDC — THE Digital Universities Conference 2025

We exhibited the Davy Notebooks and Lancaster Digital Collections at the Times Higher Education Digital Universities fringe event, held on campus here at Lancaster University. Library staff also hosted a roundtable discussion at the conference on "Building a digitally-infused and trusted research ecosystem"

Professor Sharon Ruston speaking to the DDCH in Leeds in May 2025 — Talk for the Digital Creativity and Cultures Hub at the University of Leeds

Library staff were invited to speak with Professor Sharon Ruston to the University of Leeds' Digital Creativity and Cultures Hub in May 2025. Our presentation covered the Davy Notebooks Project, and the Library's role in facilitating and maintaining the project's digital archive.

Who Owns Our Knowledge Exhibition

The Library's Open Research team developed an exhibition for Open Access Week 2025 on the theme of "Who Owns Our Knowledge". The exhibition explores the conflicts in academic publishing, law, AI and the idea of ownership, as well as showcasing some of the open journals we have available.

Talking Around the Library Tree podcast

The Talking Around the Library Tree Podcast which is recorded in the Library's very own podcast studio has been a success. The episodes have now been listened to over 2000 times with listeners tuning in from the UK, North America, Europe, South America, Australasia, Africa and Asia -a truly global audience.

'Talking Around the Library Tree' is currently available via Spotify and the Lancaster University Library YouTube channel.

Student studying at a desk in the Library

Digital Guides for the Refugee and Asylum Seeker community

Library staff do a lot of work with the refugee and asylum seeker community but this year we decided to digitally enhance our offering by providing translated guides in Ukrainian, Dari and Arabic.

Staff used translation software to update text, image alt text and links, we then asked native speakers to review the guides and give us feedback, which was all very positive.

Virtual Reading Room

Our Special Collections and Archives offer a Virtual Reading Room service, where you can book a digital appointment to view our collections remotely.

Digital appointments are one hour in length and are facilitated by a member of staff, using an onsite visualiser and viewed via the Microsoft Teams application. During the appointment, the staff member will go through the materials at your direction while you view the item on screen.

Previous uses of the Virtual Reading Room service include:

consulting Dallas newspapers from the day JFK was assassinated
research to assist with a planning dispute in Cumbria
historical research of the Chaplaincy Centre building at Lancaster University

To book a Virtual Reading Room consultation, see the Accessing Our Collections section of our Special Collections and Archives site.