Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

In any time of accelerated change it is tempting to look forward and imagine what a future world will look like. A constant theme of the past couple of months is that ‘nothing will be the same again’, the view that there have been a number of enforced shifts in our behaviour that will result in permanent changes to our lives. It will be intriguing to see if this is true – or if the elastic pull of our old lives will be so strong that we revert to previous behaviour as social distancing becomes forgotten, restaurants and bars open, and travel restrictions are lifted. In HE it is tempting to think that greater home-working, greater distance learning, and greater demands for openness of resources could be permanent changes.

The British Library is the national copyright library of the UK and the largest collection of books, periodicals, journals and sound recordings in the world.

It was established as part of the British Museum in 1753 and moved to its current home on Euston Road in 1997. The imposing brick building just beside St Pancras station houses 170m items and counting; as the library receives copies of all books, newspapers, magazines and manuscripts published in the UK the collection is expanding at a rate of around 3m items per year.

Sourcera is an Add-on for Google Slides that lets you search for historical images and insert them directly into your slides. Sourcera pulls images from eleven sources including Flickr's Commons, the British Library, and the Digital Public Library of America.