Exploring National Library of Scotland datasets with Jupyter Notebooks

Abstract

The National Library of Scotland’s Digital Scholarship Service has been releasing collections as data on its data-delivery platform, the Data Foundry, since September 2019. Following the COVID-19 lockdown, this service experienced significantly higher traffic, as library users increasingly made use of online resources. To ensure that as many users as possible were able to explore the datasets on the Data Foundry, the Library invested in a Digital Research Intern post, with a remit to provide introductory analysis of the Data Foundry collections using Jupyter Notebooks. This article provides a case study of this project, explaining the Library’s work to date around its new Digital Scholarship Service and releasing datasets on the Data Foundry; the reasoning behind the decision to begin to provide Jupyter Notebooks; the Notebooks themselves and what types of analysis they contain, as well as the challenges faced in creating them; and the publication and impact of the Notebooks.