Abstract
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom (the UK), which is known globally as one of the largest collections of books, periodicals, as well as multimedia and digital items. To better preserve its vast collections, the British Library has to react to the negative consequences of climate change, such as, for instance, the rise in mean temperature and humidity, and the risk of flooding. Whilst there are scores of studies that elucidate the British Library’s climate change-related activities from the vantage point of library and information science, there is no published research that looks into the British Library’s discourse on climate change through a linguistic prism. Seeking to address the current research gap, this contribution presents a quantitative study that explores the British Library’s discourse on climate change. Specifically, the study aims at collecting a corpus of texts on climate change produced by the British Library and analysing it quantitatively in order to identify and quantify the frequently occurring words and word clusters associated with the issue of climate change. The results of the corpus analysis indicate that the British Library’s discourse on climate change is characterised by the frequent lexical items that pertain to (i) sustainability and (ii) team efforts to mitigate the negative consequences of climate change.