The current opportunity is available for current Manchester Met students, to apply you must be based in the UK for the duration of the role.
About the Project
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world's largest open-access digital library for biodiversity literature, containing millions of pages of historical scientific texts. This internship focuses on making BHL's text collections more discoverable by extracting scientific names, locations, and other entities using Natural Language Processing (NLP). You will build a simple, interactive web dashboard that applies a single Named Entity Recognition (NER) tool to BHL texts and visualises the extracted entities.
Role Overview
We're seeking a motivated BSc student (Year 2/3) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field to build a dashboard that demonstrates how NER can help explore BHL content. You will select one NER tool, integrate it with BHL text data, and create a user-friendly interface that highlights extracted entities and provides basic visualisations. This project gives you hands-on experience with NLP while creating a useful prototype for the biodiversity informatics community. BHL is used by researchers worldwide to study biodiversity history. Your work will help unlock this treasure trove of scientific knowledge.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this internship, you will:
- Gain practical experience with Natural Language Processing and NER tools
- Learn to fetch and process data from real-world APIs (BHL)
- Build a complete web dashboard from scratch
- Understand challenges in processing historical scientific texts
- Create a portfolio-worthy project with real research applications
Technical Skills You'll Develop
- Python programming and data processing
- Working with one NER library (spaCy recommended)
- API integration (BHL API)
- Web dashboard development (Streamlit for rapid prototyping)
- Basic data visualisation (charts for entity counts)
- Version control with Git
- Technical documentation
Details
Dates: 25 May 2026 - 17 July 2026
Hours per week: 10
Please Note - As part of the 2026 Student Internship offering, priority will be given to Level 5 & 6 students who have specified in the Careers Registration survey (this is completed during enrolment and cannot be changed at this time) that they have had no work experience in the last 12 months and would like some on campus work or a short work placement. However, applications are welcomed from all students meeting the criteria below.
Students are only eligible to undertake one internship under the 2026 Student Internship offering.