There are huge challenges in rethinking the roles of an institution such as the British Library, but also many opportunities. The digital age is full of creative potential – people can find what they want quickly, which frees up energies to go even deeper with their research. The library is one of those very old words that is turning out to have valuable new meanings. Creative curatorial library skills, such as indexing, cataloguing, giving access and helping people find the material they need at the right time, turn out to be exactly the disciplines that are driving the global information economy.

These skills underpin the business model of Amazon or Apple or Google. This is why great memory institutions are going into partnership with digital organisations. Google is the British Library's partner in the digitisation of a quarter of a million of our 18th- and 19th-century books.

We are increasing access, but we're also enabling new forms of research. People can now explore a whole corpus of work as a data set as well as atomise bits of literature.

The British Library holds the national newspapers collection. We have a partnership with Brightsolid, the digital company behind Find My Past. It has expertise in high-volume digitisation of material that interests family historians and has become the British Library's partner in digitising out-of-copyright or pre-1900 newspaper holdings of the British Library and hence of the nation. The material becomes a resource for study in the reading rooms here, but is also available on the web as a paid-for service delivered by Brightsolid for a 10-year period.

Once historic newspapers become digital, you can turn them into text and the text can be searched. You or I can now go into that body of material and hunt out our village, our family or whatever our obsession might be. And who knows what other connections grow from this?

It is not an accident that we're working with a partner that has also worked with UKTV because, increasingly, the edges between media or sector are reshaping and dissolving. Audiences may be inspired by a television programme to go on a journey of discovery and rapidly find they are moving into the domain of what was historically called a library.

The British Library sits at the intersection of many different industries. New ways of thinking are sparked by different industries coming together, by people from a broadcast background seeing the opportunity in digitised historic artefacts or people from a business background finding deep sources of information.

Print is not dead. In sheer volume, both newspapers and print books seem to be riding high, but audience habits are changing. My daughter flits effortlessly between buying books on her Kindle and working her way through a paperback and likes both in different moods. In our lifetime, we will undoubtedly enjoy a sea of print materials, but it'll also be our privilege to live through some form of revolution of blended media, with people switching back and forth between print and digital.

There's an analogy with television here. Linear scheduling hasn't disappeared under pressure of on-demand services. It has just had to raise its game. We may even see the same for print and paper. Rather than disappearing, the specialness and quality and power of print will prove itself in a new way. But where print existed purely to deliver bald prose or information, digital does a better job. We will see it as the best medium for learned journals or scientific research, where the need to disseminate and discuss and explore research quickly is important.

If you look at the users of the library, you can palpably feel the creativity rising up out of the reading rooms and the cafes. The library is a public space where people come in order to have new ideas, to test a theory, to research a new story or novel and so we're here not just to be creative but to serve creativity. In the digital age, the characteristic scene is someone with their laptop using the library's digital resources and wanting the environment of concentrated creativity that a great national library can provide.

Roly Keating is CEO of the British Library. This is an extract taken from UKTV's Leading Lights, Imagination and Creativity in Television and Beyond. The free ebook will be available from 2 April from UKTV and iTunes