There's a particular kind of entrepreneur that almost nobody talks about — the one who never planned it, never had the big vision moment, and yet built something that quietly, consistently became indispensable. Lesley Whyte is that kind of entrepreneur.
As the co-founding and managing director of Bibliographic Data Services (BDS), Lesley has spent thirty years building the infrastructure that connects publishers, libraries, and readers through something most people have never thought about: metadata. The information that tells you what a book is, who wrote it, and what it's about before you ever hold it in your hands. The system that lets a university library start ordering a book before it's even published. The data that underpins the resource discovery tools students use every day without giving a second thought to where the information comes from.
It's unglamorous work to describe. The reality of doing it is anything but.
An accidental entrepreneur
When Lesley started work as a librarian in the University of London in the early 1980s, entrepreneurship wasn't on her radar. "There was no suggestion that I would be an entrepreneur at that age," she told Brenda. She was studious, ambitious in the quiet way of someone who always wanted to be the person organising things, but she expected to stay in academia.
What changed her was exposure. A sabbatical year in America at 25 — going alone, without support, to work in a college she'd never heard of — gave her confidence in a way that years of study hadn't. Then came the move back to Scotland after she married, a job she almost didn't apply for with a library bookseller in Dumfries, and a gradual realisation that her skills were more transferable than she'd imagined. "Knowledge and experience is all cumulative," she says. It wasn't one turning point; it was dozens of small ones.
The idea behind BDS
The problem Lesley and her eventual co-founder Eric had identified was simple: every library in the country was doing the same work. Librarians were creating catalogue records, manually researching authors, verifying publication details — and doing it all independently, duplicating effort across hundreds of institutions. Meanwhile, book buyers were waiting until physical copies arrived before placing orders, which was expensive, slow, and often resulted in publishers and booksellers sitting on books nobody wanted.
Lesley and Eric believed that metadata — accurate, consistent, pre-publication information — could change all of this. They believed it strongly enough that when they couldn't get support for the idea inside the company where they both worked, they resigned on the same morning in December 1994 and started BDS themselves. Eric, who had just taken possession of a brand-new house with immaculate carpets — he was about to get married — spent the next three weeks at home writing the production system that BDS would use for the following three decades. "I don't want you to come out until you've written a new system," Lesley told him, dropping off food parcels.
The internet, which most businesses were only beginning to understand, gave them the infrastructure to do what traditional publishing had never managed: send daily information directly to customers. When Princess Diana died in 1997, the fax machine at BDS was overflowing on the Monday morning with publisher announcements about forthcoming books. Within hours, that information was with BDS's customers — libraries and booksellers who could begin planning orders immediately. "We believe in the library world that we were the first company that did this," Lesley says. The model worked.
The co-founder question
One of the things Scale HER Up guests are consistently asked is about co-founders and support networks. Lesley's answer is unusual in its length and consistency. She and Eric have worked together for over thirty years — first as colleagues, then as co-founders, and throughout that time without a day that has been dull. "Working with the right people makes all the difference in the world," she says.
Their partnership works, she believes, because they were already well-acquainted before they took the risk together. They'd informed each other's thinking about how the business should run. They shared the same frustration with how things were being done, and the same conviction about how they could be done better. The decision to leave felt, at the time, not brave but obvious. "We were convinced that our idea had merit."
What women owe each other
The most striking part of Lesley's conversation with Brenda isn't about metadata or the internet or the growth of BDS. It's about the reception she got when she announced she was starting a business.
Her mother's immediate response was to remind Lesley that she had two children — as if this were information she might have forgotten. A colleague, hearing that Lesley had gone on a business trip to America when her youngest son was a year old, described this as "criminal." The church member who asked Lesley's mother whether her daughter's husband had left her because she'd had a career said this in the 1990s, not the 1890s.
"Women are not always supportive of other women who want to do something," Lesley says plainly. She's careful to contextualise this — her mother, she says, was reacting to the cultural world she'd grown up in, and eventually became enormously proud of what Lesley built. But the pattern has stayed with her. "If one of my brothers had announced he was starting a business, I'm sure my parents wouldn't have been disapproving."
What Lesley does with this, rather than letting it make her bitter, is pay it forward. She's employed and mentored many women over the years, and she describes her particular gift for spotting people who just need someone to believe in them. Her partner John's instruction to her — "If you're going to do something, be brilliant" — is something she now passes on to colleagues before presentations, to her daughter-in-law before challenges, and to anyone on her team who needs reminding that they're the expert in the room.
On AI, change, and the long view
Lesley describes herself as someone who likes change — unusual, she acknowledges, in a world where most people resist it. At BDS, they're already exploring how AI can assist the metadata creation process, taking on the laborious research tasks — verifying unique author names, distinguishing between people who share a name — while keeping the human intellectual assessment that makes BDS's data worth having. "It's not replacing staff knowledge and expertise, but it's helping them by cutting out some of the laborious research." The staff, she says, are cautiously optimistic. They can see what it offers.
After thirty years of watching technology reshape an industry — from catalogue cards to the internet to AI — Lesley has a long view. The tools change. The need for accurate, thoughtful, human-verified information doesn't.
About Lesley Whyte
Lesley Whyte is the co-founding and managing director of Bibliographic Data Services Limited (BDS), which she started with co-founder Eric in 1994. BDS now employs around 60 people and provides metadata for books, music, film, and computer games to libraries, retailers, and e-tailers across the UK and beyond. Lesley began her career as an academic librarian before moving into library book selling, where she identified the opportunity that became BDS.
