A presentation to visitors from the Finnish Cultural Institute at the British Library May 2014.

1. #BLdigital
Nora McGregor, Curator
Digital Research Team
@ndalyrose, #bldigital and @BL_Labs
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship

2. www.bl.uk 2
The British Library is the
national library of the UK.
We receive a copy of every
publication produced in the
UK and Ireland.

3. www.bl.uk 3
Well over 150 Million
items are currently
stored in London and in
York.
If you saw 5 items a day
it would take you 80,000
years to see the whole
collection.
Digitisation is crucial for
opening up access to
this content and
collections.

4. www.bl.uk 4
• The Library has spent the last two decades creating digital assets
through digitisation and preserving born-digital objects and will do
far into the future.
• We can now do much more than use technology to simply discover
these digital objects and must embrace the opportunities afforded
by analysing these digital collections at scale.
• If scholars view our archives as an infinite pool of multiple layers of
loosely held data from which new research questions can be wrung
then so must we.
• The Digital Research Team and BL Labs aim to provide services
beyond simple resource discovery then, that is, beyond helping to
point a single user to a single items or objects via a catalogue
The Digital Research View

5. www.bl.uk 5
The Library is becoming a
place full of data as much
as it is a place full of
physical stuff, and that there
is a growing community of
users who see it that way.
Big Data + Old History

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Digital Research Team
• The Digital Research Team is a
cross-disciplinary mix of curators,
librarians and programmers
supporting the innovative use of
our digital collections.
• We explore how digital technologies
are re/shaping research and how this
informs how the library does its
business.
• We encourage and support
colleagues & scholars of all
disciplines to work innovatively with
and across the library’s diverse
digital content

7. www.bl.uk 7
The Digital Scholarship Training
Programme is an ongoing internal
training initiative created by the Digital
Research team that launched in
November 2012.
We’ve designed a catalogue of
bespoke one-day courses for staff
covering the basics of Digital
Scholarship which we deliver on a
rolling basis.
The programme evolve as necessary
overtime.
Our Digital Scholarship Training
Programme

8. www.bl.uk 8
Some courses
• 101 What is Digital Scholarship?
• 102 Digital Collections at British Library
• 103 Digitisation at British Library
• 104 Communicating our collections online
• 105 Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions
• 106 Text Encoding Initiative
• 107 Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research
• 108 Geo-referencing and Digital Mapping
• 109 Information Integration: Mash-ups, API’s and The Semantic Web
• 110 Managing digital research information
• 114 Foundations in working with Digital Objects: From Images to A/V
• 115 Metadata for Electronic Resources: Dublin Core, METS, MODS, RDF, XML
• 118 Cleaning up Data
• 119 The Programming Curator

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So far so good!
“Great to have something often
referred to demystified”
“I’ve never done anything like this
before!”
“Well done to you and your DC
team, I have attended some of the
other courses myself and am
recommending my staff attend
them too.”
“[I valued] the time to explore our ideas
and see how to develop current projects
into a more useful resource”
“…I was very grateful to attend this and
learned a great deal…Look forward to
more. Renewed thanks for organising this.”
November 2012-March 2013 saw:
50 course days delivered
245 individual members of staff
attended one or more
653 seats filled
3 courses attended pp on average

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11. www.bl.uk 11
Microsoft Live Search
early foray into mass
digitisation for the Library.
Digitised 65,000 out of
copyright books from the 19th
Century from 2006 until
project abandoned in 2008.

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13. www.bl.uk 13

14. www.bl.uk 14

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See:
• http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-
steps.html
• https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/sets/
• http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com/
• http://blpublicdomain.wikispaces.com/
150 million image
views since launch
December 13th,
82,000 unique tags
added.
Top tagger a story of
Machine (15K) vs. Man
(30K)!
In numbers
150 million image
views since launch
December 13th,
82,000 unique tags
added.
Top tagger a story of
Machine (15K) vs. Man
(30K)!

16. www.bl.uk 16
Creative Uses
David Normal installation at Burning Man Festival:
http://www.davidnormal.com/crossroads-of-curiosity/#!crossroads-of-curiosity/ccw3

17. www.bl.uk 17
Research and Technology
Mario Klingemann: https://www.flickr.com/photos/quasimondo/12179292575/in/faves-
britishlibrary/
Collaborative PhD: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-
scholarship/2014/02/bldigital-british-library-collaborative-phd-studentship.html

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Apps

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Instruction

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Commerce

21. Thank you
#bldigital
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship