Rhian James is Project Manager of the Wales at War project at the National Library of Wales. Her presentation gives an overview of the broad range of activities and projects that run under the auspices of the Research Programme in Digital Collections at NLW.

1. Ymchwil
Research
Ymchwil
Research
www.llgc.org.uk/research
NLW RESEARCH PROGRAMME
IN DIGITAL COLLECTIONS
Prof Lorna Hughes
Dr Owain Roberts
Rhian James

2. Ymchwil
Research
Aims of the NLW Research Programme
UNDERSTANDING
USE
Understand use of
existing digital content
ENHANCING
CONTENT
Identify ways of
making existing digital
content more useful for
research, teaching or
community
engagement
DEVELOPING NEW
DIGITAL CONTENT
develop new digital
content that addresses
specific research or
education needs, in
partnership with
academics and other
key stakeholders
Bringing Digital Humanities to the Digital Library

3. Ymchwil
Research
What is Digital Humanities?
o Enables ‘DigitalTransformations’ - significant new type of ‘disruption’
– New modes of collaboration and communication
– Changes new paradigms of understanding and creates new knowledge by:
• Enabling research that would otherwise be impossible: addressing research
questions that would have been impossible to resolve without digital
• Asking new research questions i.e. questions that are driven by insights that
were only achievable through the use of new tools and methods
• Facilitating and enhancing existing research, by making research processes
easier via the use of computational tools and methods
o Adds value to digital collections
– Digital collections that are used for scholarship are more likely to be sustained
o Involves extended communities of practice
– Stakeholders include: researchers across the arts and humanities and scientific
disciplines, librarians, archivists, cultural heritage staff, funders, technical experts,
data scientists….

4. Ymchwil
Research
Digital humanities: a collaborative workspace
• Digital collections and project with digital
outputs
• Researchers demand high-quality content
• Freely accessible content enables greater use
and re-use
CONTENT
• “Scholarly primitives” to gain new knowledge:
discovering, annotating, comparing, referring,
sampling, illustrating, and representing digital
content
METHODS
• Software to gather, analyze and/or process data
• To enable existing research processes to be
conducted better and/or faster
• To enable researchers to ask, and answer,
completely new research questions
TOOLS

5. Ymchwil
Research
Research Programme in Digital Collections: Implementation
A collaborative research programme
• Around existing and emerging digital resources
• Engagement with academic communities,
nationally and internationally, and existing and
emerging communities of practice in Digital
Humanities
• A focus for digital humanities inWales
Building sustainable digital resources that have
an impact on scholarship
• Develop strategic digitization initiatives
addressing specific research needs
• Foster interoperability and re-use of collections
• Increasing value and impact of digital
collections through use for research
Fostering engagement with the public
• Education, training and culture around NLW
collections
• Knowledge exchange: digitization, digital asset
management and use
Activities
• Research on digital collections development, use and discovery
• Project development, obtaining funding, developing new
initiatives
• Collaborations with partners in Wales and beyond
• Outreach, dissemination and publications
• 4 x PhD students in collaboration with Universities in Wales
Develop an understanding of the use, value and impact of digital collections:
for research, education and public engagement

6. Ymchwil
Research
Activities: NLW Research Programme in Digital Collections
PhD students developed in partnership with HEIs
and based at NLW
Funded projects and activities with national and
international collaborators
New projects in development, and funding
applications
National and international networks
Programme of workshop, publications and
activities around digital collections and research

7. Ymchwil
Research
A brief history of the programme
January 2011
Programme Established with
appointment of Chair in Digital
Collections
October 2011
1st PhD students
recruited February 2012
JISC fundsWW1
digitisation project
May 2013
Appointment of 2 full-time
digital collections staff
Development
of more
significant
collaborative
projects

8. Ymchwil
Research
Developing new research: PhD Studentships
• Partnership with HEI partners via collaborative doctoral awards
• All have focus on digital collections and digital humanities research methods
• PhD programme enables NLW collaboration on in-depth research into key collections,
the digital dissemination of research outputs
• Opportunity for Library experts to collaborate and be involved in student research
• Recent AHRC block grants with CAWCS, and Wales/SW England consortium
2011-2014
Lloyd Roderick
Aberystwyth University, KESS studentship
'Kyffin Williams Online: presenting and interpreting traditional art in
new contexts'
Supervisors: Robert Meryck and Colin Cruise, Aberystwyth University;
Lorna Hughes and Avril Jones, NLW
Callista Williams
Open University, AHRC studentship
‘John Ballinger and the establishment of National Libraries’
Supervisors: Paul Lawrence, Open Univeristy University; Lorna
Hughes, NLW
2012-2015
Andrew Cusworth
Open University, AHRC studentship
‘Welsh Traditional Music: performance and reception as cultural
history’
Supervisors: Trevor Herbert, Open University; Lorna Hughes, NLW
Rhian James
University of Wales studentship
‘Digital humanities representations of Welsh wills online’
Supervisors: Lorna Hughes, NLW; David Parsons, University of Wales

9. Ymchwil
Research
AHRC funded research projects at the University of Wales
with digital humanities components at NLW
PI: David Parsons
• King’s College, London Department of
Digital Humanities will develop KILN XML
platform for digital scholarly edition of
digital manuscripts
• NLW will host, implement and sustain the
edition
• NLW will digitise medieval Saints
manuscripts from our collection
• Output: a transferrable tool for creating
online editions of NLW manuscripts as
part of NLW Digital Library
The Cult of Saints inWales: MedievalWelsh-language sources and
their transmission

10. Ymchwil
Research
Photospectral imaging of the Hengwrt Chaucer at NLW
by team fromYale Computer Science Department

11. Ymchwil
Research

12. Ymchwil
Research

13. Ymchwil
Research
http://ydc2.yale.edu/research-support/digitally-
enabled-scholarship-medieval-manuscripts
Digitally enabled scholarship of medieval manuscripts:
Using Photospectral images in the “CanvasViewer”
http://manifests.ydc2.yale.edu/viewer.html

14. Ymchwil
Research
Rhyfel Byd a’r profiad Cymreig
Welsh experience ofWorldWar One
cymruww1.llgc.org.uk (Project Blog)
@CymruWW1
www.cymru1914.org

15. Ymchwil
Research
www.walesatwar.org
Funded by

16. Ymchwil
Research
Cymru 1900 / Wales 1900
Developing a a gazetteer ofWelsh place names from OS 6 inch maps
using a platform developed by Galaxy Zoo – launched October 2013
Crowdsourcing
Sourcing tasks traditionally
performed by specific individuals
to a group of people or
community (crowd) through an
open call: e.g., to help capture,
systematize or analyse large
amounts of data (“citizen
science”)
cymru1900wales.org
@cymru1900wales

17. Ymchwil
Research
In development: New technologies and
collaborations to enhance existing digital content
• WelshWills Online - Collaborative bid to
AHRC to develop transcriptions and user
search interface forWelsh wills at NLW
• Ran workshop to gather input from
stakeholders Nov. 2011
• Investigating crowdsourcing for transcription
and semantic tagging of content for
representation and analysis
• Combination of AHRC research grant and
HLF funding to support community
transcription project

18. Ymchwil
Research
‘The snows of yesteryear: narrating extreme weather’
Building new collaborations and partnerships around digital research:

19. Ymchwil
Research
Europeana Cloud
Working with 26 European Partners, led by the European Library
@europeana_cloud
#eu_cloud

20. Ymchwil
Research
NeDiMAH: Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities
What?
To examine the practice of, and evidence
for, advanced ICT methods in the arts
and humanities
How?
Will develop activities and publications
around use of digital collections, ICT
tools and methods; foster collaboration
and engage researchers
Support from 13 Member Organizations:
• Bulgarian Academy of Science, Bulgaria
• The Danish Council for Independent Research –
Humanities (FKK), Denmark
• The Academy of Finland – Research Council for
Culture and Society
• The National Foundation of Science, Higher
Education and Technological Development of the
Republic of Croatia (NZZ), Croatia
• TGE ADONIS – National Centre for Scientific Research
(CNRS), France
• Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Germany
• Irish Research Council for the Humanities (IRCHSS),
Ireland
• Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research
(NWO), Netherlands
• Research Council of Norway (NCR), Norway
• Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT),
Portugal
• Swedish Research Council (VR), Sweden
• Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), Switzerland
• UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC),
United Kingdom
Chairs
Lorna Hughes, UK (Chair)
Fotis Jannidis, Germany
Susan Schreibman, Ireland
@NeDiMAH

21. Ymchwil
Research
Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH)
@DARIAHeu

22. Ymchwil
Research
Digital Scholarship at NLW
• The programme has collaborated on successful
applications of over £7,000,000 in grant funding, of
which over £900,000 has been generated for the
Library and over £2,000,000 (FEC) for University of
Wales
• Need to move beyond project-itis, and embed outputs
into the NLW Digital Library
• We need to better understand use of digital content
by Library users to inform development of digital
content
• Demonstrate how digital scholarship adds value to
digital content

23. Ymchwil
Research
Ymchwil
Research
www.llgc.org.uk/research
NLW RESEARCH PROGRAMME
IN DIGITAL COLLECTIONS
Prof Lorna Hughes
Dr Owain Roberts
Rhian James