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BL Labs Presentation to Michigan State Students
- 1. 1@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Engaging and Supporting Researchers who want to use the British Library’s Digital Collections and Data Examples and Lessons from the British Library Labs Project Mahendra Mahey 1400 – 1440, Tuesday, 14th June 2016, Meeting Room H, British Library, London. Presentation to students of Michigan State University, Part of ‘Technology, Humanities, and the Arts in London’ http://goo.gl/KRkTLc
- 2. 2@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Overview Interesting examples Experiences Challenges Lessons LearnedWorking and Communicating Researchers https://goo.gl/WutNyi Artists http://goo.gl/nNKhQ2 Librarians Curators https://goo.gl/9NWZUW Software Developers https://goo.gl/7QQ5Tf Archivists https://goo.gl/x7b4tg Educators https://goo.gl/qh01Mi
- 3. 3@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc The British Library Inside the British Library Space for 1200 readers, around 400,000 visitors per year Uses low oxygen and robots Reading room and delivery to London Document Supply and Storage at Boston Spa Stockton-on-Tees Author right to payment each time their books are borrowed from public libraries. St Pancras, London, UK Many books are stored 4 stories below the building Legal Deposit Library – Reference only
- 4. 4@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc British Library - Not just books! > 180*million items > 0.8* m serial titles > 8* m stamps > 14* m books > 3* m sound recordings > 4* m maps > 1.6* m musical scores > 0.3* m manuscripts > 60* m patents King’s Library *Estimates
- 5. 5@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc http://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labs Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
- 6. 6@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc #bldigital 1-2 %* digitised * estimate Digitisation Partnerships Commercial & Other Organisations Amount increasing rapidly Bias in digitisation http://goo.gl/bR9UJL Sample Generator
- 7. 7@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc digital Data all around us! / Knowledge Quarter London 55 knowledge organisations within 1 mile radius of Kings Cross http://www.knowledgequarter.london https://goo.gl/pGO7QY digital Data all around us!
- 8. 8@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc only in Reading Rooms due to © only on site due to © or ethical etc not online / available – various storage devices, personal data online and open British Library online behind paywall Challenges of Digital access at the Library
- 9. 9@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Finding Open Digital Collections • No easy search, so… Where is it, is it accessible? • Licensing? Internal Access and Reuse and Licensing Group (Risk assessment group – Strategic, Commercial, Copyright, Curatorial, Technical Stakeholders all have a say) • Curated? Learn the story behind a collection! Is there a human who knows the ‘story’ about the collection, who wants it used, are there any surprises lurking? • Metadata available? What state is it and does it need cleaning? https://goo.gl/Qjeqo1 https://goo.gl/Kfc4qc
- 10. 10@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Playbills, Books, Newspapers (includes OCR) Digital collections and Datasets British National Bibliography http://bnb.data.bl.uk http://sounds.bl.uk http://dml.city.ac.uk/ Music (Recordings & Sheet) & Sounds http://goo.gl/frSMJt Broadcast News (TV and Radio) http://goo.gl/cwThHw http://goo.gl/pBkisZhttp://goo.gl/E8aRyQ Usage dataImages, Manuscripts & Maps http://www.qdl.qa/ Qatar Digital Library http://idp.bl.uk/ International Dunhuang Project Maps http://www.bl.uk/maps/ Hebrew Manuscripts http://goo.gl/4sbCp9 Flickr & Wikimedia Commons https://goo.gl/LZRmaZ
- 11. 11@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc http://www.bl.uk/subjects/digital-scholarship http://labs.bl.uk/Digital+Collections Over 100 collections described 62 Open through Access and Reuse Soon…http://data.bl.uk No easy way to search though (yet) Over 120 guides available to date Finding Digital Collections
- 12. 12@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc The Digital Scholar Digital NetworkedOpen From Digital Scholar : How technology is transforming scholarly practice, Martin Weller, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011, page 4 Specialist who employs digital, networked and open approaches to demonstrate their specialism.
- 13. 13@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Distant Reading https://goo.gl/ln04pM Adam Crymble
- 14. 14@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Digital research methods Visualisations Using Application Programming Interfaces for datasets e.g. Metadata, Images Annotation Location based searching & Geo-tagging Crowdsourcing Human Computation
- 15. 15@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Wider Audience Researchers https://goo.gl/WutNyi Artists http://goo.gl/nNKhQ2 Librarians Curators https://goo.gl/9NWZUW Software Developers https://goo.gl/7QQ5Tf Archivists https://goo.gl/x7b4tg Educators https://goo.gl/qh01Mi
- 16. 16@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Your Audience and You Audience research & Digital interests Digital collections you have This is where Labs works It starts with a conversation! Only a small amount of content is digitised! Might not be the treasure expected at the end of a digital journey!
- 18. 18@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Competition Awards Projects Tell us your ideas of what to do with our digital content Show us what you have already done with our digital content Talk to us about working on collaborative projects
- 19. 19@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc •Submit ideas by April. •Two finalists announced late May. •Residency June – October. •Up to £3600 support, technical, curatorial etc. •Showcase @ Symposium Nov. •Winner £3000 & Runner up £1000! Competition
- 20. 20@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc •Projects already using BL digital content in interesting and innovative ways. •Submit projects (previous and new) by 5 September 2016. •Artistic, Commercial, Research and Learning / Teaching categories. •Winners announced @Symposium 7 Nov 16. •£500 Winner & £100 Runner Up. Awards
- 21. 21@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Projects •Ideas change once you try to access, examine and use the data! •Talk to us about working on potential ideas / projects.
- 24. 24@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Finding things in messy data Mrs Folly • Clean up manually • Get ‘ground truth’ • Write code to find things reliably in it automatically • Try code on messy content • Tweak if necessary
- 25. 25@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Katrina Navickas (2015) Political Meetings Mapper http://politicalmeetingsmapper.co.uk https://goo.gl/Qq78Oa Labs Symposium 2015 https://goo.gl/BSA3be Interview 2015 The Chartist Newspaper http://goo.gl/vOLSnH Chartist Monster Meeting
- 26. 26@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Chartists Un-Covered History in London The Red Lion Pub, Soho Chartists Re-enactment Chartist’s Meeting Locations in London Chartist’s Meetings Heatmap in London Chartist’s London Walking Tour 21 Sep 15
- 27. 27@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Chartists Re-enactment London https://goo.gl/BSA3be
- 28. 28@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Victorian Meme Machine (2014) https://goo.gl/HMqDt3 Bob Nicholson http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/
- 29. 29@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc http://victorianhumour.tubmblr.com Victorian Humour Public Engagement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GRgj7Q5OM0 Rob Walker, Victorian Mother-in-law Jokes Bob Nicholson interviewed on BBC Radio 4 Making History Programme: http://goo.gl/fmV9ep And telling jokes to the public: http://goo.gl/xIDRhz
- 30. 30@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Rob Walker Victorian Mother-in-law Jokes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GRgj7Q5OM0
- 32. 32@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Commercial (2015) Etsy project by Dina Malkova https://www.etsy.com/shop/DinaMalkova https://goo.gl/OfJujM Labs Symposium 2015 http://goo.gl/pbxZUv
- 33. 33@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Commercial (2015) Runner Up Sarah Wingate-Gray and Kate Lomax http://goo.gl/s1dVSC
- 34. 34@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/spatialhum.wordpress/ Labs Symposium 2015: https://goo.gl/ZCU56a Research (2015) Spatial Humanities: Lancaster University Combining Text and Geographic Informationhttp://goo.gl/yZ3xCJ Investigating geographical representation of disease in digitised 19th Century newspapers
- 35. 35@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc What can 65,000 books tell us? Image: Artwork by Alicia Martin Just one digital collection
- 36. 36@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Worked better for female faces than men’s Press http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com Posts image every 30 minutes http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/ 1,020,418 images need tagging! Creative uses of images Face recognition Mechanical Curator http://goo.gl/qPPgxX Flickr Snipping out images from 65,000 Digitised Books* >400,000,000 views >500,000 tags https://goo.gl/FgZ4HM Work @ BL by Ben O’Steen, Labs and Digital Research Team *Matt Prior - http://goo.gl/j29Tnx
- 37. 37@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Opportunities – increasing traffic to Library services You can purchase a ‘High Res’ Copy View in the Library Item Viewer Download .pdf All illustrations in book Other illustrations in books Published in same year View the item in the Library Catalogue Tags auto generated User generated Tag Grouping for image Work @ BL by Ben O’Steen, Labs and Digital Research Team
- 38. 38@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Visibility - Technology Strategy Board Competition Winner 2014 Understanding value / impact of making the BL’s data open / in the public domain Analytics dashboard for the Library showing what is happening to our Flickr Images Presentation: https://goo.gl/phtgqv Challenge details: http://goo.gl/Hb6l4A
- 39. 39@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Tagging a million images Iterative Crowdsourcing http://goo.gl/j6fxac Cardiff University’s Lost Visions Project http://www.metadatagames.org/ Metadata Games James Heald Mario Klingemann Chico 45 Use computational methods Human Tagger Top British Library Flickr Commons Taggers http://goo.gl/8SkfM1 Machine Learning Search Engine & Google Image search
- 40. 40@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Curious Images Event 2014 https://goo.gl/ubL0AO Labs Symposium 2015 https://goo.gl/gRZ5Ia 44 Men who Look 44 (Notice the direction faces) Tragic Looking Women Collage Art Artistic (2015) Mario Klingeman - Quasimondo Blog post: http://goo.gl/dM8ieA A Hat on the Ground Spells trouble
- 41. 41@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Special Jury’s Prize (2015) James Heald – Wikimedia and Map work https://goo.gl/WYZCB2 http://goo.gl/HNQq5e https://goo.gl/VPgffL https://commons.wikimedia.org/ https://goo.gl/djtm1b Labs Symposium (2015)Geotagging maps
- 42. 42@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Adam Crymble (2015) Crowdsource Arcade What if crowd sourcing looked like this? http://goo.gl/LBfJ4W http://goo.gl/OH9pOZ https://goo.gl/7z0j8p 30 mins talk Labs Symposium (2015) https://goo.gl/SSRsdd 5 min interview (2015) http://goo.gl/0APpE8 Game Jam
- 43. 43@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Art Treachery and Tag Attack https://goo.gl/vVMPuL Art Treachery Januz Druz Tag Attack Antonio Padial https://goo.gl/engC6A
- 44. 44@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc David Normal https://youtu.be/Q3SBxO34Zlc ‘It was beyond my wildest dreams’
- 45. 45@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Finding one image on Flickr Finding many more!Make collages Make 4 paintings Exhibit light boxes at Burning Man 2014 In Nevada USA Work with Labs & British Library to install Light boxes in London In 2015 Where did we put it?
- 46. 46@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Let’s have a party! Exhibited from June to Nov 2015 20th June 2015 mix by DJ Yoda using British Library Sounds: https://goo.gl/z3k4JT David Normal’s Art work: http://www.crossroadsofcuriosity.com & http://www.davidnormal.com Images from Burning Man and Flickr brought into the Poet’s Circle Physical DigitalDigital Physical
- 47. 47@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc By Kestrel Moon https://goo.gl/QilqqT Animating static images
- 49. 49@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Starting a Conversation Language Problems •Finding the intersection… •Misunderstood words –Access –Collections –Content –Crowdsourcing •Different cultures interests Digital Collections This is where Labs works
- 50. 50@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Messy data [stuff goes in here] •Metadata isn’t as clean as many •Square brackets to indicate inferred information •Code to plot when a record had square brackets by Ben O’Steen
- 52. 52@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Messy data Optical Character Recognition Real problems to solve, needs innovation!
- 53. 53@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Simple Data structures (if only) •Everything has a link •links to page which tells you about the thing •Link to other things •Links readable by machine not just a human •Not there yet! •Not easily searchable
- 54. 54@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Get the data to them however •Internet / APIs (not there yet completely) •Post hard drives •Don’t worry about cleaning it up, it will never be perfect! •Just get them in…or go to them!
- 55. 55@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Training / Teaming up with Expert? •Many have the domain knowledge but lack the technical skills to use Digital methods •Should our support be more focused on training? •There are plenty of computational experts looking for problems to solve •Should they be teamed up with those that have problems that need solving?
- 56. 56@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Why is the Library doing this?
- 57. 57@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Supporting Digital Experiments better BL Labs Git Hub Site Re-OCRing Newspapers Flickr API BL Explore – Search Catalogue Python Code Library is a place of Digital too Not just books! Library is a place of Digital too Not just books!
- 58. 58@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc only in Reading Rooms due to © only on site due to © or ethical not online / available – various storage devices, personal data online and open British Library online behind paywall Digital access at the Library Labs Residency Model Let them in! https://goo.gl/tvNVRB http://goo.gl/ii0XHG
- 59. 59@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Lessons…1 •Huge appetite to use digital content & data (e.g. Flickr Commons stats) •Identifying / bridging gaps for who wants to use data, digital collections. •Can help navigate through the Library to get the data they want.
- 60. 60@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Lessons…2 •Start conversations, first small / simple, but think big! •Let those with interest, skills and willing to accept a little pain (sometimes) i.e. mindset in! •Embrace serendipity, work fast, give it energy. •Learn the lessons, tell positive stories, move forward! •Experiment and fail! •Reject perfectionism, enemy of progress!
- 61. 61@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Fear… •Focus too much on perfection, never get anything done! •Letting go of the emotional and psychological connection to “my” collection •If collections are not used, what is the point? •Incredible opportunities just by opening the door! •Fear of failure seen as a negative thing.
- 62. 62@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia Fail faster Small experiments! https://goo.gl/Vlv3Yu Let yourself reboot!
- 63. 63@BL_Labs #bldigital http://goo.gl/KRkTLc Engaging and Supporting Researchers who want to use the British Library’s Digital Collections and Data Examples and Lessons from the British Library Labs Project Mahendra Mahey 1400 – 1440, Tuesday, 14th June 2016, Meeting Room H, British Library, London. Presentation to students of Michigan State University, Part of ‘Technology, Humanities, and the Arts in London’ http://goo.gl/KRkTLc
Editor's Notes
- 25 Seconds (68 Words) My name is Mahendra Mahey and I work on a project called British Library Labs. We are based at the British Library in London, in the Digital Scholarship department and we work closely with the Digital Research team there. It’s been running for three years now and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
- https://goo.gl/WutNyi http://goo.gl/nNKhQ2 https://goo.gl/9NWZUW https://goo.gl/7QQ5Tf https://goo.gl/x7b4tg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Interactive_whiteboard_at_CeBIT_2007.jpg
- 140 seconds The British Library is the national library of the UK and one of the largest research libraries in the world . The Library moved to a new purpose built building in 1997 <click> the largest of it’s kind that was built in the UK in the 20th century. Many frequently used items are stored 5 stories below the main building at St Pancras in London and many might not know that part of the building is meant to look like a ship on a journey to discovery!<click>. <click to switch off> The building can sit 1,200 researchers at any one time across 5 reading rooms. <click>Medium and long term requested items are held at Boston Spa in Yorkshire in a low oxygen warehouse, using robot to retrieve items. In total, the library has 625 km of shelving, growing by 12 km every year. Whilst we acquire items through purchase or gifts, much of the collection has been built up through legal deposit. That is, by law, a copy of every UK and Ireland print publication must be given to the British Library by its publishers. Around 3 million items are added per year. In 2013, legal deposit was extended to cover non-print material which means by law we take in digitally published items as well, which means regular mass crawls of the entire UK web domain as well as ebooks, ejournals etc.
- 85 seconds The picture you can see is inside the main building in London, it’s the King’s Library – King George the Third’s personal library! Sometimes known as the ‘stack’, I walk past this everyday and I sometimes forget that the collections the British Library have are truly staggering! We currently estimate them to exceed <click>150 million items, representing every age of written civilisation and every known language. Our archives now contain the earliest surviving printed book in the world, the Diamond Sutra, written in Chinese and dating from 868 AD…. So some big numbers… Over …<click>14 million books <click>60 million patents <click>8 million stamps <click>4 million maps <click>3 million sound recordings <click>1.6 million music scores <click>over .3 million manuscripts <click>0.8 million serials titles (which are of course made up of many many volumes/editions), this is where a lot of our content is, just in case you thought the numbers didn’t add up!
- 33 Seconds (100 Words) In a nutshell the project encourages researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators and anyone else, <Click> to ‘experiment’ with our digital collections and data. We are particularly interested in those who have questions which focus on the potential to find and create NEW things through access to the digital content. For example, being able to ask a question across thousands of digitised books or newspapers using computational techniques would not feasible using manual methods. Let’s look at a clear example. <Click>
- 17 Seconds (53 Words) <Click>The British Library is one of the largest Library’s in the world <Click> with an estimated 180 million physical items, with only a small proportion being digitised. <Click>We estimate this is around 1-2%, but no one really knows exactly how much. However, increasingly more items are being stored as ‘born’ digital, such as the UK Web Archive<Click>
- 6 Seconds (20 Words) So <Click> ‘how’ do we try and engage those who might be interested in the BL’s digital collections and data? <Click>
- <click>The British Library faces many challenges of access to our Digital collections! <click> Sometimes digital content is only available onsite due to license restrictions, <click>or even only on a specific computer in a reading room! Technically there are very few reasons why digital content can’t be online <click> though it might be too big or hasn’t been transferred from other digital storage media. <click>Sometimes access is through a paywall. Finally, <click>some content is in the happy sunny place, online, open and freely available. The real reasons why there are challenges to accessing digital content are of course human. They require different approaches from the Library and may often involve an honest, open dialogue and negotiation with the publishers. The Labs project has tried to address this problem my creating a ‘residency model’ for researchers to work intensively with a digital collection on-site, so as to not infringe access conditions, I will say more about this later.
- https://goo.gl/Kfc4qc Finding openly licensed collections is sometimes like detective work and from lessons learned Labs, uses the following 4 methods for filtering digital content: <click>Is the Copyright cleared for research and non commercial use? <click>Is it Curated (Is there someone who knows the ‘story’ about the collection?) <click>Is there Collection / Item Level Metadata available? And importantly what state is it in, does it need cleansing? <click>Finally, where is it? <click>These have been effective filters in doing the work of Labs in an agile way. <click>Labs has therefore identified several collections at the website above, some are shown in the slide: <click>Due to our licensing conditions, we are in the process of text mining the abstracts for a large number of journal titles in electronic form. The visualisation indicates the subject spread of our collections. <click>We have been harvesting the UK Web since 1993 and this is available as a resource under specific conditions for research. <click>We are also investigating the use of our item request data (around 17 million records) and anonymised reader data, data protection allowing. <click>The British National Bibliography has over 3 million catalogue records available as linked open data, licensed under CCO from the British and Irish National Library catalogues. More information is available on the Labs website, and we hope to one day develop data.bl.uk a place where all our open content and data lives with a unique identifier for each data set.
- Have balance of Multimedia Broadcast news and radio, sounds asave our sounds Books and newspapers Images BNB Qatar Digital library Hebrew manuscripts
- 35 Seconds overall We have created collection guides detailing some of these digital collections <Click>on our Digital Scholarship site. <Click>and some on the Labs site. <Click> Soon data.bl.uk will be the place where people can directly access some of the digital collections we have available. <Click> Today we have brought data with us, see the guide on how to access it and print outs on the tables. A pause for thought and reflection however, digital is just a current technology to deliver information. Perhaps in Years to come <Click>we won’t be using the word ‘Digital’ <Click>in front of the word ‘Scholarship’. It will just be ‘Scholarship’, digital tecnology will be part of the EVERYDAY process of research. Any way back to the present.
- 50 seconds In his book, The Digital Scholar: How technology is transforming scholarly practice, Martin Weller suggests that a short hand term should be used to loosely define a Digital Scholar. First of all, <click>the person does not necessarily need to be a recognised academic or someone who posts online<click>. It is someone who employs <click>digital, <click> networked and open<click> approaches to demonstrate their specialisms. Offering digital content on large scale means scholars can ask questions they had not dreamed of doing before.
- Adam Crymble was doing his PhD research on Distant Reading at King’s College. He won a competition to explain his thesis in 2 minutes in the PhD Comics competition. Examples like this will hopefully INSPIRE YOU to use the British Library’s digital content in some way in your work by showing some of what others have done.
- Get clearer annotation image and transcription (perhaps TILT)
- https://goo.gl/WutNyi http://goo.gl/nNKhQ2 https://goo.gl/9NWZUW https://goo.gl/7QQ5Tf https://goo.gl/x7b4tg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Interactive_whiteboard_at_CeBIT_2007.jpg
- 6 Seconds (20 Words) So <Click> ‘how’ do we try and engage those who might be interested in the BL’s digital collections and data? <Click>
- 41 Seconds (123 Words) One way is by running an annual competition which is open to the world! All you have to do is <Click>submit and idea by 11 April 2016. <Click>The two finalists will be announced in late May <Click>and they work with in residence between June and October, <Click>where they will get up to £3600 financial support, together with technical, curatorial and other types of support. <Click>The winners will showcase their work and receive their prizes at our symposium on Monday 7th of November. <Click>£3000 will be awarded to the winner and £1000 for the runner up.
- 15 Seconds (45 Words) The next way we try to engage those interested in using our digital content is through our Awards, <Click>these recognise work already carried out using our digital content.<Click>The deadline for this year is the 5 September. You can submit previous and new projects<Click>in one of four categories: Artistic, Commercial, Research and Teaching & Learning <Click> Winners will be announced on Monday 7th of November <Click> where each category winner, winning £500 with £100 for the runners up.
- 8 Seconds (24 Words) The final way to engage with our digital collections and data is to simply examine and use our data. We have learnt ideas usually change when we have done this. Talk to us about projects or ideas you would like to work on whether it’s for the competition, awards or something else.<Click>
- 6 Seconds (20 Words) So <Click> ‘how’ do we try and engage those who might be interested in the BL’s digital collections and data? <Click>
- 7 Seconds (21 Words) So focusing back on the competition, let’s look at a few examples.
- 21 Seconds (65 Words) Katrina Navickas was particularly interested in the <Click>Chartist Movement who were a group who were campaigning for the vote for working people. <Click>They were the biggest popular movement for democracy in 19th century British history, just as this is early picture shows a huge monster meeting at Kennington Common<Click>She wanted to use a combination of manual and computational methods to explore our Digitised Newspapers to find out when and where they met and plot them on map. <Click>and hopefully unearthing new history.
- 33 Seconds (101 Words) Katrina’s previous research has primarily focussed on the North of England.<Click>She was surprised to learn that many Chartists’ meetings were held in London. See the map of Chartists’ meetings in London and heat map where they met most. <Click>The map at the bottom left shows the route of a walking tour she organised in London visiting sites where the Chartists met.<Click> The photo at the bottom right is a Historical re-enactment of a Chartist meeting that took place in the Red Lion pub. Let’s take a peek at have happened …
- 54 Seconds Video from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lx0CL_dsQs 2.39 – 3.07 From 2.13 – 3.07 – 54 seconds <Click> From 1.18 – 3.09 – Longer clip – 1 minute 51 seconds
- Play from 1:06
- 9 Seconds (25 Words) Now on to our Awards, these recognise work *already* carried out using our digital content. Last year’s categories were Artistic, Entrepreneurial and Research. <Click>
- 26 Seconds (78 Words) Dina Malkova was the winner of Commercial category. <Click>Inspired by a small digitised fragment of an <Click>illustration of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground original handwritten manuscript<Click>Dina made handmade and bespoke bow ties and cufflinks. <Click>You can still buy these items in the Alice pop up shop in London and of course online on Etsy.
- 12 Seconds (37 Words) <Click>The research winner were a Spatial Humanities group of researchers from Lancaster University <Click>who focussed on analysing digitised newspapers to establish when and where diseases were mentioned in the Victorian Era and <Click>plotting them on a map to look for patterns.<Click><Click>
- 75 seconds The work of Labs is really about a number of stories, stories about digital collections and about researchers wanting to ask fascinating research questions about them. Let’s now tell you a story about one collection and the intended and unintended consequences of working with it. The Library digitised 65,000 17th to 19th century books from our collections a few years ago (around 2.7 % of the physical total in that period). You can view them from our catalogue or read them on your <click>IPad via the Historical Books app developed by BiblioLabs. We also captured 22 million individual page images, along with full text scans of these images all of which contain untold quantity of useful data such as names of people, places, historical events, dates. So the question became then, what next? What can 65,000 books tell us?
- Posts small illustrations taken almost at random from the digitised book corpus to a Tumblr blog. This experiment with undirected engagement was a by-product of work to uncover the hidden wealth of illustrations within the digitised pages.
- 50 seconds Here is the anatomy of a Flickr record, importantly we have created links to many of the Library’s services <click>some of this lovely traffic is going back to the Library and hopefully generating more interest in our services, from downloading a pdf of the book to purchasing a high res scan of the image. <click>Tags are added from the original book record, including the approximate page number the image came from<click>users of Flickr can add their own tags, and I have mentioned they have already started doing it.
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- 37 Seconds (112 Words) The artistic winner was Mario Klingemann otherwise known as ‘Quasimondo’ . He tries to use computers to generate art or do clever and interesting things such as find images. He worked a lot a collection of un-described images largely from the 19th Century. <Click> Here you can see a picture of a 44 men he found algorithmically who looked around 44<Click>notice how the eyes of the faces change from left to right. <Click>Bottom Left is an attempt to use code to find images of <Click> ‘Tragic looking women’ and <Click>Top Right above is an attempt to create computer art by snipping bits of images together computationally.
- 18 Seconds (56 Words) Indexing BL the 1 million & Mapping the Maps – was led by James Heald and collaboration with others <Click>They produced an index of 1 million 'Mechanical Curator collection' images on <Click>Wikimedia Commons from a collection of largely un-described images. <Click>This gave rise to finding 50,000 maps within the collection partially through a map-tag-a-thon <Click>These are now being geo-referenced. <Click>
- 27 Seconds (82 Words) Adam Crymble <Click>wanted to harness the power of playing fun games on arcade machines to help with crowdsourcing the tagging of un-described images. He particularly wanted to engage a younger audience into crowdsourcing .<Click>On the right you can see a replica 1980’s arcade machine we built and <Click>and on the bottom left some tagging games that were developed through a ‘Games Jam’ for the machine. <Click>. Let’s take a closer look at two of the games…<Click>
- 79 Seconds Video Clip We are close to installing the machine at the National Video Arcade in Nottingham to see how successful the games will be. If you’re interested in having the machine in your institution, please contact us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoCgHo2rwN4 (Switch on Subtitles) 1.47 – 3.06 1 min 19 seconds <Click> From 1.47 to 2.28 – Art Treachery – 41 seconds From 2.28 to 3.06 – Art Attack – 38 seconds Total for both clips – 1 min 19 seconds
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- Let’s look at the finished work! 16 Seconds Video Clip https://goo.gl/QilqqT 1.27- 1.43 – 16 seconds
- 5 Seconds (15 Words) <Click> Why is the Library doing this? Well there are many reasons, but essentially it is about…
- 20 Seconds (62 Words) <Click>Labs is learning important lessons on how we are supporting researchers who want to experiment with our digital content using digital methods. <Click>We are learning what we are doing right.<Click>Understanding what researchers want, <Click>learning if we provide the appropriate services, tools and resources to support them. Trying to understand where the gaps are <Click>and what we should be doing in the future. <Click>
- <click>The British Library faces many challenges of access to our Digital collections! <click> Sometimes digital content is only available onsite due to license restrictions, <click>or even only on a specific computer in a reading room! Technically there are very few reasons why digital content can’t be online <click> though it might be too big or hasn’t been transferred from other digital storage media. <click>Sometimes access is through a paywall. Finally, <click>some content is in the happy sunny place, online, open and freely available. The real reasons why there are challenges to accessing digital content are of course human. They require different approaches from the Library and may often involve an honest, open dialogue and negotiation with the publishers. The Labs project has tried to address this problem my creating a ‘residency model’ for researchers to work intensively with a digital collection on-site, so as to not infringe access conditions, I will say more about this later.
- 28 Seconds (86 Words) We have learned many lessons. I will touch on a few briefly here. <Click>There is a tremendous appetite from researchers, artists, entrepreneurs and others who want to use our digital content/data (see our Flickr Commons Image statistics later). <Click> We are identifying and bridging gaps for researchers to access BL data.<Click> and helping researchers navigate through the Library’s systems and processes to get to it. <Click>At our first roadshow, student Alison Pope suggested that BL Labs acts like a human API (or access point) connecting people to the BL’s digital data.
- 20 Seconds (62 Words) The Labs is a place where we do many small experiments quickly. Most importantly it’s where it’s OK to make mistakes and learn from them. Fail faster and fail better! Perhaps Jimmy Wales’ advice (founder of Wikipedia) can sum what we have learned time and time again.<Click> 40 Seconds Video Clip http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34808495
- 25 Seconds (68 Words) My name is Mahendra Mahey and I work on a project called British Library Labs. We are based at the British Library in London, in the Digital Scholarship department and we work closely with the Digital Research team there. It’s been running for three years now and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.