The document discusses the British Library Labs initiative which aims to make the British Library's intellectual heritage and digital collections more openly accessible and usable. It provides information on the Library's collections, digital strategy and initiatives like cultural heritage datasets. British Library Labs works closely with researchers, developers and other organizations to understand how to better support access and reuse of digital content through tools, services and collaborative projects.
1. 1@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol #bldigital https://goo.gl/VFR8Hm
British Library Labs
British Library’s Cultural Heritage Data
Mahendra Mahey
1130– 1140, 25 November 2016,
The International Scene and next steps
Accelerating Human Imagination, A workshop with the Arthur C Clark Center for Human Imagination,
UC San Diego and the University of Liverpool in London,
33 Finsbury Square, London, EC2A 1AG, UK.
https://goo.gl/VFR8Hm
2. 2@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol #bldigital https://goo.gl/VFR8Hm
Living Knowledge Vision (2015 – 2023)
Custodianship Research Business
Culture Learning International
To make our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone,
for research, inspiration and enjoyment and be the most open, creative
and innovative institution of its kind by 2023.
Document:http://goo.gl/h41wW7 Speech:https://goo.gl/Py9uHK
Roly Keating (Chief Executive Officer of the British Library)
To make our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone,
for research, inspiration and enjoyment and be the most open, creative
and innovative institution of its kind by 2023.
3. 3@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol #bldigital https://goo.gl/VFR8Hm
Collections – 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
4. 4@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol #bldigital https://goo.gl/VFR8Hm
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!
6. 6@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol #bldigital https://goo.gl/VFR8Hm
http://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labs
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
10. 10@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol #bldigital https://goo.gl/VFR8Hm
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 in research, artistic, commercial and learning and
teaching categories
Talk to us about working on collaborative projects
11. 11@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol #bldigital https://goo.gl/VFR8Hm
Cultural Heritage Datasets
Datasets about our collections
Bibliographic datasets relating to our published
and archival holdings
Datasets for content mining
Content suitable for use in text and data mining
research
Datasets for image analysis
Image collections suitable for large-scale image-
analysis-based research
Datasets from UK Web Archive
Data and API services available for accessing UK
Web Archive
Digital mapping
Geospatial data, cartographic applications, digital
aerial photography and scanned historic map
materials https://data.bl.uk
Launched November 7, 2016
Discussion list: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CULTURAL-HERITAGE-DATASETS
12. 12@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol #bldigital https://goo.gl/VFR8Hm
Why and how are doing this?
• Working closely with and listening to those who want use
our digital collections and data for their work and helping to
build services, tools and processes to support them
• We can learn how we are and should be supporting them.
– Is the access to digital collections we provide sufficient?
– Do we have the right tools?
– Do we provide the right support?
– Where are the gaps between what they want and what we
can give?
– How do we build the bridges to overcome them?
– Many more reasons…
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.
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!
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>
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>
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>
<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.