2. Digital Scholarship Department
…become a leading centre of digital scholarship …
internationally recognised for innovation and
collaboration in support of research and learning…
• Researchers use the Library’s digital content - an indispensable
resource
• Our collections are well cared for and developed in line with our
content strategy
• Our communities actively engage with content and curators
• Every Library curator can competently engage with digital content,
tools, and services in their area of expertise
2
3. Digital Scholarship Department - Based around core collection and
curatorial areas with advanced digital practices
• Sound & Moving Image
Audio
Moving image
Music
News and news media
• Cartography and
Topography
Maps
Prints, views and drawings
Photographs
Philatelic
• IDP
International initiative
Curation of central Asian
materials
• Digital research team
Digitisation
Digital curation
Digital archives
Endangered archives
programme
5. Transformations in research and scholarship
Digital Scholarship
Changes
The production, use and
integration of digital content,
services and tools to facilitate
scholarship and research
1. Digital content
Allows research questions to
be investigated in new ways
Using new tools and methods
Leading to new discoveries
Generating new understanding
Across many disciplines
2. Tools and services
3. Methods
4. Engagement
5. Capacity
6. Audio Video Preservation Challenge
A 1950 lacquer disc from the Peter
Newbrook collection of unique jazz
recordings (BL collection C1126),
now unplayable and irreparable
7. Music – extensive collections of early, classical, jazz, pop, world &
traditional
8. Sounds and Moving Image
http://Sounds.bl.uk
http://Videoserver.bl.uk/
12. International Dunhuang Programme
• A major digital scholarship effort
that has matured and grown
over twenty years
• Brings together fragile
inaccessible items in digital form
• 400,000 images and 120,000
items available on-line
• A major international
collaboration with partners from
China, Russia, Japan, Germany,
France, Korea …
• Resources, descriptions,
metadata available in many
languages
• http://idp.bl.uk/
13. Digital research and curation team – digitisation, digital curation, digital
archives
14. Endangered Archives Programme
• EAP funds projects to rescue,
digitise, and make available
endangered archives
• Supported by Arcadia
• Over 150 projects world-wide
since 2005
Iranian photographs c. 1900
Audiovisual material on Andean culture
Telegu paintings in India
State papers from Liberia as well as
Tuvalu and Yap
Monastery library in Bhutan…
“Documentary heritage reflects the
diversity of languages, peoples and
cultures. It is the mirror of the world
and its memory. But this memory is
fragile. Every day, irreplaceable parts
• BL provides infrastructure,
of this memory disappear for ever.” –
long-term digital preservation,
UNESCO Memory of the World
guidance
Programme
• http://eap.bl.uk/
15. British Library Labs
• Encouraging scholars to do research and development with and
across existing British Library digital collections and data (born digital
and digitised).
• Data driven approach through competitions, hack days, data events
• Creates an environment for scholars to work intensively with British
Library digital collections / data.
• Library learns to support digital scholars, builds on existing or creates
new processes, tools (e.g. APIs etc.) and services.
• Case studies for to inspire others
• 2 Year Andrew Mellon funded project.
16. Datasets, Books / Text, Images / Music, Maps, Sounds, Multimedia
http://labs.bl.uk/Digital+Collections
Resonance FM
10 year Community
Arts Radio Show
Book ordering and
anonymised reader
data
Text-mining of
electronic journals
UK Web Archive Data
19th Century Books
Environmental Sounds
British National Bibliography
17. Digital Scholarship – BL Labs
• Annual competitions showcase
our digital content
• Deep engagement with
researchers
• Two 2013 winners
Dan Norton - Mixing the Library: The Disc
Jockey and the Digital Collection
Pieter Francois - Sample Generator for
Digitised Texts
“brings together my interests in
data, statistics, and nineteenth
century travel”
http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.co
m/archive
http://labs.bl.uk/
18. Improving methodology with representative samples
• Pieter Francois - postdoctoral
researcher at the University of
Oxford
• Focus on European travel in
the 19th Century
• Uses statistical methods to
support text analysis
• Tool produces representative
samples of texts based on
search criteria
http://samplegenerator.cloudapp.net
19. Mixing the Library:
The Disc Jockey and the Digital Collection
Annotation
http://www.tompro.co.uk
Preview ‘item’
‘Play back’ of ‘items’ (Blue)
and annotations (Yellow)
http://www.ablab.org/pd/di/
Selected ‘left’
channel ‘item’
Collection ‘stalks’ made of ‘items’. Each ‘item’ is a URL.
The order of the ‘items’ can be ‘shuffled’ and sent to the ‘left’ or ‘right’ channels
Prototype design
http://www.ablab.org/shetland
Selected ‘right’
channel ‘item’
20. Off the Map Competition
A challenge for videogame design students to turn historic maps and engravings from the
British Library collections into a 3D environment using Crytek's CRYENGINE software.
Pudding Lane Productions, a team of six second-year students from De Montfort
University, Leicester, won first prize.
Their work was showcased at GameCity, an annual festival of videogame culture.
http://youtu.be/SPY-hr-8-M0 (Flythrough starts at 0:50)
21. Building our capacity
•
Foundations in working with Digital
Objects: From Images to A/V
•
Behind the Screen: Basics of the
Web
•
What is Digital Scholarship?
•
Digital Collections at British Library
•
Digitisation at British Library
•
Crowdsourcing in Libraries,
Museums and Cultural Heritage
Institutions
•
Text Encoding Initiative &
Annotation
•
Data Visualisation for Analysis in
Scholarly Research
•
Geo-referencing and Digital Mapping
•
Information Integration: Mash-ups,
API’s and The Semantic Web
