The Digital Research and Curator Team at the British Library supports the library's mission of making its collections accessible by developing strategies for digital scholarship. The team provides training to library staff, curates digital research data, and manages projects that engage users and promote the library's digital services and collections. This includes crowdsourcing initiatives, exhibitions exploring digital tools and data, and games that reuse the library's digital holdings. The goal is to widen access to collections and enhance research through collaboration between librarians, researchers, and technology experts.

1. Digital Scholarship:
widening access to BL collections
and services
Dr. Aquiles Alencar-Brayner
@AquilesBrayner

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Digital Research & Curator Team
 Formed in 2010 as part of the new Digital Scholarship department
The Digital Research Team is a cross-
disciplinary mix of curators, researchers,
librarians and programmers supporting the
British Library's Living Knowledge mission
“to make our intellectual heritage
accessible to everyone, for research,
inspiration and enjoyment.”

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Our Team Mission
• Support the BL to adopt clear strategies and operating models for
Digital Scholarship
• Develop innovative models for Digital Scholarship exploiting
digital content and new technologies
• Offer training and support to BL staff on Digital Scholarship
practices and resources
• Involvement with various digital programmes (internal and
external) involving digitisation, born-digital materials, publication
on the Web, etc.
• Engage with new and existing user communities
• Strengthen the BL capabilities

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Digital Libraries: 10 “in” rules
1.Integrity: access to digital
object as it has been created
2.Integration: different contents
and file formats available from a
single platform
3.Interoperability: different
programmes and operating
systems compatible with each
other
4.Instant access: unrestricted
access to material, especially
from mobile devices
5.Interaction: catalogues that
provide Web 2.0 features (blogs,
wikis, tags, content sharing, etc)
6.Information: comprehensive
metadata for fast and reliable
retrieval of content
7.Ingest of content: constant
upload of new digital content
8. Interpretation: digital content placed in
relation to other items in the collection
9.Innovation: material to be presented in
innovative ways
10.Indefinite access: digital objects to be
preserved for posterity

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Scalability: how to filter, find and analyse
the information I need?
• How many data is generated in
ONE day?
1. Twitter: 7 TB
2. Facebook: 10 TB
• By 2020 we will have
approximately 35 ZB (1.1 Trillion
GB) of Data available

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Main Activities
• Staff training
• Promotion of Digital Scholarship within BL
• Curation of digital research data
• Project management
• Engagement with users
• Create and share online content with other libraries and
research centres
• Communication channels

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Digital Scholarship Training Programme: 15 courses
(offered 3 times a year) launched in October 2012
1. Social Media: Introduction to Yammer, Twitter, and Blogging
2. Working collaboratively: Using the BL Wiki
3. Presentation skills: From PowerPoint to Prezi
4. Foundations in working with Digital Objects: From Images to
A/V
5. Behind the Screen: Basics of the Web
6. Metadata for Electronic Resources: Dublin Core, METS, MODS,
RDF, XML
7. What is Digital Scholarship?
8. Digital Collections at British Library
9. Digitisation at British Library
10. Communicating our collections online: Access & Reuse Policy
11. Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage
Institutions
12. Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
13. Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research
14. Geo-referencing and Digital Mapping
15. Information Integration: Mash-ups, API’s and The Semantic
Web
Delivered 88 courses to nearly 400
staff members so far!

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Digital Conversations
• Series of talks organised by DRCT on specific themes around ideas, tools and
projects around Digital Scholarship. Contributors have included
entrepreneurs, technologists, librarians, academics and analysts.
• Events held:
1. Search and Discovery
2. Sharing and Annotation
3. Profiling and Privacy
4. Open for Re-use
5. Future of Text
6. Digital Narratives
7. Using the Cloud
• Events are recorded on video and made publicly available on BL Youtube
account: http://bit.ly/XFJrcI

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Curation e-Manuscripts
• Extracting and archiving digital
content from personal devices
• Assist with capture, management,
description, and preservation of
personal digital collections to
facilitate access and content analysis
• Data analysis beyond documents

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Support for digital collections and services
Involvement with BL digital programmes
and services run by other departments
• Born-digital content:
Tools for data analysis: JISC 1996-2010
• Digitised resources:
Codex Sinaiticus
Shakespeare in Quarto

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Engagement with users I:
Growing Knowledge exhibition (2010 – 2011)
Beautiful Science (Feb – May 2014)
Growing Knowledge offered a physical space
where public could walk in and start exploring a
wide number of digital tools used by researchers
from text mining to online collaboration.
Beautiful Science explores how our
understanding of ourselves and our planet has
evolved alongside our ability to diagram, graph,
and map the mass data of the time.
http://bit.ly/1juG9VG

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Engagement with users II: Crowdsourcing projects
• Sound map -Your Accent: The 'Your accents'
interactive map displays a collection of recordings
created between November 2010 and April 2011 and is
a result of the British Library exhibition, Evolving
English: One Language, Many Voices. People all over
the world were invited to record their voice reading a
children’s story, Mr Tickle (© 1971 Roger Hargreaves),
to help the Library capture contemporary English
accents. The recordings are available at
http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/Your-Accents
• Chinese Book Cards Catalogue: project
supported by the Chinese embassy aiming to identify
OCLC records that match 28,000 printed card
catalogues of Chinese publications held at the BL
using crowdsourcing activities. The idea is to derive
matching records from OCLC and ingest the data into
the BL electronic catalogue (ALEPH):
http://www.libcrowds.com/

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Engagement with users III: Gaming and
Apps
• Off the Map: annual competition for
videogame developers who are re-using
BL digital collections
• PoeticPlaces: collaborative project
between the British Library and
TIME/IMAGE that aspires to put together
written works, images and sounds,
bringing literature into people’s everyday
life.

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Network & partnerships

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Provide wider
access to our
collections
Enable users
to create and
manipulate
data
Enhance
research and
learning
Support of Digital Scholarship:
 New tools applied to digital
collections: annotation, citation,
comparison, analysis, etc.
 Awareness of emerging research
trends within DS
 Strong collaboration between
researchers, IT and information
professionals
Distinctive through:
 Comprehensive digital collections
 Core infra-structure to store,
preserve, discover and access
Delivered through:
 Joint projects
 E-platforms
 Connecting data sets to research
tools Transform
scholarly
production &
communication
Digital Scholarship

Digital Curatorship
Staff training
and support

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Communication Channels
• BL Digital Scholarship Blog:
• http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
• Connect - DRCT Newsletter (internal)
• Twitter (Digital Curators personal accounts)
• Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LYaclanmcU

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Thank you