1. British Library Labs
http://labs.bl.uk
British Library Labs
Tuesday 17th
September 2013
The European Library Annual Meeting
Amsterdam
Aly Conteh
Head of Digital Research & Curator Team
British Library

2. http://labs.bl.uk 2
#bl_labs
“Every book tells a story, but
what can 68,000 books tell
you?”
The project in a nutshell…
Encouraging scholars and developers to do
research and development with British Library
digital collections

3. http://labs.bl.uk 3
#bl_labs
About
• Grant from The Andrew Mellon Foundation
• 2 year initial project (to September 2014)
• External Advisory Board
• Professor Tim Hitchcock (Digital Humanities)
– University of Hertfordshire
• Professor Andrew Prescott (Digital Humanities)
– King’s College London
• Bill Thompson (Technology writer)
- BBC
• Professor Claire Warwick (Digital Humanities)
- University College London
• Professor David De Roure (e-Research)
- University of Oxford

4. http://labs.bl.uk 4
#bl_labs
About
• British Library Team
• Project Manager – Mahendra Mahey
• Technical Lead – Ben O’Steen
• Supported by a team of 4 Digital Curators

5. http://labs.bl.uk 5
#bl_labs
Labs details…what
• No digitisation involved, just digitized and born digital Library content
• Some content online
• Other in digital form but not online yet
– e.g. too big, needs work, technical challenges, license restrictions
(e.g. onsite access etc.)
• Examine and analyse the content, especially entire collections (i.e.
cross collection research)
• Do research, publish
• Make things, e.g. tools, services, apps etc…
• Transforming processes, services and tools for scholars / developers
using Library digital collections

6. http://labs.bl.uk 6
#bl_labs
Lab details…how
• Competitions, events and various activities
• Creating environment where scholars / developers can
work intensively with Library’s digital collections (winners will
be resident)
• Encourage research / developers to do innovative things
with British Library digital content
• Labs is more than the competition
• Ideas can be pursued by talking to Library staff , scholars /
developers interested in conducting research / making things

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#bl_labs
The plan in time…
• Launch Event – 25th
March 2013 – draft details of competition and feedback, launched end
of April
• Virtual 17 May (Video of Hangout Available), more virtual event?
• Hack Event 28/29 May London
• AHRC research network - 'the infinite archive‘, Open University, University of Nottingham,
University of Warwick
• Winners announced at 6 July 2013, York (Digital Heritage Conference)
• Best two ideas work in residence and showcase their work on the 11th
November 2013,
when the next competition will be launched, deadline end of March 2014, work on entry May
to end of October 2014, Nov/Dec Showcase
• Other ideas, look at supporting in other ways e.g. through Labs, other Library departments,
Business opportunities etc.
• Case studies produced around Nov/Dec for first iteration 2013 and second iteration 2014

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#bl_labs
Labs Hack Days…
• Bringing researchers, developers, curators and anyone
interested with collections together at events, want to do
more!
• Brainstorming ideas – ideas lab
• Scoping research, ideas, solving problems and developing
prototypes
• Watch this space
Brainstorm ideas and group
Consider and choose
Work into the night and show
what has been done

9. http://labs.bl.uk 9
#bl_labs
Case studies…
• Research generated from the competitions and general
activity of Labs
• Inform the Library / other libraries around the world about
the issues, challenges, solutions and benefits generated
when using a Labs approach

10. http://labs.bl.uk 10
#bl_labs
Labs Content
• Work with curators to identify those digital collections that
are suitable for Labs
• Focus on those that are copyright cleared at the moment
• Others considered in light of challenges, i.e. in scope for
Labs work
• Engage researchers/developers with these materials
through meetings, road-shows, hack days, promotions
(including competitions and events)
• Started off with a list of over 300 digital collections
• Needed a filter

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#bl_labs
Types of content
• Datasets
• Books / Text
• Images / Music
• Maps
• Sounds
• Multimedia
http://labs.bl.uk/Digital+Collections

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#bl_labs
British National Bibliographic Data
• bnb.data.bl.uk
• 2.6 Million individual records
• Title, Author, Subject, Descriptions and
more of books and journals published or
distributed in the UK and Ireland since
1950.
• Available as Linked Open Data, Basic
RDF/XML and Marc21.
• An excellent resource for uncovering
publishing trends across the decades,
and augmenting records!

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#bl_labs
UK Web Archive Data
• data.webarchive.org.uk/o
pendata
• An example dataset is
the JISC UK Web
Domain Dataset (1996-
2010) which is a 32TB
subset of the Internet
Archive’s web collection
relating to the UK.
• Comparing events across
media types?

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#bl_labs
19th
Century Digitised Books
• 68,000 digitised volumes and their
accompanying JP2, PDF, metadata
and OCR text files
• Many rare or inaccessible books
published between 1789 and 1914
and covers a wide range of subject
areas including philosophy, history,
poetry and literature, travel
• Representative materials here:
britishlibrary19c.tumblr.com
• Text mining?

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#bl_labs
Book ordering data…
• Every day thousands of items are ordered up from the
library stacks and delivered to researchers in our reading
rooms. We can provide daily anonymised reports of these
titles including shelfmark information and reading room
location
• Visualising what readers are reading?
Anonymised reader data…
• Anonymised information about our readers
• Big buckets
• Social trends?

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#bl_labs
Bringing Text Mining to the Library
Many electronic journals we have negotiated text mining
rights for (50%) journals
A project to get the tools to readers?

17. http://labs.bl.uk 17
#bl_labs
Example Research Methods
• Corpus Analysis tools
• Visualisations
• Topic Models
• Location based searching
• Geotagging
• Annotation
• APIs for datasets e.g. Metadata, Images
• Crowdsourcing / Human Computation
• Natural Language Processing
• Transcribing

18. http://labs.bl.uk 18
#bl_labs
Dan Norton
• Mixing the Library: The Disc Jockey and the Digital Collection
• Dan Norton is a PhD Researcher on the Digital Economy Project; SerenA, Chance Encounters in the
Space of Ideas, based at the University of Dundee and is Artist in Residence at Hangar, Centre for Art
and Research, Barcelona.
• Builds an interface for interacting in digital collections developed from the DJ's interaction with
information. His project uses selecting and mixing as creative behaviours for exploring, learning, and
authoring with digital collections.
• The prototype will demonstrate the interface requirements necessary for collecting, enriching
(organizing, annotating),and mixing information from digital libraries; for building aesthetic,
experimental, or logical links between resources; and for developing ad hoc visualizations, or
publishing annotated data.
• The template to be produced during the project will inform future developments of a fully functioning
platform for learning and authoring in digital collections, by selecting, mixing, and sequencing.
• Working on functioning prototype to collect URLs for different media types e.g. text, video, sound and
images, shuffle order and then comparing two digital objects and being able to annotate in real time

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#bl_labs
Pieter Francois
• The Sample Generator for Digitised Texts
• Pieter Francois is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford.
• The ‘Sample Generator for Digitized Texts’ is a relatively simple piece of software which connects one
or more major catalogues or bibliographies with one or more collections of digitized texts through the
metadata.
• The ‘Sample Generator’ allows users to create custom-made samples of fully digitized texts that mirror
the distribution of certain key parameters, like genre, year and place of publication, language, gender
of the author, ..., as found within the catalogues and bibliographies. Whereas the applicability of the
‘Sample Generator’ is universal, this proposal will focus on testing out this novel approach by
connecting the nineteenth-century holdings of the Integrated Catalogue of the British Library with the
‘19th Century Books’ digital collection.
• The main aim is to tell the story of over a million nineteenth-century books through a structured
sampling of 68,000 books, focus is on travel routes/accounts
• Creating demonstrator which searches across 1 million records and where possible find highly
significant samples for further research

20. http://labs.bl.uk 20
#bl_labs
@aconteh
alyconteh@bl.uk
labs.bl.uk/
@BL_Labs
#bl_labs
Thank You