British Library Labs Roadshow 2017 at the University of Birmingham

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@mahendra_mahey @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol #bldigital https://goo.gl/EvKGfa
mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
British Library Labs
What is British Library Labs and what have we learned over the last four years?
1320-1420 & 1600-1615, 10 May 2017
Learning the Lessons of working with the British Library’s Digital Content and Data for your research
British Library data and collections and discussions and feedback on ideas, challenges and issues
College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham, UK
https://goo.gl/EvKGfa
Mahendra Mahey
Manager of British Library Labs

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The British Library
Inside the British Library
Space for 1200 readers, around 400,000 visitors per year
Building 37 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
UK Legal Deposit Library – Reference only

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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.

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Collections – not just books!
> 180*million items
> 0.8* m serial titles
> 8* m stamps
> 14* m books
> 6* m sound recordings
> 4* m maps
> 1.6* m musical scores
> 0.3* m manuscripts
> 60* m patents
King’s Library *Estimates

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http://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labs
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

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http://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labs
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

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Wider…not just Researchers
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

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Digital research methods
Digital Scholarship
Visualisations
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
for datasets e.g. Metadata, Images
Transcribing
Annotation
Location based searching & Geo-tagging
Corpus analysis, Text Mining &
Natural Language Processing
Crowdsourcing
Human Computation

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How are we doing this?

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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

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Why are we doing this?

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Why are doing this?
• Working closely with and listening to those who want
use our digital collections and data for their work
• We can learn how we are and should be supporting
them (shapes the problems we work on):
– Access to digital collections?
– Advice, guidance, technical support, training
– Services, Tools and Processes?
– Many more reasons…
• Where are the gaps between what
users want & what we can give?
• How do we build the bridges to overcome the gaps?
• How do we help users to navigate their way through
the Library to what they want to do?
https://goo.gl/esqpRb
https://goo.gl/6CwCeE
https://goo.gl/62JnQT

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Born digital
Data all around us!
/
Knowledge Quarter London
89 knowledge organisations (as of 07/07/17) within 1 mile radius of
Kings Cross, http://www.knowledgequarter.london
http://www.turing.ac.uk (Headquartered at the British Library)
UK Web Archive and e-legal deposit (2013)
http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/
Born digital
Data all around us!

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#bldigital
1-2 %* digitised
* estimate
Digitisation
Partnerships
Commercial & Other Organisations
Amount
increasing rapidly
Bias in digitisation
http://goo.gl/bR9UJL
Sample Generator

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Playbills, Books, Newspapers
(includes OCR)
Digital collections and Datasets
British National
Bibliography
http://bnb.data.bl.uk
http://sounds.bl.ukhttp://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 data
EtHOS
Web ArchiveImages, 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

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Open Cultural Heritage Datasets
Collection Guides (173 as of 04/05/17)
https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/
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
Download collections as zips, no API
Each dataset has a Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Discussion list:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CULTURAL-HERITAGE-DATASETS

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What did people
actually do?

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Example pattern of research for Labs
• Finding invisible / well hidden
things in ‘messy’ historical data
• Unearthing / unlocking hidden
histories & data to stimulate
new research
• Celebrating hidden histories /
data creatively through events,
art & performance
https://goo.gl/vJ291F
https://goo.gl/mcpa8B
https://goo.gl/Ql0Bwz
Not the British Library!

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https://goo.gl/oUNj5N
https://goo.gl/ImAUv4
Finding things in ‘messy’
Optical Character Recognised (OCR) text
Mrs Folly
• Clean up some manually
• Get human ‘ground truth’
• Write code to find things
reliably in it automatically
• Try code on messy content
• Tweak if necessary
• Digital ‘lasso’ around content
• Human sift through
Mrs Folly
An example pattern of research

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Code: Machine Learning / Reading
• Labs sometimes use Machine Learning / Reading
techniques
• Analogies to how humans read / learn
• Machines acquire ‘knowledge’ / data, use that
knowledge / data to make sense / identify patterns
• Labs doing this on a case by case basis so methods
can vary
• Need computational & human effort
• Legalities of Text and Data mining being ‘ironed’
out with publishers, on-going…Often a misunderstood …
• Perhaps we need a metaphor from history…
https://goo.gl/gXmVQL
https://goo.gl/gDQEAz
https://goo.gl/k68fTf
© £

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Smell of soup & Machine Learning
Thanks to Memo Akten (@memotv on twitter) for the inspiration!
https://goo.gl/toq4Bo
Nasreddin, 13th Century Turkish Sufi
http://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/elc/studyzone/330/reading/smell1.htm

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http://victorianhumour.tubmblr.com
Victorian Meme Machine (2014)
https://goo.gl/HMqDt3
Bob Nicholson
http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/
Bob Nicholson interviewed on
BBC Radio 4 Making History Programme:
http://goo.gl/fmV9ep
And telling jokes to the public:
http://goo.gl/xIDRhz
Bob obtained further funding from his university
Looking for more collaborations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GRgj7Q5OM0
Rob Walker, Victorian Mother-in-law Jokes
Victorian Comedy Night, 7 Nov 2016
Learnt about access paths
to digital collections

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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
Chartists Walking Tour and
Re-enactment London
Learnt that domain knowledge
reduces noise

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Black Abolitionist Performances & their
Presence in Britain (2016) – Hannah-Rose Murray
Frederick
Douglass
Ellen
Craft
Josiah
Henson
Ida B
Wells
A Performance by
Joe Williams &
Martelle Edinborough
http://frederickdouglassinbritain.com/
Started to implement
Machine Learning Techniques

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Data-mining verse in 18th Century newspapers
BL Labs Project 16-17, Jennifer Batt
https://goo.gl/5Akthd
Slides courtesy Jennifer BattJennifer Batt @ the BL on World Poetry Day

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What thoj' among ourrelves, with too much Heat, or t
W: fweutimes.wongle, wvhen we Ihould debate, W –
(A confequential Ill which Freedom drawvs, fl t
A bad Efficf, but from a noble Caufe) t
We can with univeifal Zcal advance, to
To cutb the faithlefs Arrogancccof V rance. hi
Dublin Journal, 10-14 September, 1745 Slides courtesy Jennifer Batt

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Verse: 81% lines begin
with initial capital
Prose: 52% lines begin
with initial capital
Westminster Journal 3 March 1745
Slides courtesy Jennifer Batt
Started to refine
Machine Learning Techniques

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Psychiatrist’s Journey
into 19th Century Newspapers (2016)
• Dr Surendra P Singh, Consultant Psychiatrist
• To identify weekly, monthly, yearly and
longitudinal trends in suicide reporting in
terms of gender, status, sites, locations and
health in OCR text of 19th Century
Newspapers
• Used ‘R’ Open Source Stats
Package to collect ‘Suicide’ corpus
• Looking for collaborators to work on this
dataset
Use off-the-shelf tools
and remote access pathways

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Use of Overproof
OCR Correction?
Re-OCR with
ABBY FineReader?
https://www.abbyy.com/en-gb/
http://overproof.projectcomputing.com/
RE-OCR

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Virtual Infrastructure for OCR text
OCR text ‘scraped’ from
digitised newspapers
and put in cloud
Jupyter notebook
Write python code and results
in web browser
http://jupyter.org
Access available for researchers ‘in residence’

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Other experiments with images

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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
Algorithms based on photos
Mechanical Curator
with an algorithmic brain
(Circles, Squares and Slanty etc)
http://goo.gl/qPPgxX
Wikimedia
Flickr Commons
Individual URL & API
Snipping out images
from 65,000 Digitised Books*
>600,000,000* views
>20,000,000* tags
https://goo.gl/FgZ4HM
Work @ BL by Ben O’Steen, Labs
and Digital Research Team*Matt Prior - http://goo.gl/j29Tnx
Since Dec 2013
Tumblr
*Estimates

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Tagging, Tagging, Tagging…

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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
18 hard core taggers
How to reward and keep motivated?
Average for ‘crowd’ is 1 tag per person
Mobile games for ‘Ships’, ‘Covers’ and ‘Portraits’ Interface for tagging

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Adam Crymble (2015)
Crowdsource Arcade
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
Using Arcade Games
to help Tag images

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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
54,000 Maps
Found in Flickr 1 million
Human & Computational Tagging
& Community engagement
Geo-referencing work

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SherlockNet: Competition Winner 2016
Karen Wang, Luda Zhao and Brian Do
Using Convolutional Neural Networks to Automatically Tag and Caption
the British Library Flickr Commons 1 million Image Collection
12 categories
>20 million tags added
>100,000 captions
bit.ly/sherlocknet
Pooled surrounding
OCR text on page
from similar images
Used Microsoft COCO (photographs) &
British Museum Prints and Drawings
collections as training sets.
Tags Captions

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Artistic / Creative Works
http://goo.gl/dM8ieA
Mario Klingeman (2015)
Code Artist / Curator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SBxO34Zlc
David Normal 2014 and 2015
Collages/Paintings & Lightboxes
http://goo.gl/bNxGZZ
Kris Hoffman (2016)
Animation for Fashion Week 2016
https://goo.gl/QilqqT
Jiayi Chong 2016 - Animation tool
https://www.facebook.com/RealmlandStory/
Paul Rand Pierce 2016
Graphic Novel on Facebook
A Hat on the Ground Spells trouble
Tragic Looking Women
44 Men who Look 44
(Notice the direction faces)

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Imaginary Cities – BL Labs Project 16-17
Michael Takeo Magruder
https://goo.gl/4ARwTy
An artistic exploration seeking to create provocative fictional cityscapes for the Information Age
from the British Library’s digital collection of historic urban maps

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Learning & Teaching
The PhD Abstracts Collections in FLAX:
Learning Academic English with Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS)
https://goo.gl/fOwHAe
Shaoqun Wu, Alannah Fitzgerald, Ian H. Witten and Chris Mansfield

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Learning &Teaching
Library Carpentry
James
Baker
https://goo.gl/25cq99
And many more!

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Commercial: Poetic Places (2016)
http://www.poeticplaces.uk/
Sarah Cole

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Commercial:
Curating Digital Collections Go Mobile (2016)
http://www.biblioboard.com
Mitchell Davis (BiblioLabs)
See it in the Foyer!

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#bldigital
1-2 %* digitised
* estimate
Digitisation
Partnerships
Commercial & Other Organisations
Amount
increasing rapidly
Bias in digitisation
http://goo.gl/bR9UJL
Sample Generator

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Have you got X?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Real_wuerzburg.jpg
Looking for Physical Content in the British Library

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Have you got X digitised?
http://www.yorkmix.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/mr-simms-sweet-shoppe-york.jpg
Looking for Digitised Content in the BL

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• Digitisation costs time & resources & access can depend
on restrictions imposed by funders …
• Still…over 600 Digital Collections!!
But not all found through Google or even online!
• Need lots of engagement, dialogue is either:
– you are ‘lucky’ & we have the digital content
/ data relevant to your research
– we don’t have exactly what your looking for,
but is there anything of interest? Let’s talk…
• Artists find this dialogue easier and we tend to
attract researchers with ‘fuzzier’ research boundaries
• Access easier for openly licensed content
• More challenging for on-site, in-copyright, data
protected, old content media and contemporary material
https://goo.gl/qpCLlk
So little digitised? Type of Engagement?
© £ 
https://goo.gl/Y5zCXg
©
https://goo.gl/wMTS3Z

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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 access to Digital Collections

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The Story of the Digital Collection…
Digital
Collection
Curator
Who paid for the digitisation?
Who did the digitisation?
Technology used
Born digital?
Published
Unpublished
Where is it?
Can it still be accessed?
Generates income
Reputational Risk
Legalities
Political
Ego (all)
Surprises (e.g. gaps)
Metadata
Old format not supported
What media was the
digitisation done from?
Documentation
No Metadata
Messy Metadata
Still there?
Good to know the background of a
Digital collection if you want to use it for research and make conclusions…

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Open Licensed Digital Content?
20% Openly
Licensed
Around 15%*
available online
Working through to make more open…
Though some collections will always only be available onsite due to ©
Breakdown by collection*
Manuscripts 59%
Books 9%
Maps and Views 7%
Newspapers 3%
Archives and Records 3%
Paintings, Prints and Drawings 2%
*Based on number of digitisation projects
Largest proportion of funding
Public / Private Partnership
20%* Openly Licensed
80%* Available onsite
*Estimates

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How do we give access to
onsite-only
Digital Collections
(80% of our Digital Collections)?

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READING
ROOM
ON
SITE
NOT
ONLINE
OPEN
British Library
£
Labs Residency Model
Challenges of access to Digital Collections

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Accessing digital collections onsite
OPEN
£
• Have to be ‘onsite’
• Need to be security cleared for some collections
– Hence ‘Researcher in Residence Model’
• Permission required (depending on ‘story’ of collection)
• Content could be on various media formats
(not always online)
• 5 - 20 % re-use of material for non commercial research for
some collections
• We are learning ‘pathways’ so that this becomes ‘everyday’ to
provide onsite access to some digital collections in the future

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Lessons Learned & Challenges…(1)
• Start with a conversation, our data isn’t all on Google
(yet!) & not easy to find. Need to create and embrace
serendipity & opportunities for use by talking!
• Need to have several conversations with several
stakeholders & tap into their tacit knowledge that
isn’t always written down sometimes to progress
ideas. https://goo.gl/XaHYT9
• Often misunderstandings because
of jargon & different meaning of words.
• Expectations change when researchers
actually see the data, systems &
experience the ‘culture’ of the organisation.
• Opening & using digital collections occasionally requires a
need to let go of the emotional & psychological connection to them
https://goo.gl/OYAsmK
?
https://goo.gl/ytmWnu

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Lessons Learned & Challenges…(2)
• Embrace dirty data, it may never be perfect!
• Careful of making conclusions (trust) based on
‘black box’ software & techniques (e.g. sentiment analysis)
• We tend to work with researchers who can be ‘flexible’
with their research questions & are willing to embrace
challenges.
• Many researchers have the domain knowledge but
lack technical / digital skills to use Digital Research
methods. Should they be teamed up with those that
want to solve problems or get trained?
• Huge appetite to use digital content & data
(e.g. Flickr Commons stats).
https://goo.gl/mcpa8B
https://goo.gl/i5GVfI
https://goo.gl/yQ5s4U
https://goo.gl/kwcK8J
https://goo.gl/wMTS3Z

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Labs mindset…
1. Start a conversation, generate positive energy
and try to support ideas
2. Start with small experiments, but think big!
3. Fail faster (don’t be afraid)!
4. Reject perfectionism!
5. Good enough is sometimes…good enough!
6. Celebrate the uses of digital collections
https://goo.gl/noASfl

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https://goo.gl/SUOO0J
The Magic of Openness!
• If digitised / digital collections are
not used, what is the point of
digitising / keeping them
(i.e. apart from preservation)?
• Opening up our digital collections
offers new ways for the Library’s
content to be re-discovered,
remixed, re-imagined and ‘re-
energised’
• Generates plenty of examples to
inspire use by others

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Hey there Young Sailor!
Ling Low 2016 – Hey there Young Sailor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcOP1E5bRE0VIMEO.COM/SWEETANDLOWFILMS
@SWEETNLOWFILMS ON INSTAGRAM
@SWEETNLOWLING ON TWITTER
The Impatient Sisters

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The Future of BL Labs
• Continue to engage with researchers
• Learn what they want to do
• Collect evidence of demand
• Develop Business Model and Support
process to make ‘Business as Usual’ at
the British Library
• Help to create pathway to developing
a ‘Digital Research Suite’ at the
British Library by 2019
http://www.library.pitt.edu/digital-scholarship-services
https://goo.gl/W4TjGt

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Taking a peek at our Open Data
A digitised book…

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002819694

62

63

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Optically Character Recognised (OCR)
generated Text
Scanned Page
Image on Flickr
Commons
https://goo.gl/AC43vs

65
OCR XML Generated by ABBY Fine Reader

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Taking a peek at our on-site only
accessible data
A digitised newspaper

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Accessing digitised newspapers
onsite at the BL
1
Windows 7
External access possible through Citrix Server
Results of digitisation exist on Windows file shares!

68
onsite at the BL (JISC 1)
2
12 Volumes, each with terabytes of data

69
onsite at the BL
3

70
onsite at the BL
4

71
onsite at the BL
5

72
onsite at the BL
6

73
onsite at the BL
7

74
onsite at the BL
8

75
onsite at the BL
9

76
onsite at the BL
10

77
onsite at the BL
11

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onsite at the BL
12

79
onsite at the BL
13
Accessing original ‘master’ image (not
cropped or post processed)
Or ‘service’ copy (post processed)
and results of OCR available as ALTO XML

80
onsite at the BL
14a
Accessing original ‘master’ image
(not cropped or post processed) in .TIFF format

81
onsite at the BL
Accessing original
‘master’ image
(not cropped or post
processed)
14b

82
onsite at the BL
15a
Accessing ‘service’ Copy (post processed)
and results of OCR available as ALTO XML

83
onsite at the BL
Accessing ‘service’
Copy (post processed)
15b

84
onsite at the BL
15c
Accessing OCR as ALTO XML

85
through Gale Interface (subscription)
1

86
through Gale Interface (subscription)
2

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Explore or Imagine Our Data!
• CSV of Metadata
https://data.bl.uk/digbks/dig19cbooks-mdata-csv.csv
• 19th Century Books - Book Metadata - 01/09/2013.
https://data.bl.uk/digbks/db21.html
• Digitised Books - Flickr Tag History - Dec 2013 to March 2016.
TSV
https://data.bl.uk/digbks/db15.html
• Digitised Hebrew Manuscripts - Metadata
https://data.bl.uk/hebrewmanuscripts/heb1.html
• Digitised Hebrew Manuscripts: Or 2210 - Or 2364
https://data.bl.uk/hebrewmanuscripts/heb8.html
• Theatrical playbills from Britain and Ireland (OCR text only)
https://data.bl.uk/playbills/pb2.html
• Portraits of actors, views of theatres and playbills (covering
1750 - 1821 in a single volume)
https://data.bl.uk/singlesheet/por1.html
• Volumes of Lysons Collectanea (Amusements), comprising
broadsides, cuttings, advertisements on amusements.1660-
1840.
https://data.bl.uk/singlesheet/ad1.html
https://data.bl.uk
• Have a look at the data.
• Data Quality
• Issues
Or an idea you have thought of
what to do with the data!
http://labs.bl.uk/Ideas+for+Labs
Smaller datasets

British Library Labs Roadshow 2017 at the University of Birmingham

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British Library Labs Roadshow 2017 at the University of Birmingham

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