1. Digital Research & Curator Team
Innovative ways of engaging researchers with digital
content
Aquiles Alencar-Brayner
2. Digital Research & Curator Team
Formed in 2010 as part of the new Digital Scholarship department
Team composed of 1 Head of DRCT; 5 Digital Curators, 1 eMSS Curator,
1 Curator Library & Information Studies; 1 Web & Intranet Coordinator
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3. Our 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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4. 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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5. Staff training: Increasing skills and awareness
Objectives:
Wider engagement from staff in implementing
the 2020 Vision and Digital Scholarship
Strategy
Increased ability to work with digital content and
services
Increased ability to shape digital services
Increased engagement with researchers
Increased confidence in establishing
collaborations with partners in digital
scholarship
Improved fluency around data management
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6. 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
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7. 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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8. 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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9. Support for digital collections and services
Involvement with BL digital programmes and
services run by other departments
Web Archive team:
Collection development: Video games
http://bit.ly/ZwVAgJ
Tools for data analysis: JISC 1996-2010
http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/visualisation
DIPS (Digital Image Presentation System):
www.bl.uk/manuscripts
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10. Engagement with users I:
Growing Knowledge exhibition (2010 – 2011)
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.
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11. Engagement with users II:
Crowdsourcing projects
• Pin-a-Tale:
Online crowdsourcing initiative as part of the Writing
Britain exhibition, that sought to connect our individual
experiences of writing and place, and pin them to a
searchable map. We welcomed contributions from Ireland
and the Channel Islands in celebration of the close cultural
and literary relationship between all these islands.
http://www.bl.uk/pin-a-tale/pin-a-tale-map.aspx
• Europeana 1914 – 1918 Roadshows
Public was invited to bring WW1 photographs, letters,
diaries, film or audio recordings, together with the stories
of who they belonged to and why they are important to
their families to the Europeana 1914-1918 while staff from
museums and BL digitised the objects and uploaded them
to the dedicated europeana1914-1918.eu website on the
spot.
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12. Engagement with users III:
BL Labs (Launch 25th March 2013)
The BL Labs project, sponsored by A. Mellon Foundation, designed to
support the BL to provide access to its digital resources and enable scholars
to research entire collections rather than just individual items by:
1. Reviewing the BL’s approach to licensing: moving towards a coherent
licence framework and setting the standard for access to catalogue
metadata and out-of-copyright materials in digital form.
2. Enabling scholars to use and implement novel services; to access,
download, and analyse digital content; and to link data to other data and
digital collections in order to allow research that analyses entire collections.
This will be achieved by providing access to catalogue and digital materials
through simple open protocols and semantic linking.
3. Creating BL Labs so that scholars can work intensively with the Library’s
digital collections to collaboratively define and implement the services that
they need in the digital age.
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13. Creating and Sharing Digital Content
Europeana 1914 – 1918:
The BL is digitising 10,000 items (up to 250,000 digital images) of a
wide range of material related to the First World War. Digitised
content will be retrievable via the Europeana portal, as well as via the
BL website, and this will form the Library’s contribution to the
Europeana Collections 1914-1918.
http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/en
International Image Interoperability Framework
(iiif)
The BL and Stanford University, with a half dozen of the world’s
leading research libraries and funding from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, are working collaboratively to produce an interoperable
framework for image delivery. With shared technology, common
application programming interfaces (APIs), and rich user interfaces,
this framework will surpass the current crop of image viewers, page-
turners, and navigation systems, giving scholars an unprecedented
level of uniform and rich access to image-based resources.
http://lib.stanford.edu/iiif 13
15. Digital Curatorship
Provide wider Enable users
access to our to create and
collections manipulate
Support of Digital Scholarship: data
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
Digital Scholarship Staff training
and support
Distinctive through:
Comprehensive digital collections
Core infra-structure to store,
preserve, discover and access
Delivered through: Enhance
Joint projects Transform
research and
scholarly
E-platforms learning
production &
Connecting data sets to research
communication
tools 15
16. 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
• Webpage: https://digitalscholarship.jux.com/
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