Talk for Digital Scholarship and literacies: enhancing professional skills and perceptions CPD25 event on 15th March 2018 by Stella Wisdom

1. Developing a digital scholarship
training programme for staff
Talk for Digital Scholarship and literacies: enhancing
professional skills and perceptions event
15 March 2018
Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator
@miss_wisdom
Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/

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What I’ll cover today:
• Introduction to the British Library’s Digital
Scholarship Department & Digital Research Team
Plus what we do
• BL Labs
• Digital Scholarship Training Programme
• Hack & Yack
• 21st Century Curatorship Talks
• Digital Scholarship Reading Group

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The British Library is the
national library of the UK
We receive a copy of every
publication produced in the UK and
Ireland
From 6 April 2013, legal deposit
covers e-books, e-journals and
other types of electronic
publication
Plus other material that is made
available to the public in the UK on
handheld media such as CD-
ROMs and microfilm, on the web
(including websites) and by
download from a website.
http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/

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Over 150 Million items
are stored in London and in
Yorkshire
If you saw 5 items a day
it would take you 80,000
years to see the whole
collection
Digitisation is crucial for
opening up access to
this content and collections
http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/quickinfo/facts/

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The UK Web Archive
http://www.webarchive.org.uk
• Three collections:
– Open Archive (since 2004)
– Legal Deposit Archive (since 2013)
– JISC Historical Archive (1996-2013)
• Statistics:
– Over eight billion resources
– Over 160TB compressed data
• Goals:
– Preserve UK web history
– Support access
– Enable research

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The Conservative Party deleted speeches and press releases
published on its website between 2000 and the 2010 general election.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24924185
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/13/conservative-party-archive-speeches-internet

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Born-Digital Manuscripts
Personal Digital Archives

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The Wendy Cope Archive
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/10/british-library-digital-archives

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Who am I?
Founded in 2010, the Digital
Scholarship Department at British
Library supports researchers and
staff to make innovative use of our
digital collections and data.
We are a group of cross disciplinary
experts in the areas of digitisation,
librarianship, digital history &
humanities, computer and data
science, looking at how technology is
transforming research, and in turn,
our services.
@BL_DigiSchol

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Meet the Digital Scholarship Team
Main Activities:
• Staff training
• Promoting Digital Scholarship within BL
• Curating digital research data
• Project management
• Engagement with users
• Creating and sharing online content with
other libraries and research centres
• Communication: events, blogging, social
media

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Rossitza Atanassova
Digitisation
Mia Ridge
Western Heritage
Alex Mendes
Research Software
Engineer
Stella Wisdom
Contemporary British
Nora McGregor
Asian & African
Collections
Tom Derrick
Two Centuries
Indian Print
Digital Curators

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Details of BL Labs Activities can be found on their wiki: http://labs.bl.uk/
British
Library
Labs
Ben O’Steen
Technical Lead
Mahendra Mahey
Project Manager

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Digital skill building
The Digital Scholarship Training Programme is an
internal staff training initiative by the Digital Research
team that launched in November 2012.
Informed by both Collections Training Needs Analysis
as well as our own domain expertise/experience
Delivered over 150 courses to 500+ staff members so
far!
https://www.bl.uk/projects/digital-scholarship-training-programme

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100 Digital Scholarship Unconference Event
Digital scholarship and innovation is happening across the Library every day and
these special unconference events give colleagues the opportunity to share their
interests and skills with others.
101 This is Digital Scholarship
A thought-provoking look at how information technology has transformed research.
This course offers colleagues an overview of the concepts, tools and methods
which define digital scholarship today. Through group discussion staff will explore
how their own expertise and interests can support digital researchers.
102 Digital Collections at British Library
An overview of the present and future landscape of our permanent digital offering
focusing on how these digital collections are acquired, ingested, preserved, and
access provided.
103 Digitisation at British Library
Broadly covers lifecycle digitisation project planning and the process for embarking
on digitisation at the British Library including considerations of copyright, metadata,
preservation and access issues. Includes a digitisation studio tour.
Digital Scholarship Training Programme

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104 Communicating our collections online
It will explore emerging opportunities for sharing digitised collections online on
platforms ranging from Pinterest, to the British Library Facebook and History Pin.
105 Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage
Institutions
Provides an overview of the history and types of crowdsourcing projects in memory
institutions, illustrating best practices and providing guidance in getting started in
this area.
106 Introduction to Scholarly Markup: Text Encoding Initiative & EAD
This course will introduce participants to Extensible Markup Language (XML),
specifically the version developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for document
content markup. It will survey the basics of TEI used by scholars and librarians, and
contextualize it in relation to other XML technologies, such as Encoded Archival
Description (EAD), transformation languages, and schema languages. The course
will provide opportunities for applied learning that will assist participants in
understanding TEI independently and in relation to other technologies.
Digital Scholarship Training Programme

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107 Data Visualisation for historical collections
This course provides an overview of key concepts in data visualisation and shows
how freely available visualisation tools can be used to help scholars understand,
analyse and present large-scale datasets in the humanities and sciences.
108 Geo-referencing and Geocoding
This course will provide an introduction to geo-referencing and geocoding historical
maps and data. Through guided tasks, short talks and exercises, the course will
explore how geo-referencing and geocoding can be used to display content in
innovative, research orientated, and user-friendly ways.
109 Information Integration: Mash-ups, API’s and The Semantic Web
Introduces staff to the fundamentals of information integration and sharing from
web mash-ups, API’s to semantic web/linked open data technology and how these
technologies are being used to communicate and connect collections online.
Digital Scholarship Training Programme

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110 Managing personal digital research information
This course will provide an introduction to managing digital research information. It
will explain how reference management software can be used to manage individual
and collaborative research.
111 Social Media
Sessions cover the Library’s Social Media Policy and offer practical introductions to
Twitter and Blogging for beginners.
112 Working collaboratively: Using the BL Wiki and Beyond
Provides practical training in the Library’s internal document sharing services such
as the Wiki and Yammer as well as Google Drive, which underpin much of the
Digital Scholarship Training Programme.
113 Presentation skills: From Powerpoint to Prezi
Strong presentation skills are vital for engaging audiences, ensuring your key
messages are understood and positively remembered. This course covers
presentation preparation, understanding and involving audiences, and using visual
aids effectively.
Digital Scholarship Training Programme

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114 Foundations in working with Digital Objects: From Images to A/V
Covers basic image and A/V literacy, introducing attendees to common terminology
and concepts related to working with these digital objects. Through practical
exercises participants learn about the creation, processing, editing, management
and use of digital objects.
115 Behind the Screen: Basics of the Web
Introduces the history of computing, demystifying the difference between the
internet and the web, and offers practical experience in creating simple webpages
using different languages of the web including HTML, XHTML and XML.
116 Metadata at the British Library
The goal of this course is to increase participants' literacy with the various
cataloguing systems and standards used for physical and digital collections across
the British Library.
Digital Scholarship Training Programme

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117 Digital Storytelling
Attendees will learn about storytelling as a communications approach, and consider
its potential in the context of their own work. There will also be a demonstration of
the different tools required for producing digital stories and guidance on using social
media to improve the potential for sharing and discoverability.
118 Cleaning up Data
This popular Digital Scholarship Training Programme workshop provides a hands-
on guided introduction to OpenRefine, a powerful open source tool for cleaning
messy data and augmenting it. It's like Excel on steroids.
119 Programming in Libraries
This course aims to provide an introduction to querying, transforming and mining
research data using the command line. It will explore why well documented and
structured research data is an important prerequisite of data mining, before
introducing a number of basic Unix command line actions for querying,
transforming, and mining research data. The course is aimed at beginners, so no
knowledge of code or programming is required!
Digital Scholarship Training Programme

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120 Distant Reading
This is a new course, currently being developed. Building on the data
visualisation course, it will provide an overview of the methods and tools
available to help understand collections or corpora as datasets.
121 Copyright at the British Library
Copyright overview; including advice for Digitisation Projects
and Reader Facing Staff
The course aims to provide a very general overview of copyright law in the UK;
and information on how the Library’s policies and processes deal with copyright
in the context of digitisation projects.
Plus the Library’s policies and processes for dealing with copyright queries from
Library readers and users.
Digital Scholarship Training Programme

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https://www.libcrowds.com/

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This is a casual meet up arranged by the Digital Research Team every THIRD
Tuesday of the month 10:00-12:00 to work through an online tutorial at everyone's
own pace but with support of colleagues.
We use it as an opportunity to explore new tools/techniques/applications relevant to
digital research and keep our own skills up to speed.
Note this is not a formal training session, we're all learning together and come to
the tutorials with a variety of experience/knowledge/skills.

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Introductions to Machine Learning
Transforming XML with XSLT
Using Gazetteers to Extract Sets of Keywords from Free-Flowing
Texts and Getting Started with Topic Modelling and MALLET
Interactive writing platforms: Twine and Inklewriter
Regular Expressions & OpenRefine
Social network analysis

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The Publishing Trap
Jane Secker and Chris Morrison gave a demonstration of "The Publishing Trap"; a board
game developed by the UK Copyright Literacy team that explores the impact of scholarly
communications choices and discusses the role of open access in research.
Aim of the Game:
The game follows the academic career of four characters who at each stage in their career,
from PhD submission, through to Professorship, are presented with a series of scenarios about
which they have to make choices.
The characters make decisions about how to disseminate their research at conferences, in
academic journals and in monographs or textbooks. Ultimately the game helps researchers to
understand how money, intellectual property rights, and both open and closed publishing
models affect the dissemination and impact of their research.
Through playing the game in teams, players get to discuss the impact of each character’s
choices. The game ends at the end of the character’s life, when players sees the
consequences of the choices they have made in terms of money, knowledge and impact.
https://copyrightliteracy.org/resources/the-publishing-trap/

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21st Century Curatorship Talks
• Professional development talks and seminars
• Visiting speakers from other institutions
• Forum for keeping up with new developments and emerging technologies in
GLAM sector
• Open to all colleagues across the library who wish to broaden their knowledge

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Digital Scholarship Reading Group
• Informal lunchtime discussions on the first Wednesday of each month
• Discuss an article, conference paper or video related to digital scholarship
• All welcome – we love suggestions for topics that are relevant to other teams
• Great way to keep up with new ideas or reality check trends in digital

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Web: http://www.bl.uk/subjects/digital-scholarship
Blog:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Email: digitalresearch@bl.uk
Twitter: @BL_DigiSchol #bldigital