Slides from seminar on Digital Cultural Heritage given to UCL Institute of Sustainable Heritage's two programmes: the MSc Sustainable Heritage and the MRes Science and Engineering in Arts, Heritage and Archaeology.
Open Science, Open Data: towards a new transparent and reproducible ecosystemLIBER Europe
Presented at the Preforma Open Source Workshop 8 April 2016
As a library membership organization, LIBER works on addressing Open Science barriers. Standardisation of file formats can really help in overcoming some of these barriers: it enables us to process and preserve data in a controlled way, it helps ensure that outputs are really open and accessible in the long term and it improves interoperability of new tools and services. Making sure data is stored in a controlled way and can be (re) used today and in the future is an important element in Open Science. We see this as not only a technical challenge but also a social one: awareness, trust and community building is needed in order to ensure uptake of these standards. Libraries therefore have a valuable role to play in the development of good research data management throughout all phases of the Open Data lifecycle.
Presentada en la Jornada Internacional sobre Archivos Web y Depósito Legal Electrónico, en la Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE), el día 9 de julio de 2013.
Open Science, Open Data: towards a new transparent and reproducible ecosystemLIBER Europe
Presented at the Preforma Open Source Workshop 8 April 2016
As a library membership organization, LIBER works on addressing Open Science barriers. Standardisation of file formats can really help in overcoming some of these barriers: it enables us to process and preserve data in a controlled way, it helps ensure that outputs are really open and accessible in the long term and it improves interoperability of new tools and services. Making sure data is stored in a controlled way and can be (re) used today and in the future is an important element in Open Science. We see this as not only a technical challenge but also a social one: awareness, trust and community building is needed in order to ensure uptake of these standards. Libraries therefore have a valuable role to play in the development of good research data management throughout all phases of the Open Data lifecycle.
Presentada en la Jornada Internacional sobre Archivos Web y Depósito Legal Electrónico, en la Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE), el día 9 de julio de 2013.
How university libraries of the future need to make global content accessible locally, and local content accessible globally. Given at Slovakian Digital Library conference, October 2012
Rethink research, illuminate history with the British LibraryMia
Join Dr Mia Ridge, Digital Curator for Western Heritage Collections at the British Library, to discover how research and technology can create a richer picture of our past. Living with Machines is a collaborative project between the Alan Turing Institute, universities and the British Library – home to the world’s most comprehensive research collection. Together, they are using data science and digital history methods to analyse millions of historical documents and understand the impact of mechanisation in the 19th century. Their initial approach has focused on specific regions like Yorkshire that will help tell us the story of industrialisation in Britain.
This presentation will discuss how the structured data, together with the semantically indexed/mined entities in semi-structured and unstructured data, are contributing to researches beyond libraries, especially in digital humanities. It aims to explore the opportunities and strategies to use, reuse, share, and effectively elaborate the smart data -- generated or to be generated -- in libraries.
Clare Lanigan - Presentation to IES Studentsdri_ireland
Presentation given by Clare Lanigan, DRI Education and Outreach Manager, to students of the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina, at the Institute for the International Education of Students (IES) Abroad centre in Rathmines, Dublin, on 1 June 2017.
How university libraries of the future need to make global content accessible locally, and local content accessible globally. Given at Slovakian Digital Library conference, October 2012
Rethink research, illuminate history with the British LibraryMia
Join Dr Mia Ridge, Digital Curator for Western Heritage Collections at the British Library, to discover how research and technology can create a richer picture of our past. Living with Machines is a collaborative project between the Alan Turing Institute, universities and the British Library – home to the world’s most comprehensive research collection. Together, they are using data science and digital history methods to analyse millions of historical documents and understand the impact of mechanisation in the 19th century. Their initial approach has focused on specific regions like Yorkshire that will help tell us the story of industrialisation in Britain.
This presentation will discuss how the structured data, together with the semantically indexed/mined entities in semi-structured and unstructured data, are contributing to researches beyond libraries, especially in digital humanities. It aims to explore the opportunities and strategies to use, reuse, share, and effectively elaborate the smart data -- generated or to be generated -- in libraries.
Clare Lanigan - Presentation to IES Studentsdri_ireland
Presentation given by Clare Lanigan, DRI Education and Outreach Manager, to students of the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina, at the Institute for the International Education of Students (IES) Abroad centre in Rathmines, Dublin, on 1 June 2017.
Europeana 2019 - Connect Communities - Pitch your projectEuropeana
Slides 3 - 10: The GIFT Box: Helping museums make richer digital experiences for their visitors by Anders Sundnes Lovlie
Slides 11 - 18: Between people and things - Transfer of knowledge at SHMH by Elisabeth Böhm
Slides 19 - 30: Automated recognition of historical image content by Tino Mager
Slides 31 - 51: 50s in Europe: Kaleidoscope by Sofie Taes
Slides 52 - 63: CrowdHeritage: Crowdsourcing Platform for Enriching Europeana Metadata by Vassilis Tzouvaras
Slides 64 - 73: One by One: developing digital literacy in museums by Anra Kennedy
Slides 74 - 85: HeritageMaps.ie - Ireland's One-Stop Heritage Portal by Patrick Reid
Slides 86 - 90: Open GLAM now! - Sharing knowledge openly online by Larissa Borck
Slides 91 - 103: Endangered Archives Programme the world's most diverse online archive by Tristan Roddis
Slides 104 - 109: We transform the world with culture - Our impact on climate change by Barbara Fischer, Killian Downing and Peter Soemers
presented at the International Conference on Challenges in Preserving and Managing Cultural Heritage Resources, held on 2005 October 19-21 at the Institute of Social Order, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines
NORFest 2023 Lightning Talks Session Three dri_ireland
Lightning Talk Session 3: Enabling FAIR Research Data and Other Outputs
The Irish ORCID Consortium
presented by Catherine Ferris, IReL;
Exploring Large-Scale Open Data: The Curatr Platform
presented by Derek Greene, University College Dublin;
A Workflow for Research Data Management (RDM): Aligning the Management of Research Data
presented by Gail Birkbeck, University College Dublin;
Making Cultural Heritage Data FAIR: Developing Recommendations for the WorldFAIR Project at the Digital Repository of Ireland
presented by Joan Murphy, Digital Repository of Ireland.
A whirlwind introduction to digital humanities for CDP Digital Humanities: Collections & Heritage - current challenges and futures workshop. February 22, 2018 Imperial War Museum
Tanya Szrajber, The British Museum Collection DatabaseAndrew Prescott
'The British Museum Collection Database: How to Create and Manage over 2,000,000 Records': seminar by Tanya Szrajber, Head of Documentation, The British Museum, to Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London, 20 November 2012
Similar to Digital Cultural Heritage: Experiences from British Library (20)
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2. www.bl.uk 2
The Digital Scholarship Team
A cross-disciplinary mix of curators,
digital history and humanities scholars,
librarians, data & computer scientists.
Founded in 2010, we support the
innovative use of British Library's digital
collections and data through:
• Getting content in digital form and
online
• Offering digital research support and
guidance
• Supporting collaborative projects
• Running events, competitions, and
awards
3. www.bl.uk 3
The British Library is the
national library of the UK
and by many counts one
of the largest research
libraries in the world.
By law (Legal Deposit) a
copy of every UK and
Ireland print publication
must be given to the
British Library by its
publishers. In 2013 this
extended to digital.
4. www.bl.uk 4
Well over 150 Million items
are currently stored in
London and in York.
The building in St Pancras
can sit 1,200 researchers
at any one time across 11
reading rooms.
If you saw 5 items a day it
would take you 80,000
years to see the whole
collection.
16. www.bl.uk 16
Printers “fill the world with
pamphlets and books that
are foolish, ignorant,
malignant, libelous, mad,
impious and subversive;
and such is the flood that
even things that might
have done some good lose
all their goodness,”
….wrote Erasmus, 15th
Century
19. www.bl.uk 19
Not as simple as point and click…
Activity/Overhead Description
Technological Infrastructure Includes equipment (scanners, computers), software and suitable
space for Digitisation
Selection Choosing material to be digitised. This includes rights clearance.
Description Cataloguing, description, indexing and the creation of management
information
Conservation Care, handling, packaging, transport and conservation of the material.
Preparation Making objects and books ready to be digitised: for example unbinding
Conversion to master Digital formats Scanning, digital photography or audio and video encoding
Production of intermediates For example, access copies.
Quality Management Error checking and correction
Storage/maintenance Storage and management of digital assets for use and preservation. Format migration.
http://nickpoole.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/digiti_report.pdf
20. www.bl.uk 20
Why we digitise, how we prioritise
• Is it unique to the British Library collection and does it have a particular
relevance to UK cultural heritage?
• What additional user benefits and outcomes might digitisation bring the
object (accessibility & discoverability, reconstruction, reunification, creative re-
use, scientific enquiry, authentication)
• Could it help preserve the original object? Or document the original
object before going out on loan, or to be sold overseas?
• Does someone with a lot of £ want to digitise it? Strategic Partnerships
can support huge collections getting online, they also bring commercial
opportunities, revenue generation, technical expertise.
21. www.bl.uk 21
What are ways in which we
might make a digital
collection truly
“accessible”?
22. www.bl.uk 22
• Open Rights
• Open platforms
• Cataloguing & description
• APIs to share
• User Experience Testing
• Full text (Optical Character Recognition, Transcription, Named
entity recognition)
• Multiple language support (Translations)
• Exhibitions & Interpretations
• Search engine optimisation (Schema.org)
23. www.bl.uk 23
• A data set represents a distinct collection of data ideally packaged,
preserved and made accessible for enquiry.
• Humanities data might be sets of bibliographic information, images,
image processing details, texts, texts with mark-up and annotations
etc.
• No one knows our collections data better. This expertise is essential
in digital scholarship.
• We can play a part by creating reliable datasets for reuse by
researchers-also allowing us to respond more quickly to frequent
similar requests.
• Easy access to data and datasets which researchers can trust
enables new research
Accessibility=Data
24. www.bl.uk 24
• The Library has spent the last two decades creating digital assets
through digitisation and preserving born-digital objects and will do
far into the future.
• We can now do much more than use technology to simply discover
these digital objects and must embrace the opportunities afforded
by analysing these digital collections at scale.
• If scholars view our archives as an infinite pool of multiple layers of
loosely held data from which new research questions can be wrung
then so must we.
• The Digital Research Team and BL Labs aim to provide services
beyond simple resource discovery then, that is, beyond helping to
point a single user to a single items or objects via a catalogue
The Digital Research View
25. www.bl.uk 25
The emergence of the new digital humanities isn’t an isolated
academic phenomenon. The institutional and disciplinary changes
are part of a larger cultural shift, inside and outside the
academy, a rapid cycle of emergence and convergence in
technology and culture
Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2014)
http://lisacharlotterost.github.io/2015/06/20/Searching-through-the-years/
27. www.bl.uk 27
Political Meetings Mapper
Dr. Katrina Navickas, a self-professed
luddite, wanted to know how many, and
where, Chartist movement meetings took
place in the 19th Century and if there was a
more efficient way to extract this information
programmatically from our digitised
newspapers, rather than by hand.
5,519 meetings held from 1838 to 1850
discovered in 462 towns and villages across
the UK!
Will be added to her existing findings:
http://protesthistory.org.uk/the-story-1789-
1848/database-of-meetings
“I was able to do in minutes with a python code what
I’d spent the last ten years trying to do by hand!”
-Dr. Katrina Navickas, BL Labs Winner 2015
32. www.bl.uk 32
‘Early users of medieval books
of hours and prayer books left
signs of their reading in the form
of fingerprints in the margins.
The darkness of their
fingerprints correlates to
the intensity of their use
and handling. A
densitometer -- a machine that
measures the darkness of a
reflecting surface -- can reveal
which texts a reader favored.’
Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Dirty Books:
Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval
Manuscripts Using a Densitometer’,
Journal of Historians of Nederlandish Art
(2010)
34. www.bl.uk 34
Where do we find the £? Some case
studies…
• Public/Private Partnerships: (Microsoft) 19th Century Books Online
• Charitable Funds: (Arcadia) Endangered Archives Programme
• Internal budgets: (though mostly just for stabilisation/preservation)
Libcrowds
• Grants: (Newton/AHRC) Two Centuries of Indian Print
• Government (and gamblers): (Heritage Lottery Fund) Unlocking our
Sound Heritage
• Individual donations: Support Us
37. www.bl.uk 37
Endangered Archives Programme
Through an annual competition, EAP grants
provide funding to preserve social and
cultural archival material that is in danger of
destruction, neglect or physical deterioration
world-wide.
To date, the EAP has awarded 290 grants in
80 countries, preserving cultural and social
archives across Africa, Asia, Europe,
Americas and Oceania.
EAP266: History of Bolama, the first capital of Portuguese
Guinea (1879-1941), as reflected in the Guinean National
Historical Archives
http://sounds.bl.uk/World-and-
traditional-music/Syliphone-record-
label-collection
40. www.bl.uk 40
Big Data History of Music
How can vast amounts of bibliographic data held by research libraries be unlocked for
music researchers to analyse?
Can this data be interrogated in ways that challenge the traditional narratives of music
history?
Analyses and visualisations
exposed previously
uncharted patterns in the
history of music, for instance
the rise and fall of music
printing in 16th- and 17th-
century Europe (huge dips in
output in Venice were down
to plague and war).
https://www.royalholloway.ac
.uk/music/research/abigdata
historyofmusic/home.aspx
41. www.bl.uk 41
Pilot will see over 4,000 items between
1713 to 1914, mostly Bengali to be
digitised and catalogued
http://www.bl.uk/press-
releases/2015/november/unlocking-indias-
printed-heritage
Dedicated Digital Curator supporting
computationally driven research, such as
text mining, with outputs, through creating
and curating datasets for inclusion on
data.bl.uk and providing digital skills
training.
Two Centuries of Indian Print
Right: Pleasing tales designed to improve the understanding, and
direct the conduct of young persons, 1825
43. www.bl.uk 43
The “West and the rest”
Buttressed by the rise of data science, faculty
across humanities fields have harnessed
search algorithms and optical character
recognition (OCR) to conduct research on an
unprecedented scale. Petabytes, not pages,
are now the unit of analysis. Yet the majority of
these tools only handle Latin script.
“Digital databases and text corpora – the ‘raw
material’ of text mining and computational text
analysis – are far more abundant for English
and other Latin alphabetic scripts than they are
for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Sanskrit, Hindi,
Arabic and other non-Latin orthographies,”
Mullaney said. Troves of unread primary
sources lie dormant because no text mining
technology exists to parse them…..”
http://news.stanford.edu/thedish/2016/10/17/digital-humanities-scholars-
receive-mellon-support/
45. www.bl.uk 45
Food for thought
• What are some ways biases might manifest themselves in
digitised archives? Think about accessibility, formats,
collection decisions, languages…
• How might technology & digitisation impact on our
understanding of history?
• How might digital technology help or hinder bias in the
archive?
• What active things can we as professionals do to
mitigate/reverse bias in the archive?
46. www.bl.uk 46
A note on skills
The Digital Scholarship Training
Programme is an internal staff
training initiative by the Digital Curator
team that launched in November
2012.
Helps us to situate our collections and
expertise in the realm of digital
research. Explore opportunities and
challenges.
LibraryCarpentry &
Programming Historian are great
places to start!
47. www.bl.uk 47
Internal Staff Courses
• 101 This is Digital Scholarship
• 103 Digitisation at British Library
• 105 Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions
• 107 Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research
• 108 Geocoding Historical Information and Digital Mapping
• 109 Data on the Web: Mash-ups, API’s and The Semantic Web
• 118 Cleaning up Data
Our Hack & Yacks
• Handwritten Text Recognition with Transkribus
• From Paper Maps to the Web: A DIY Digital Maps Primer
• Literary & Historical Network Analysis using Gephi
• Interactive writing platforms: Twine and Inklewriter