Presentation given by Mahendra Mahey at the

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British Library Labs
http://labs.bl.uk
Digital Scholarship Meeting – British Library Labs
Wednesday 17th
April 2013, 11:30 -11:45
Meeting Room H, St Pancras
Mr Mahendra Mahey
BL Labs Project Manager
Scholarship and Collections,
Digital Scholarship

2. 2http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Who am I?
Mahendra Mahey
Worked for 20 years in Further and Higher Education and
Libraries
• Over 10 years as a Social Science and Computing Lecturer
• Project Manager
• Researcher
• Working with Developer and Research Communities
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3. 3http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
The Project
• Digital Scholarship
• 2 Year Mellon Foundation funded project
• Managed by Mahendra Mahey
• Line management >Aly Conteh>Adam Farquhar
• Encouraging scholars to do research across BL collections
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4. 4http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Project Details…1
• Use BL collections e.g. access and download
• Analyse the content especially entire collections (i.e.
cross collection research)
• Do research, publish, make things…
• Transforming services and tools for scholars using BL
collections
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5. 5http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Project Details…2
• One part is organising competitions, events and various
activities
• Creating an environment where scholars can work
intensively with Library’s digital collections (winners will
be resident), but not only…
• We want to encourage research across collections so
ideas can be pursued by talking to BL staff and scholars
who are interested in conducting research, e.g.
meetings, events etc
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6. 6http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
BL Labs Competition
• 2 Competitions
• Winners will work at the BL ‘in residence’
• Competitions highlight materials
• Focus particularly on cross collection research if possible
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7. 7http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
BL Labs Content
• Work with curators to identify those collections that are
suitable for BL labs
• Engage researchers with these materials through meetings,
road- shows, hackathons, promotions (including competitions
and events)
• Some content…
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8. 8http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
British National Bibliographic
Data
bnb.data.bl.uk
• 2.6 Million individual records detailing Title, Author, Subject,
Descriptions and more of books and journals published or
distributed in the United Kingdom and Ireland since 1950
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9. 9http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
UK Web Archive Data
data.webarchive.org.uk/opendata
• 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.
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10. 10http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
19th
Century Digitised Books
• 68,000 digitised volumes and their accompanying JP2, PDF,
metadata and OCR text files from our Historical 19th Century
Books collection
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11. 11http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Environment and Nature
Sounds
• thousands of recordings from the Sound Archive's unrivalled
natural sounds collection is available for free download as
MP3’s to staff and students UK higher and further education
institutions
• http://sounds.bl.uk/Environment/
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12. 12http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Book ordering and
borrower data…
• Millions of records!!
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13. 13http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
BL Labs Services
• Identify appropriate services to be developed for scholars
wanting to use collections for research
• Lead by Technical lead (in recruitment)
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14. 14http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
BL Labs Hackathons..
• Bringing researchers, developers, curators and collections
together at events
• Brainstorming ideas
• Scoping research and prototypes
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15. 15http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Case studies generated for
others to learn..
• Case studies of the research generated from the competitions
and general activity of BL Labs
• Inform the Library and other libraries around the world about
the issues involved in opening up collections for research
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16. 16http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Our ‘brand’
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17. 17http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Twitter and Hash Tag
@BL_Labs
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#BL_Labs

18. 18http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Website
http://labs.bl.uk
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(Wiki based…we want people interested in the
project to be involved and add content)

19. 19http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Launch Event
• 25 March 2013
• Getting researchers doing the kind
of research BL Labs is interested in
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20. 20http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Example Methodologies of
cross collection research
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• Corpus Analysis tools
• Visualisations
• Location based searching
• Geotagging
• Annotation
• APIs for datasets e.g. Metadata
• Crowdsourcing / Human Computation
• Natural Language Processing
• Transcribing

21. 21http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
How we want you to
engage with the project?
• Are you responsible for a collection?
• Are you engaged with researchers?
• How would researchers get access to the collection?
• Do you know what the access issues are?
• Do you have any ideas of how the collection could be used for
research purposes?
• Useful contacts of potential researchers who BL labs could
work with
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22. 22http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
What next?
Speak to me: 0207 412 7324
Email me: mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
BL Labs Website: http://labs.bl.uk/
Twitter: @BL_Labs
Hash Tag:#bl_labs
Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
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