British Library Labs Overview

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol #bldigital https://goo.gl/Mj9DWR
British Library Labs
What is British Library Labs and what have we learned over
the last four years?
Mahendra Mahey
1315 – 1400, 22 March 2017
Learning the Lessons of working with the British Library’s Digital Content and Data for your research
(History UK with Liverpool John Moores University)
https://goo.gl/Mj9DWR

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The British Library
Inside the British Library
Space for 1200 readers, around 400,000 visitors per year
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
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
> 3* 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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Curators /
Researchers
Access &
Reuse Group
©
Developers/
Technical
Staff
Project
Board
Universities & wider
The World
ResearchersBL Labs
British Library
Digital
Scholarship
Digital
Content
United Kingdom
Advisory
Board
Digital
Research
Stakeholders involved in Labs

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Digital research methods
Visualisations
Using Application Programming Interfaces
for datasets e.g. Metadata, Images Annotation
Location based searching & Geo-tagging 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 doing this?
• Working closely with and listening to those who want use
our digital collections and data for their work and helping to
build services, tools and processes to support them
• We can learn how we are and should be supporting them.
– Is the access to digital collections we provide sufficient?
– Do we have the right tools?
– Do we provide the right support?
– Where are the gaps between what they want and what we
can give?
– How do we build the bridges to overcome them?
– Many more reasons…

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digital
Data all around us!
/
Knowledge Quarter London
55 knowledge organisations within 1 mile radius of
Kings Cross, http://www.knowledgequarter.london
https://goo.gl/pGO7QY
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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So little digitised…?
• Common misconception that all our physical items are digitised.
No! Costs time and resources!
• Still a big number though!
• Dialogue is either:
– you are lucky and we have the digital content relevant to your
research
– we don’t have, exactly what your looking for but this is what
we have, is there anything of interest?
• We tend to attract researchers with ‘fuzzier’ research boundaries
• Artists find this dialogue easier
• Access easier for out of copyright content

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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
Digital access at the Library

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The Story of the Collection!
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 Surprises
Metadata
Old format not supported
What media was the
digitisation done from?
Documentation
No Metadata
Messy Metadata
Still there?
Sometimes it’s complicated, better to know as much as possible, if you want to open it up!

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Finding Open Digital Collections
at the British Library
• Curated?
Learn the story behind a collection!
Is there a human who knows the ‘story’
about the collection, who wants it used, are
there any surprises lurking?
• Where is it, is it accessible?
• Licensing?
Internal Access and Reuse and Licensing Group
(Risk assessment group – Strategic, Commercial,
Copyright, Curatorial, Technical)
• Metadata available?
What state is it and does it need cleaning?
https://goo.gl/Qjeqo1
https://goo.gl/Kfc4qc
Access &
Reuse Group
©

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Open Licensed Digital Content?
15% Openly
Licensed
Working through
Breakdown by collection*
Manuscripts 59%
Books 9%
Maps and Views 7%
Newspapers 3%
Archives and Records 3%
Paintings, Prints and Drawings 2%
*Based on digitisation projects
Largest proportion of funding
Public / Private Partnership
15% Openly Licensed
85% Available onsite

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READING
ROOM
ON
SITE
NOT
ONLINE
OPEN
British Library
£
Digital access at the Library
Labs Residency Model

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Playbills, Books, Newspapers
(includes OCR)
Digital collections and Datasets
At the British Library
British National
Bibliography
http://bnb.data.bl.uk
http://sounds.bl.uk
http://dml.city.ac.uk/
Music (Recordings & Sheet) & Sounds
http://goo.gl/frSMJtBroadcast News (TV and Radio)
http://goo.gl/cwThHw
http://goo.gl/pBkisZhttp://goo.gl/E8aRyQ
Usage dataImages, 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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Cultural Heritage Datasets
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
Discussion list: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CULTURAL-HERITAGE-DATASETS

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Taking a peek at our Open Data

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002819694

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

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OCR XML Generated by ABBY Fine Reader

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Taking a peek at our onsite only
accessible data

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Accessing digitised newspapers
onsite at the BL
• Need to be security cleared so that you exist as a BL entity
– Hence ‘Researcher in Residence Model’
• Permission required from internal IP department and
perhaps commercial company involved in the digitisation
• 20 % rule in terms of re-use in research
• Learning pathways so that this becomes ‘everyday’

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onsite at the BL
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Results of digitisation exist on Windows file shares!
Windows 7, external access possible through Citrix Server

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

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onsite at the BL
3

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onsite at the BL
4

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onsite at the BL
5

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onsite at the BL
6

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onsite at the BL
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onsite at the BL
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onsite at the BL
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onsite at the BL
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onsite at the BL
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onsite at the BL
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onsite at the BL
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Accessing original master image (not cropped or post processed
Or Service Copy (post processed)
and results of OCR available as ALTO XML

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onsite at the BL
14a
Accessing original master image (not cropped or post processed)

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

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

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onsite at the BL
Accessing Service Copy (post processed)
15b

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onsite at the BL
15c
Accessing OCR as ALTO XML

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through Gale Interface (subscription)
1

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through Gale Interface (subscription)
2

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Virtual Infrastructure for OCR text
OCR text scraped from
digitised newspapers
and in cloud
Jupyter notebook
Write code in browser
Results in browser
http://jupyter.org

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What did people
actually do?

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Machine Learning / Reading
• Analogies to how humans read
• Machines acquire ‘knowledge’ and use that knowledge to
make sense of new situations
• BL doing this on a case by case basis.
• Need computational and human effort
• Human input as to where to look > computational ‘lasso
throwing’ > human sift
• Legalities of this process being ‘ironed’ out with publishers
• Not well understood area…

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The smell of soup!
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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Messy Data!
Optical Character Recognition

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Finding things in messy data
Mrs Folly
• Clean up some manually
• Get ‘ground truth’
• Write code to find things
reliably in it automatically
• Try code on messy content
• Tweak if necessary
• Digital lasso around content
• Manually sift through

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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 Re-enactment London

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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/

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Use of Overproof – OCR Correction
Also just re-OCR?

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See Bob Nicholson – Looking for Jokes
See Jennifer Batt – Looking for Poems

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What can 65,000
books tell us?
Image: Artwork by Alicia Martin
Just one open digital collection

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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
Mechanical Curator
http://goo.gl/qPPgxX
Flickr
Snipping out images
from 65,000 Digitised Books*
>600,000,000 views
>15,500,000 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

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Opportunities
– increasing traffic to Library services
You can purchase
a ‘High Res’ Copy
View in the
Library Item Viewer
Download .pdf
All illustrations
in book
Other illustrations in books
Published in same year
View the item in
the Library Catalogue Tags auto generated
User generated
Tag
Grouping for image

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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
http://goo.gl/8SkfM1
Machine Learning
Search Engine
& Google Image
search

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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

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Adam Crymble (2015)
Crowdsource Arcade
What if crowd sourcing
looked like this?
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

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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
Classify into one of 12 categories
>20 million tags added
(total now 20 million overall)
>100,000 experimental captions
Data available soon!
bit.ly/sherlocknet
Pooled surrounding
Optical Character Recognised
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)
http://www.crossroadsofcuriosity.com
David Normal 2014 and 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GRgj7Q5OM0
Rob Walker 2014
http://goo.gl/bNxGZZ
Kris Hoffman (2016)
https://goo.gl/QilqqT
Jiayi Chong 2016
Ling Low 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcOP1E5bRE0
https://www.facebook.com/RealmlandStory/
Paul Rand Pierce 2016
A Hat on the Ground
Spells trouble
Tragic Looking Women
44 Men who Look 44
(Notice the direction faces)

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Mario Klingemann 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgnxnmqnR7Y
Google Arts and Culture Lab – Experiments with Machine Learning
https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/

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Imaginary Cities – BL Labs Project 16-
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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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Some Lessons Learned and Challenges
so far…
• Everything starts from a conversation (external and internal)!
• Need to have several conversations with several stakeholders and tap
into their tacit knowledge that isn’t always written down (esp. internal).
• It’s hard work at the beginning!
• Expectations change when researchers actually see the data, systems
and experience the ‘culture’ of the organisation.
• We tend to work with researchers who can be ‘flexible’ with their
research questions and are willing to embrace challenges.
• Often misunderstandings because of jargon & different meaning of
words.
• Embrace dirty data, it may never be perfect!

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Some Lessons Learned and Challenges
so far…(2)
• Many researchers have the domain knowledge but lack the technical skills to use
Digital Research methods. Should they be teamed up with those that have problems
that need solving (Computing) or get trained?
• Identifying / bridging gaps for researchers to use data, help them ‘navigate’ through
the Library to get the data they want (sometimes).
• Huge appetite to use digital content & data (e.g. Flickr Commons stats).
• Start small and simple, but think big!
• Create and embrace serendipity, stimulate the imagination, work fast, give it energy.
• Letting go of the emotional and psychological connection to “my” collection
• If digitised collections are not used, what is the point of digitising them?
• Fail faster (don’t be afraid), small experiments, reject perfectionism, good enough

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The Magic of Openness!
• By opening collections up we are creating the possibility to
have them used in ways only restricted by human
imagination.
• Need to work hard to tell people about our Digital
Collections and Data especially if not easy to find, creating
serendipity and opportunities for use!
• Give plenty of examples to inspire use!
• Support and celebrate the use!

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Exercise – 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
Work in pairs!
https://data.bl.uk
•Report back on 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

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Contact us
Mahendra Mahey
Manager of BL Labs
mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
labs@bl.uk

British Library Labs Overview

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