Presentation given to British Library Staff as part of C21st Curatorship staff talks by Mahendra Mahey (British Library Labs Manager) and Stella Wisdom (Digital Curator)

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British Library Labs
http://labs.bl.uk
C21st Curatorship staff talk – British Library Labs
Friday 22nd
March 2013, 1100 -1200
Meeting Room H, St Pancras
Stella Wisdom
Digital Curator
Mr Mahendra Mahey
BL Labs Project Manager
Scholarship and Collections, Digital Scholarship

2. 2http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Timings
• Background to Project – Stella Wisdom
• The Project Plan – Mahendra Mahey
• How the project will engage with British Library Staff
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3. 3http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Overview
• Background to the Project - Stella
• Introduction - Mahendra
• BL Labs in more detail - Mahendra
• Research Methods and Content that could be used with BL Labs -
Stella
• For a competition
• For work with BL labs
• How we want to engage with British Library Staff
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The project in a nutshell…
“Every book tells a
story, but what can
68,000 books tell you?”
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Background the project
• Adam Farquhar and Chris Clarke wrote the proposal
• Money from a grant from Andrew Mellon Foundation
• 2 year initial project
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Project Board
• Aly Conteh
• Adam Farquhar (SRO)
• Michelle Burton
• Maja Maricevic
• Richard Boulderstone
• Kristian Jensen
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Advisory Board
• Tim Hitchcock
• Andrew Prescott
• Bill Thompson
• Claire Warwick
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Our ‘brand’
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…hot off the press – e-flyer (draft)

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Post Card for researchers…
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Website and email
http://labs.bl.uk
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(Wiki based…we want people interested in the
project to be involved and add content)
labs@bl.uk
All enquiries to be sent here

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Ideas and website
• Website is wiki based
• Register and start creating pages soon!
• Log ideas, incubate, grow and build interactions with those
interested
• Resources
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12. 12http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Blog and other
• We will be using the Digital Scholarship Blog
• http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
• Mailing / Discussion list…
• http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/BL-Labs
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Launch Event
• 25 March 2013
• Getting researchers doing the kind of research BL Labs is
interested in
• BL content available
• First competition announcement
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Who am I?
Mahendra Mahey
Worked for 20 years in Further and Higher Education and
Libraries
Worked for over 7 years at UKOLN at University of Bath
• DevCSI project – Developer Community Support Innovation
initiative
• CERIF
• Repositories Research Team
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Before University of
Bath…
JISC Regional Support Centres
• Five years (West Midlands and Scotland)
• ILT adviser for Electronic Resources
• Further and Higher Education Colleges
• Working with librarians, lecturers and researchers
Over 10 years teaching in the UK and Poland
• Warsaw, Poland
• Colleges in the West Midlands
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The Project
• Digital Scholarship
• 2 Year Mellon Foundation funded project
• Managed by Mahendra Mahey
• Line management >Aly Conteh>Adam Farquhar
• Stella Wisdom setting up infrastructure for project before I
started (Jan – Mar)
• Nora McGregor – working through BL content available for BL
Labs
• Encouraging scholars to do research across BL collections 16

17. 17http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
More detail about BL Labs…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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More detail about BL Labs…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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19. 19http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
The Plan
• Launch Event – 25th
March 2013
• Announce draft details of first competition at
Launch event
• Hack event for interested parties – end of May
2013
• End of June - close competition and decide
winners at event in York
• July – Oct– Winner works on winning entry with
BL team
• Case studies produced around Nov/Dec
• Do it all again for 2014
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•Continue to work
with BL
staff/Researchers
to identify those
collections
• that people want
to engage with
the project and
open their
collections for
research

20. 20http://labs.bl.uk labs@bl.uk
Elements to the plan…
• Policy Framework
• BL Labs Competitions
• Content to be used with BL Labs
• BL Labs Services
• BL Labs Hackathons
• Disseminating findings
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Policy Framework
Collecting scholars’ feedback to inform the access and reuse
policy
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BL Labs Competition
At least 2 Competitions
Winners will work at the BL ‘in residence’
Competitions highlight materials
Focus particularly on cross collection research
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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)
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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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BL Labs Hackathons..
• Bringing researchers, developers, curators and collections
together at events
• Brainstorming ideas
• Scoping research and prototypes
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Disseminating Findings…
• Website
• Email to lists
• Blog
• Interviews
• Case Studies
• Reports
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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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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

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Maps, Music, Audio,
Philatelic
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Digitisation, International Dunhuang Programme,
Endangered Archives Programme
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Massive Digitised collections
through partnership
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Improving Access by converting
to text
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Visualising personal digital
archives and web archives
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Linked Open data
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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. It is
currently available as Linked Open Data, Basic RDF/XML and
Marc21. An excellent resource for uncovering publishing
trends across the decades!
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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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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 available under Creative Commons Public
Domain Mark.
• This unique selection includes many rare or inaccessible
books published between 1789 and 1914 and covers a wide
range of subject areas including philosophy, history, poetry
and literature.
• representative materials here: britishlibrary19c.tumblr.com
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International Dunhuang
Project
• IDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make
information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles
and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the
Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to
encourage their use through educational and research
programmes
• http://idp.bl.uk/pages/education_research.a4d
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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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Book ordering data…
• Every day thousands of items are ordered up from the library
stacks and delivered to researchers in our reading rooms. We
can provide daily anonymised reports of these titles including
shelfmark information and reading room location
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The story of working with BL
Labs…Four days in…
Wildlife and Environmental sounds…
• Who looks after this collection?
• Meet up have a discussion about the collection
• Important questions?
• Access, who and how can they be used?
• How much is there?
• Can collections be gathered for cross collection research? Issues and how can it
be accessed? Easy, difficult, how long?
• Can they be used for a competition? Can they be used for BL labs?
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How we want you to
engage with the project?
• Are you responsible for a collection?
• 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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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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Questions…
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