british library labs presentation given to british library staff

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British Library Labshttp://labs.bl.uk

C21st Curatorship staff talk – British Library LabsFriday 22nd March 2013, 1100 -1200Meeting Room H, St Pancras

Stella WisdomDigital CuratorMr Mahendra MaheyBL Labs Project Manager

Scholarship and Collections, Digital Scholarship

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Timings

• Background to Project – Stella Wisdom

• The Project Plan – Mahendra Mahey

• How the project will engage with British Library Staff

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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.ukAll 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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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 collections16

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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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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 201419

•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

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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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