bl labs presentation to social sciences team at the british library
DESCRIPTION
Presentation given my Mahendra Mahey about British Library to the Social Sciences Team meeting on Wednesday 17th of April 2013, 10:15 - 10:45.TRANSCRIPT
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British Library Labshttp://labs.bl.uk
Social Science Team Meeting – British Library LabsWednesday 17th April 2013, 10:25 -10:35Board Room, St Pancras
Mr Mahendra MaheyBL Labs Project Manager
Scholarship and Collections, Digital Scholarship
2http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
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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3http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
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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4http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
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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5http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
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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6http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
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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7http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
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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8http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
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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9http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
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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10http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
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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11http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
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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13http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
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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14http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
BL Labs Hackathons..
• Bringing researchers, developers, curators and collections together at events
• Brainstorming ideas
• Scoping research and prototypes
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15http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
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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18http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
Website
http://labs.bl.uk
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(Wiki based…we want people interested in the project to be involved and add content)
19http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
Launch Event
• 25 March 2013
• Getting researchers doing the kind of research BL Labs is interested in
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20http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
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
21http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
Social Sciences
• I have a social sciences background!
• I want to encourage social science type research with BL content
• How do we work together?
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22http://labs.bl.uk [email protected]
What next?
Speak to me: 0207 412 7324
Email me: [email protected]
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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