Digital Scholarship:widening access to BL collections and services

Dr. Aquiles Alencar-Brayner

@AquilesBrayner

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Digital Research & Curator Team

Formed in 2010 as part of the new Digital Scholarship department

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Our Mission• Support the BL to adopt clear strategies and operating models for

Digital Scholarship

• Develop innovative models for Digital Scholarship exploiting digital content and new technologies

• Offer training and support to BL staff on Digital Scholarship practices and resources

• Involvement with various digital programmes (internal and external) involving digitisation, born-digital materials, publication on the Web, etc.

• Engage with new and existing user communities

• Strengthen the BL capabilities

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Digital Libraries: 10 “in” rules1.Integrity: access to digital object as it has been created2.Integration: different contents and file formats available from a single platform3.Interoperability: different programmes and operating systems compatible with each other4.Instant access: unrestricted access to material, especially from mobile devices5.Interaction: catalogues that provide Web 2.0 features (blogs, wikis, tags, content sharing, etc)6.Information: comprehensive metadata for fast and reliable retrieval of content7.Ingest of content: constant upload of new digital content

8. Interpretation: digital content placed in relation to other items in the collection

9.Innovation: material to be presented in innovative ways10.Indefinite access: digital objects to be preserved for posterity

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Scalability: how to filter, find and analyse the information I need?

• How many data is generated in ONE day?

1. Twitter: 7 TB

2. Facebook: 10 TB

• By 2020 we will have approximately 35 ZB (1.1 Trillion GB) of Data available

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Main Activities

• Staff training

• Promotion of Digital Scholarship within BL

• Curation of digital research data

• Project management

• Engagement with users

• Create and share online content with other libraries and research centres

• Communication channels

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Digital Scholarship Training Programme: 15 courses (offered 3 times a year) launched in October 2012

1. Social Media: Introduction to Yammer, Twitter, and Blogging

2. Working collaboratively: Using the BL Wiki

3. Presentation skills: From PowerPoint to Prezi

4. Foundations in working with Digital Objects: From Images to A/V

5. Behind the Screen: Basics of the Web

6. Metadata for Electronic Resources: Dublin Core, METS, MODS, RDF, XML

7. What is Digital Scholarship?

8. Digital Collections at British Library

9. Digitisation at British Library

10.Communicating our collections online: Access & Reuse Policy

11. Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions

12.Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)

13.Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research

14.Geo-referencing and Digital Mapping

15. Information Integration: Mash-ups, API’s and The Semantic Web

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Digital Conversations• Series of talks organised by DRCT on specific themes around ideas, tools and

projects around Digital Scholarship. Contributors have included entrepreneurs, technologists, librarians, academics and analysts.

• Events held:

1. Search and Discovery

2. Sharing and Annotation

3. Profiling and Privacy

4. Open for Re-use

5. Future of Text

6. Digital Narratives

7. Using the Cloud 

• Events are recorded on video and made publicly available on BL Youtube account: http://bit.ly/XFJrcI

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Curation e-Manuscripts

• Extracting and archiving digital content from personal devices

• Assist with capture, management, description, and preservation of personal digital collections to facilitate access and content analysis

• Data analysis beyond documents

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Support for digital collections and services

Involvement with BL digital programmes and services run by other departments

• Born-digital content:

Tools for data analysis: JISC 1996-2010

• Digitised resources:

Codex Sinaiticus

Shakespeare in Quarto

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Engagement with users I:Growing Knowledge exhibition (2010 – 2011)Beautiful Science (Feb – May 2014)

Growing Knowledge offered a physical space where public could walk in and start exploring a wide number of digital tools used by researchers from text mining to online collaboration.

Beautiful Science explores how our understanding of ourselves and our planet has evolved alongside our ability to diagram, graph, and map the mass data of the time. http://bit.ly/1juG9VG

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Engagement with users II: Crowdsourcing projects

• Sound map -Your Accent: The 'Your accents' interactive map displays a collection of recordings created between November 2010 and April 2011 and is a result of the British Library exhibition, Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices. People all over the world were invited to record their voice reading a children’s story, Mr Tickle (© 1971 Roger Hargreaves), to help the Library capture contemporary English accents. The recordings are available at http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/Your-Accents

• Chinese Book Cards Catalogue: project supported by the Chinese embassy aiming to identify OCLC records that match 28,000 printed card catalogues of Chinese publications held at the BL using crowdsourcing activities. The idea is to derive matching records from OCLC and ingest the data into the BL electronic catalogue (ALEPH): http://www.libcrowds.com/

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Network & partnerships

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Provide wider access to our collections

Enable users to create and manipulate data

Enhance research and learning

Support of Digital Scholarship: New tools applied to digital

collections: annotation, citation, comparison, analysis, etc.

Awareness of emerging research trends within DS

Strong collaboration between researchers, IT and information professionals

Distinctive through: Comprehensive digital collections Core infra-structure to store,

preserve, discover and access

Delivered through: Joint projects E-platforms Connecting data sets to research

tools

Integration

Engagement

Innovatio

n

Transform scholarlyproduction &communication

Digital Scholarship

Digital Curatorship

Staff trainingand support

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Communication Channels

• BL Digital Scholarship Blog:

• http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/

• Connect - DRCT Newsletter (internal)

• Twitter (Digital Curators personal accounts)

• Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LYaclanmcU

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Thank you