Supporting Digital Scholarship

Adam Farquhar, PhD Head of Digital Scholarship

Digital Scholarship Department

…become a leading centre of digital scholarship … internationally recognised for innovation and collaboration in support of research and learning…

• Researchers use the Library’s digital content - an indispensable resource

• Our collections are well cared for and developed in line with our content strategy

• Our communities actively engage with content and curators

• Every Library curator can competently engage with digital content, tools, and services in their area of expertise

2

Digital Scholarship Department - Based around core collection and curatorial areas with advanced digital practices

• Sound & Moving Image Audio

Moving image

Music

News and news media

• Cartography and Topography Maps

Prints, views and drawings

Photographs

Philatelic

• IDP International initiative

Curation of central Asian materials

• Digital research team Digitisation

Digital curation

Digital archives

Endangered archives programme

Growing content

0

50

100

150

200

250

20

06

-03

20

06

-08

20

07

-01

20

07

-06

20

07

-11

20

08

-04

20

08

-09

20

09

-02

20

09

-07

20

09

-12

20

10

-05

20

10

-10

20

11

-03

20

11

-08

20

12

-01

20

12

-06

Transformations in research and scholarship

The production, use and integration of digital content, services and tools to facilitate scholarship and research

Allows research questions to be investigated in new ways

Using new tools and methods

Leading to new discoveries

Generating new understanding

Across many disciplines

Changes

1. Digital content

2. Tools and services

3. Methods

4. Engagement

5. Capacity

Digital Scholarship

Audio Video Preservation Challenge

A 1950 lacquer disc from the Peter

Newbrook collection of unique jazz

recordings (BL collection C1126),

now unplayable and irreparable

Music – extensive collections of early, classical, jazz, pop, world & traditional

Sounds and Moving Image

http://Sounds.bl.uk http://Videoserver.bl.uk/

9

Newspaper

Maps, prints, views, photographs, philately

11

International Dunhuang Programme

• A major digital scholarship effort that has matured and grown over twenty years

• Brings together fragile inaccessible items in digital form

• 400,000 images and 120,000 items available on-line

• A major international collaboration with partners from China, Russia, Japan, Germany, France, Korea …

• Resources, descriptions, metadata available in many languages

• http://idp.bl.uk/

Digital research and curation team – digitisation, digital curation, digital archives

Endangered Archives Programme

• EAP funds projects to rescue, digitise, and make available endangered archives

• Supported by Arcadia

• Over 150 projects world-wide since 2005 Iranian photographs c. 1900 Audiovisual material on Andean culture Telegu paintings in India State papers from Liberia as well as

Tuvalu and Yap Monastery library in Bhutan…

• BL provides infrastructure, long-term digital preservation, guidance

• http://eap.bl.uk/

“Documentary heritage reflects the

diversity of languages, peoples and

cultures. It is the mirror of the world

and its memory. But this memory is

fragile. Every day, irreplaceable parts

of this memory disappear for ever.” –

UNESCO Memory of the World

Programme

British Library Labs

• Encouraging scholars to do research and development with and across existing British Library digital collections and data (born digital and digitised).

• Data driven approach through competitions, hack days, data events

• Creates an environment for scholars to work intensively with British Library digital collections / data.

• Library learns to support digital scholars, builds on existing or creates new processes, tools (e.g. APIs etc.) and services.

• Case studies for to inspire others

• 2 Year Andrew Mellon funded project.

British National Bibliography UK Web Archive Data 19th Century Books

Environmental Sounds Text-mining of

electronic journals

Book ordering and

anonymised reader

data

Resonance FM

10 year Community

Arts Radio Show

Datasets, Books / Text, Images / Music, Maps, Sounds, Multimedia

http://labs.bl.uk/Digital+Collections

Digital Scholarship – BL Labs

• Annual competitions showcase our digital content

• Deep engagement with researchers

• Two 2013 winners Dan Norton - Mixing the Library: The Disc

Jockey and the Digital Collection Pieter Francois - Sample Generator for

Digitised Texts

“brings together my interests in data, statistics, and nineteenth century travel”

http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com/archive

http://labs.bl.uk/

http://samplegenerator.cloudapp.net

Improving methodology with representative samples

• Pieter Francois - postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford

• Focus on European travel in the 19th Century

• Uses statistical methods to support text analysis

• Tool produces representative samples of texts based on search criteria

Mixing the Library: The Disc Jockey and the Digital Collection

http://www.tompro.co.uk

http://www.ablab.org/shetland

http://www.ablab.org/pd/di/

Prototype design

Annotation

Preview ‘item’

Selected ‘right’ channel ‘item’

Selected ‘left’ channel ‘item’

Collection ‘stalks’ made of ‘items’. Each ‘item’ is a URL. The order of the ‘items’ can be ‘shuffled’ and sent to the ‘left’ or ‘right’ channels

‘Play back’ of ‘items’ (Blue) and annotations (Yellow)

Off the Map Competition

A challenge for videogame design students to turn historic maps and engravings from the

British Library collections into a 3D environment using Crytek's CRYENGINE software.

Pudding Lane Productions, a team of six second-year students from De Montfort

University, Leicester, won first prize.

Their work was showcased at GameCity, an annual festival of videogame culture.

http://youtu.be/SPY-hr-8-M0 (Flythrough starts at 0:50)

Building our capacity

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

• Behind the Screen: Basics of the Web

• What is Digital Scholarship?

• Digital Collections at British Library

• Digitisation at British Library

• Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions

• Text Encoding Initiative & Annotation

• Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research

• Geo-referencing and Digital Mapping

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

www.bl.uk

http://www.flickr.com/britishlibrary/

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

http://labs.bl.uk