British Library Labs Competition Presentation - Digital Humanities, University of Nottingham

British Library Labs
http://labs.bl.uk
British Library Labs and competition
Monday 21st
May 2013, 13:00 – 14:00
Digital Humanities Centre, Humanities Building,
University of Nottingham
Mr Mahendra Mahey
British Library Labs Project Manager
Scholarship and Collections, Digital Scholarship

http://labs.bl.uk 2
Shortcut to presentation
http://goo.gl/
On slideshare

http://labs.bl.uk 3
Overview
• Background
• Labs in detail
• Research methods and content used with Labs
• The competition and engaging
• Your ideas

http://labs.bl.uk 4
“Every book tells a story, but
what can 68,000 books tell
you?”
The project in a nutshell…
Encouraging scholars and developers to do
research and development with and across British
Library collections and data (+other)

http://labs.bl.uk 5
Our Brand…

http://labs.bl.uk 6
Background
• Grant from The Andrew Mellon Foundation
• 2 year initial project

http://labs.bl.uk 7
• Michelle Burton
• Maja Maricevic
• Richard Boulderstone
• Kristian Jensen
• Professor Tim Hitchcock (Digital Humanities)
– University of Hertfordshire
• Professor Andrew Prescott (Digital Humanities)
– King’s College London
• Bill Thompson (Technology writer)
- BBC
• Professor Claire Warwick (Digital Humanities)
- University College London
• David De Roure – Professor of e-research
- Oxford e-research centre
Project Board Advisory Board
People…Boards

http://labs.bl.uk 8
• Stella Wisdom
• Nora McGregor
• Aquiles Alencar Brayner
• James Baker
• Rossitza Atanassova
Digital Curators Digital Scholarship
• Aly Conteh
• Adam Farquhar
People…Digital Scholarship Team

http://labs.bl.uk 9
• Meet regularly (monthly) to decide on licensing of content
that has been submitted for considerations
• Provide policy framework in terms of how to approve
materials for re-use
People…Access / Reuse Working Group

http://labs.bl.uk 10
People - Library curators
• Around 200 curators at the Library
• Find the digital collections and engage with the curators and
where appropriate promote on Labs website
• Curators sometimes suggest ideas for usage, research,
development
• Participate in events, meetings etc.

Labs people
• Labs Manager
• Recruiting a Technical Lead (closes 22 May 2013)
• Ioannis Lagamtzis (Work placement Masters student at
University College London)

Details (1)
• No digitisation involved, just digitized and born digital Library content
• Some content online
• Other in digital form but not online yet
– e.g. too big, needs work, technical challenges, license restrictions
(e.g. onsite access etc.)
• Examine and analyse the content, especially entire collections (i.e.
cross collection research)
• Do research, publish
• Make things, e.g. tools, services, apps etc…
• Transforming processes, services and tools for scholars / developers
using Library digital collections

Details (2)
• Competitions, events and various activities
• Creating environment where scholars / developers can
work intensively with Library’s digital collections (winners
will be resident), but not only…
• Encourage research / developers generally with and
across collections
• Labs is more than the competition just speak to us!
• Ideas can be pursued by talking to Library staff , scholars /
developers who are interested in conducting research /
making things, e.g. meetings, events etc. even business
opportunities where relevant and appropriate

The plan in time…
• Launch Event – 25th
March 2013 – draft details of competition and feedback
• Competition details launched end of April, June 26th
deadline
• Virtual 17 May (Video of Hangout Available), more virtual event?
• Hack Event 28/29 May London
• Winners announced at 6 July 2013, York (Digital Heritage Conference)
• Best two ideas will win a residency and one will be awarded £3000 prize and the
other £1000 prize in November
• Other ideas, look at supporting in other ways e.g. through Labs, other Library
departments, Business opportunities etc.
• Case studies produced around Nov/Dec, repeat for 2014

Components to the plan…
• Labs Competitions
• Labs Services
• Labs Hackdays
• Disseminating findings
• Content to be used with Labs

Labs Competition
• At least 2 Competitions
• Review and feedback to examine approach
• Winners will work ‘in residence’ where possible
• Focus particularly on cross collection research, research at
scale
• Other research and development encouraged too!
• Help develop tools and services to support digital
scholarship

BL Labs Services
• Developed for scholars / developers wanting to use digital
Library collections for research and development
• Application Programming Interface (APIs) for data /
collections
• Powerful interface for researchers and developers for
conducting innovative and transformative projects
• Lead by Technical lead

Labs Hack Days…
• Bringing researchers, developers, curators and anyone
interested with collections together at events
• Virtual Hacks?
• Brainstorming ideas – ideas lab (can try)
• Scoping research, ideas, solving problems and developing
prototypes
• 28/29 May – book!
Brainstorm ideas and group
Consider and choose
Work into the night and show
what has been done

Case studies…
• Research generated from the competitions and general
activity of Labs
• Inform the Library / Other libraries around the world about
the issues, challenges, solutions and benefits generated
when using a Labs approach

Labs Content
• Work with curators to identify those digital collections that
are suitable for Labs
• Focus on those that are copyright cleared at the moment
• Others considered in light of challenges, i.e. in scope for
Labs work
• Engage researchers/developers with these materials
through meetings, road-shows, hack days, promotions
(including competitions and events)

British Library Digital Collections
• Copyright cleared for research
and non-commercial use?
• Curated?
• Collection Level
Metadata available?
Available
only in
Reading
Rooms
Available
on site
Digital but
not online –
various storage
devices
Available only onsite at the moment
Hack Events, In residence
Digital and
online

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

Types of content
• Datasets
• Books/Text
• Images / Music
• Maps
• Sounds
• Multimedia

British National Bibliographic Data
• bnb.data.bl.uk
• 2.6 Million individual records
• Title, Author, Subject, Descriptions and
more of books and journals published or
distributed in the UK and Ireland since
1950.
• Available as Linked Open Data, Basic
RDF/XML and Marc21. An excellent
resource for uncovering publishing trends
across the decades, and augmenting
records!

UK Web Archive Data
• data.webarchive.org.uk/o
pendata
• 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.

19th
Century Digitised Books
• 68,000 digitised volumes and their
accompanying JP2, PDF, metadata
and OCR text files
• 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
26

International Dunhuang Project
• IDP international collaboration
• 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/

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/

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
Anonymised reader data…
• Anonymised information about our readers
• Big buckets

Resonance FM
• London Community Arts Radio Show
• http://resonancefm.com/
• 10 year sound archive!
• Speech to text?

Bringing Text Mining to the Library
Many electronic journals we have negotiated text mining right
for (75%), around 48,000 journals
A project to get the tools to our readers?

Competition 2013
• Join our website and mailing list
• Express your interest or tell others
• Virtual event 17 May 2013 (1500 GMT)
• Hack event 28/29 May 2013, London
• Deadline for Submission is 26 June midnight 2013
• Winners announced 6 July 2013
• Working on entry July to November (curatorial and financial support given)
– Ideas need to fit into this time frame, a 4 month time frame
• Other ideas can be worked on too!, Competition is one way to engage
• Showcase in November 2013 and winners get up to £3000!

Example Research Methods
• Corpus Analysis tools
• Visualisations
• Topic Models
• Location based searching
• Geotagging
• Annotation
• APIs for datasets e.g. Metadata, Images
• Crowdsourcing / Human Computation
• Natural Language Processing
• Transcribing

Tips and tricks
• Express your interest, ENGAGE with us!
• Submit your name, contact details and lets speak!
• Make sure you understand the competition details
• Think ‘4 months’ and what is realistic to create
– Avoid things that will delay, e.g. long rights clearance
• Use the text version of the form to draft entry
• Deadline 26 June!

Activity (30 mins)
Your ideas…driven by…
• Your research area / interest…’marry’ with a collection(s)
• Digital Collection(s) you are interested in
• Themes you want to explore across the collections…
• Improving access
• Ask and scribble away…20 mins
• Let’s discuss and give feedback (time limited depending on number of
ideas)
• Express your interest on the wiki.

Speak to me: 0207 412 7324
Email me: mahendra.mahey@bl.uk or labs@bl.uk
Labs Website: http://labs.bl.uk/
Enter our competition!
Twitter: @BL_Labs
Hash Tag: #bl_labs
Jiscmail: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=BL-LABS
Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
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