2. ● Scale & materiality
– Not individual, standard documents but vast collections of
them; authenticity demands multiplicity of versions
● Cost
– Preservation not by individuals but large organizations
● Intellectual Property
– If content worth saving someone is making money
from it

3. http://www.economist.com/node/15557443 http://youtube-global.blogspot
.com/2011/05/thanks-youtube-community-for-two-big.ht

4.  “The challenge for libraries is to find ways to preserve
platform dependent digital works and to prevent the loss of
complex digital media…. Since we cannot possibly save
everything, we need to carefully consider which digital
materials are the most important to preserve and try to
anticipate the needs of future scholars and researchers”
Marlene Manoff, 2006
 If preservation priority is X and user need is Y,
what are the values of X and Y?

5. If sustainability means that information is kept useful and available, then the LOCKSS
approach has real merit! It implies that SERVICES must be preserved as well.

6. Abundance of stored content:
attention is scarce & must be earned
Services
Content

7.  platforms to focus in 2012+
 Maintain active presence on
 Continue to assess

8. Digital Research & Curator Team
digital commercia
l
scholars
pa
academic
rt n
social digital consortia
ers
ers
networks Digital funding
us
hip
Research & bodies
machines
s
Curator Team media
systems & services
M
ser ation
ns
ret h &
al
es
g
l
/ST
o
se oria
riev
s
vic
rc
etin
ibiti
ce
v
sea
s er
eIS
exh
rvi
rat
pre
rk
cu
ma

9. Training & development:
seminars, conferences, events,
‘Digital Conversations’
Extend + ‘Tooling up’
Collaborate Digital Scholarship:
horizon scanning, Tech Watch
communities of practice, consortia
Consolidate
Digital Curation as
collaborative process:
acquisitions, workflows, tools,
project management, funding,
exhibitions & marketing

10. Europeana – SB Berlin User generated content
 Centenary of the outbreak of the First  Roadshows in 10 countries to create
World War unique pan-European archive
 Will create a European corpus of  Preston event produced more than
digitised materials concerning the First 2300 images from letters, diaries,
World War in all its aspects medals, pictures, trench art, and more
 Will contribute to Europeana a
substantial collection of more than
400,000 outstanding sources

11. British Newspaper Archive Google Books
 British Library and brightsolid online  A 6 year project starting June 2011
publishing  250,000 Books, 1700-1870
 Up to 40 million newspaper pages from  From the French Revolution to the
the British Library's collection over 10
end of slavery.
years
 Collection includes runs of most
 Material in major European languages
newspapers published in the UK since  Focus on books that are not yet
1800 freely available in digital form online
 Over 4m pages added since launch  Access via Google Books and BL
 Storage at Google and BL
 Contract and terms available on the
web!

12. Broadcast News IMPACT Historic Text
 TV & radio news receivable in the UK,  Improve the digital accessibility of
since May 2010, e.g. Al-Jazeera English, printed text produced before 1900
CNN, France 24, Russia Today
 OCR does not produce
 Search subtitles (where available)
satisfactory results for old books,
 AHRC-funded project looking at magazines and newspapers
speech-to-text technologies for
opening up audio and video archives  Historic material have archaic
 Project will index 3,00 hours of TV fonts, complex layouts, warped or
news and 3,000 hours of radio content degraded pages
 Manual post-correction is slow and
expensive

13.  Early music on-line: digitised 300 volumes (21k
images) of rare early printed music from the
British Library’s collections
 Open educational licence encourages use and re-
purposing of content and embedding in teaching
and research
 Detailed inventories of the books’ contents
created for the first time, with access points for
composer and title
 Data included in British Library catalogue, COPAC
and RISM music database, with links to digitised
content
 Digital images provided to Aruspix, which is
developing an OCR and transcription tool for
early music
www.earlymusiconline.org

14. Personal digital archives Web archives
 Data analysis beyond documents  Create a research collection of UK
 Use computer forensics websites
 Capture, management, description,  Develop high-impact data analytical
and preservation of personal digital access services
collections to facilitate access and  Demonstrate the potential of domain
analysis level web archives, or the “haystacks”
 Archives range from poets (W Cope)  UK web domain > 9m .uk domain
and playwrights (H Pinter) to names
computer scientists (D Michie) and  Estimate 110TB/crawl
biologists

15.  Goal • Approach
 Builds on previous crowd- • Accessible and convenient application
sourcing projects, e.g. UK • Immediate results and feedback
SoundMap
• Competitive tools
 Addressed key challenges –
awareness, engagement, • Recognition and visible contribution
productivity at scale

16. What is georeferencing?
Ordnance Surveyors Drawing 40 (detail). Pen and Ink on paper. 1801.
British Library, Maps OSD 40(3).

17. sults:
725 maps assigned spatial metadata over 5 days
Publicity minimal – social media key
~90 participants, top five completed half the work
Data quality good: <3% had errors

19. T-Pen Transcription UI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOnJtWtCFZc

20.  Evolution by projects and
commercial ties tends to
reduce interoperability and
inconveniences the
researcher
 International collaborations,
such as International Image
Interoperability Framework,
seek a shared canvas

21. ARROW project - a tool to assist ‘diligent
search’ and provide faster answers to:
Rights status? – Rightsholders? – Can I digitise?
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
ARROW
 29 Partners ARROW Plus
 Libraries, BIP, Reprographic Rights
Organisation (UK)  36 Partners
 12 countries  14 countries
(Austria, Denmark, France, Finland, (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany,
Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia,
Slovenia, Spain, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland,
Sweden, UK) Portugal, Spain)
 Pilots: Germany, France; Spain; UK  Books and images in books
 Books only
21

22. ARROW benefits
 Automated (where it can be – still some manual processes)
 Therefore saves time and cost
ARROW search = 5 % of Manual search time
 National partners working together across different sectors
 Domain partners working together across countries
22

23. Persistent enquiry: can I use this?
 Open Knowledge Foundation
 Creative Commons Licenses
 Persistent URLs

24.  Six decades into the computer revolution,
four decades since the invention of the microprocessor,
and
two decades into the rise of the modern internet, all of
the technology required to transform industries through
software finally works and can be delivered at global
scale.
Marc Andreessen ‘Why software is eating the world’
Wall Street Journal August 20 2011

25.  Our vision: In 2020, the British Library will be a leading
hub in the global information network, advancing
knowledge through our collections, expertise and
partnerships, for the benefit of the economy and society
and the enrichment of cultural life.
 If Andreessen is right, we may not be talking in 2020
about digital libraries and digital curators but an agency
for the curation and creation of software.

26. @chrisleeclark
www.bl.uk