BL Labs Presentation to Social Sciences Team at the British Library

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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 labs@bl.uk

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 labs@bl.uk

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Book ordering and borrower data…

• Millions of records!!

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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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BL Labs Hackathons..

• Bringing researchers, developers, curators and collections together at events

• Brainstorming ideas

• Scoping research and prototypes

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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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Our ‘brand’

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Twitter and Hash Tag

@BL_Labs

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#BL_Labs

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Website

http://labs.bl.uk

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(Wiki based…we want people interested in the project to be involved and add content)

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Launch Event

• 25 March 2013

• Getting researchers doing the kind of research BL Labs is interested in

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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

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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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What next?

Speak to me: 0207 412 7324

Email me: mahendra.mahey@bl.uk

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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