Bl labs ucl_17_06_13

British Library Labshttp://labs.bl.uk

British Library Labs and competitionMonday 17th June 2013, 12:00 – 14:00UCL, Centre for Digital Humanities.

Mr Mahendra MaheyBritish Library Labs Project ManagerScholarship and Collections, Digital Scholarship

http://labs.bl.uk 2#bl_labs

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On slideshare


Overview• Background

• Content used with Labs

• Research methods

• The competition and engaging with Labs

• Your ideas


“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)


Our Brand…


Background• Grant from The Andrew Mellon Foundation

• 2 year initial project


People involved in Labs

Project Board

Advisory Board

Digital Scholarship

Team

DigitalCurators Access and

Reuse Group

©

Curators

Labs

Researchers

Developers

Researchers

Developers

British Library

Universities & wider


• Michele 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


• Stella Wisdom

• Nora McGregor

• Aquiles Alencar Brayner

• James Baker

• Rossitza Atanassova

Digital Curators Digital Scholarship

• Aly Conteh

• Adam Farquhar

People…Digital Scholarship Team


• 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


People - Library curators• Around 200 curators at the Library

• Find the digital collections / data 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 at the moment (shortlisting)

• Ioannis Lagamtzis (Work placement Masters student at University College London)


Labs 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


Lab 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 to do interesting things with BL digital content (+other) 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 interested in conducting research / making things, e.g. meetings, events etc, business opportunities


How Labs works…

BL LabsCompetition

Events

Contact

Software

Publications

Tools and services to

support Digital Scholarship

BL Digital Collection /

Data

idea

BL Digital Collection /

Data

Other Digital Collection

idea

idea

idea

idea


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


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 showwhat 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

• Most content unique!

• 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 momentHack Events, In residence

Digital and online


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

See cards…


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/

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.

• Comparing events across media types?


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, travel

• Representative materials here: britishlibrary19c.tumblr.com

• Text mining?


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/

• Time-lining the silk road?


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/

• Adding sounds to poetry?


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

• Visualising what readers are reading?

Anonymised reader data…• Anonymised information about our readers

• Big buckets

• Social trends?


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 rights for (50%) journals

A project to get the tools to 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


Ideas for current competition

• OCR algorithm for Tangut Manuscripts

• Linking BNB data with Author Claim service

• Timelining collections

• Improving access by putting on Wikimedia

• Using item request data

• 3D visulisations of manuscripts

• Text mining in the reading rooms

• Music app

• Repurposing content using Drupal

• Lyme disease a social history

Ideas fromLaunchEvent

http://labs.bl.uk/Launch+Event


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!


Ideas Lab…Your ideas…driven by…

• Method 1: Your research area / interest…

– Introductions, scribble on post it note (4 keywords), methods

– ‘Marry up’ with a digital Collection(s) you are interested in, see cards, website, ask?

• Method 2: Lucky dip?– Choose a card and then brainstorm, top trumps, whatever works…– Work with a partner and each choose cards and then brainstorm together

• Method 3: Choose a theme– Choose a theme and then see which collections fit, then think of an idea to bring them

together

• Method 4: Improving access– An idea to improve access to the collections

• Method X – Anything that works?


Speak to me: 0207 412 7324 Email me: [email protected] or [email protected] Website: http://labs.bl.uk/ Enter our competition!Twitter: @BL_LabsHash Tag: #bl_labsJiscmail: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=BL-LABS

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

What next?

Education

Bl labs ucl_17_06_13