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BL Digital Scholarshipand its impact on Latin American studies
Aquiles Alencar-Brayner
@AquilesBrayner
www.bl.uk 2
Digital Research & Curator Team
Formed in 2010 as part of the new Digital Scholarship department
www.bl.uk 3
Our Mission• Support the BL to adopt clear strategies and operating models for
Digital Scholarship
• Develop innovative models for Digital Scholarship exploiting digital content and new technologies
• Offer training and support to BL staff on Digital Scholarship practices and resources
• Involvement with various digital programmes (internal and external) involving digitisation, born-digital materials, publication on the Web, etc.
• Engage with new and existing user communities
• Strengthen the BL capabilities
www.bl.uk 4
Digitisation: Endangered Archive Programme (EAP)
• EAP has received 120 applications from Latin America in the last 10 years (15% of total received)
• 22 funded projects in Latin America
www.bl.uk 5
Engagement with users:BL Labs (Launched March 2013)
• The BL Labs project, sponsored by A. Mellon Foundation, designed to support the BL to provide access to its digital resources and enable scholars to research entire collections rather than just individual items by:
• 1. Reviewing the BL’s approach to licensing: moving towards a coherent licence framework and setting the standard for access to catalogue metadata and out-of-copyright materials in digital form.
• 2. Enabling scholars to use and implement novel services; to access, download, and analyse digital content; and to link data to other data and digital collections in order to allow research that analyses entire collections. This will be achieved by providing access to catalogue and digital materials through simple open protocols and semantic linking.
• 3. Creating BL Labs so that scholars can work intensively with the Library’s digital collections to collaboratively define and implement the services that they need in the digital age.
www.bl.uk 6
Experiment: 19th Century Microsoft Books
• Background
• 68,000 titles digitised by Microsoft – no clear selection policy
• Identified 1,400 Latin American titles
Image taken from page 157 of 'A Visit to Chile and the nitrate fields of Tarapaca ... With illustrations by Mr. M. Prior'
www.bl.uk 7
New Discoveries
• British Library Mechanical Curator
Unlocking design
• Flickr ImagesAdding metadata to our digital collections
• Synoptic index
• Georeferencing
www.bl.uk 8
BL Labs Competition: Previous winners
Desmond Schmidt
Text to Image Linking Tool - TILT
Mixing the Library, Information Interaction and the DJ
Dan Norton
Victorian Meme Machine - VMM
Bob Nicholson
Sample Generator
Pieter Francois Anna Gerber
www.bl.uk 9
Sample Generator: representative samples
• Pieter Francois
• 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
http://goo.gl/YFnZmu
www.bl.uk 10
Anna Gerber and Desmond Schmidt:Text to Image Linking Tool (TILT)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl4bjZSJ4cY&feature=youtu.be
www.bl.uk 11
BL Labs 2015 Winners
• The Crowdsourcing Arcade
• Political Meetings Mapper
www.bl.uk 12
Mechanical Curator: Crowd-sourcing Arcade
Adam Crymble (@adam_crymble)
Image Credit: Sam Howzit
Drawing on downtime
Drawing on scarcity of access
Drawing on energy reserved for ‘play’
www.bl.uk 13
Take two key British Library collections: 19th century newspapers & geo-referenced historic maps
Explore a key story in the history of British democracy: the Chartist movement of the 1830s & 1840s
Discover local & national histories of protest places:
Katrina Navickas: Political Meetings Mapper
www.bl.uk 14
Katrina Navickas: Political Meetings Mapper
A tool to extract and geo-code textual data
www.bl.uk 15
Network & partnerships
www.bl.uk 16
Provide wider access to our collections
Enable users to create and manipulate data
Enhance research and learning
Support of Digital Scholarship: New tools applied to digital
collections: annotation, citation, comparison, analysis, etc.
Awareness of emerging research trends within DS
Strong collaboration between researchers, IT and information professionals
Distinctive through: Comprehensive digital collections Core infra-structure to store,
preserve, discover and access
Delivered through: Joint projects E-platforms Connecting data sets to research
tools
Integration
Engagem
ent
Innovation
Transform scholarlyproduction &communication
Digital Scholarship
Digital Curatorship
Staff trainingand support
www.bl.uk 17
Thank you
