Digital Scholarship Training Programme at British Library

James Baker, Digital Curator

@j_w_baker

Blog: http://bit.ly/11bhQ5k

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Digital Scholarship at British Library

“The production, use and integration of digital content, services and tools to facilitate scholarship and research. It allows research areas to be investigated in new ways, using new tools, leading to new discoveries and analysis to generate new understanding”

-Adam Farquhar Head of Digital Scholarship

Created in 2010, the department works to enable….

• production of digital content• sharing and integration of digital content• wider collaboration and

contribution around digital content

• complex analysis & facilitation of new discoveries

Created in 2010, the department works to enable….

• production of digital content• sharing and integration of digital content• wider collaboration and

contribution around digital content

• complex analysis & facilitation of new discoveries

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What is a Digital Curator?

• Digital Curators at the British Library explore how digital technologies are re/shaping research and how this informs how the library does its business.

• The team supports staff across the library to identify the opportunities that digital tools and collections afford in modern scholarship and to gain the skills to engage confidently in this area.

• We partner with libraries and institutions to enable innovation in digital scholarship.

• No specific collection but rather expertise in digital scholarship, broadly defined.

James Baker Nora McGregor

Stella Wisdom Aquiles Alencar-Brayner

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• Staff across all collection areas have the opportunity to become familiar and conversant with the foundational concepts, methods and tools of digital scholarship.

• Staff can situate their collection expertise in the realm of facilitating digital scholarship and have the practical skills to do so.

• Staff are empowered to innovate

• Cross-disciplinary collaborative digital initiatives flourish across subject areas within the Library as well as externally

What do we hope to ultimately achieve?

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Digital Scholarship Training Programme

The Digital Scholarship Training Programme is a two-year internal training initiative dreamed up by the Digital Curator team that launched in November 2012.

We’ve created fifteen bespoke one-day courses for staff covering the basics of Digital Scholarship which we deliver on a rolling basis.

These courses are evaluated and adapted after each run.

Plan for full restructure in 2014.

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Design & Development

• Literature survey, primarily around Digital Humanities.• Spoke to scholars.• Researched conference themes.• Skills survey.• Drafted learning outcomes.• Allocation of work• Advice and feedback

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The Courses

• 101 What is Digital Scholarship? • 102 Digital Collections at British Library • 103 Digitisation at British Library • 104 Communicating our collections online• 105 Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions• 106 Text Encoding Initiative• 107 Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research• 108 Geo-referencing and Digital Mapping • 109 Information Integration: Mash-ups, API’s and The Semantic Web• 110 Managing digital research information• 111 Social Media: Introduction to Twitter, and Blogging• 112 Working collaboratively: Using the BL Wiki and Beyond• 113 Presentation skills: From Powerpoint to Prezi• 114 Foundations in working with Digital Objects: From Images to A/V• 115 Metadata for Electronic Resources: Dublin Core, METS, MODS, RDF, XML

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Our Principles

Relevance

Wider concepts

Practical

Time and space for exploration

Onsite not online

Bring the outside in

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So far so good!

“Great to have something often referred to demystified”

“I’ve never done anything like this before!”

“Well done to you and your DC team, I have attended some of the other courses myself and am recommending my staff attend them too.”

“[I valued] the time to explore our ideas and see how to develop current projects into a more useful resource”

“…I was very grateful to attend this and learned a great deal…Look forward to more. Renewed thanks for organising this.”

30 course days delivered so far205 individual members of staff attended one or more641 seats filled 3 courses attended pp on average

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On the right track…“We have a large collection of Canadian photographs and associated data at the Library and I’d been considering for some time now ways in which to work with them beyond simply hosting them in a typical image gallery. The course on Data Visualisation gave me the space to play around with some of my ideas for visualisations and pointed me in the direction of free tools out there such as Google Fusion Tables. I hadn’t realised it was so easy to get started and was able to see the shape of the collection almost immediately.”

Phil Hatfield Curator Canadian & Caribbean Studies

Picturing Canada

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Lessons Learned Next Steps

Ambition

Beyond curators

Structured exercises.

Equipment

Reaching the less inclined

Supporting the enthusiastic

Capturing information

Looking outwardZoterowiki

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Thank you!

@j_w_baker

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