Presentation for Hack on the Record event at the National Archives on 24/03/2012

1. Hack on Records
March 2012
Stella Wisdom – Digital Curator
http://www.slideshare.net/swisdom @miss_wisdom

2. How Big? What?
150 million items 625 km shelves 12 km p.a. growth
Spend 319 million + £9 million worth of legal deposit
Most known languages Ancient to modern
Newspapers Grey lit Patents Philatelic
Paintings Magazines Official Publications
Wax cylinders Sound India Office
Records BIPC Photographs
Oral history e-publications Fanzines
Manuscripts Conferences papers Websites IGOs
Maps and atlases Research reports
Books
Music scores Exhibitions

3. Increasing amount of digital
•Library content being digitised and born digital includes printed
text, images, audio/visual, web archive
•Library is involved in large digitisation projects such as google
books, and we want to make as much content open and freely
accessible where licensing allows
•http://code.google.com/apis/books/
•We are looking at crowdsourcing as a way to improve access to our
digital collections
• Georeferencer http://www.bl.uk/maps/
•We want to hear and learn from developers to see what apis we should
be developing for our content and how you would like them to be
developed.
•1st step in the right direction with open data is releasing our
bibliographic metadata
http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/datafree.html

4. British Library Open Data
• British National Bibiliography Data
available via
• linked open data
•Basic RDF/XML via FTP
•MARC21 via Z39.50
•BNB records the publishing activity of the
United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland
and as such is a measure of their
intellectual output
•A number of related linked open datasets
are highlighted on the page
http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/datafree.html
http://explore.bl.uk
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5. DataCite
http://datacite.org/
•Supports researchers by
allowing data to located and
for reuse to be tracked
•Supports data centres by
establishing a mechanism
that promotes discovery and
reuse
•Supports publishers by
enabling a link between
articles and the underlying
data

6. What does DataCite do?
DataCite provides persistent identifiers (DOIs) to trusted
data centres
The dataset:
Storz, D et al. (2009): Planktic foraminiferal flux and faunal
composition of sediment trap L1_K276 in the northeastern Atlantic.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.724325
Is supplement to the article:
Storz, David; Schulz, Hartmut; Waniek, Joanna J; Schulz-
Bull, Detlef; Kucera, Michal (2009): Seasonal and interannual
variability of the planktic foraminiferal flux in the vicinity of the
Azores Current. Deep-Sea Research Part I-Oceanographic
Research Papers, 56(1), 107-
124, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dsr.2008.08.009

7. Why are you telling me?
DataCite makes it‘s metadata freely available via OAI-PMH
http://oai.datacite.org/
Metadata contains information about digital objects (mainly research
data) assigned DataCite DOIs
Datacite Holy Grail is to link data creators with datasets, authors and
publications in order to attribute credit and track impact of digital
objects.
Currently work in progress via a number of projects
We will be holding a DataCite related hackathon at CERN next
year
Project source code is available https://github.com/datacite

8. Other Library Open Data Initiatives
data.europeana.eu currently contains linked open data metadata on 2.4
million texts, images, videos and sounds gathered from European cultural
institutions by Europeana.
http://openlibrary.org/ is run by Internet Archive and has gathered over 20
million records from a variety of large catalogues as well as single
contributions.
Open Library has an api and examples of work carried out so far
http://openlibrary.org/developers/api
http://openbiblio.net/ Open Bibliographic Data Working Group of the Open
Knowledge Foundation
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9. Thank You
Stella Wisdom
Digital Curator
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London
NW1 2DB
Telephone: 020 74127245
Email: stella.wisdom@bl.uk
Twitter: @miss_wisdom
Slides - http://www.slideshare.net/swisdom
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