Chris Clark, Head of Digital Research at the British Library. From his talk at Digital Berkshire, April 2012

1. Digital engagement, innovation
& The British Library
Presentation by Chris Clark to
Digital Berkshire, April 19th 2012
www.bl.uk

2. You can know the name of a
bird in all the languages of the world,
but when you're finished, you'll know
absolutely nothing whatever about the
bird... So let's look at the bird and
see what it's doing — that's what counts.
I learned very early the difference between
knowing the name of something and
knowing something.
Richard Feynman
The “Petabyte Age” is different. … with enough data,
mathematics can do things like evaluate the relative
value of a hyperlink, translate languages, win lawsuits,
predict the spread of epidemics and perform other
tasks that used to be related to the domains of theory
and modeling.
Chris Anderson The end of theory

3. It exists for anyone who wants to do research –
for academic, personal or commercial purposes
i.e. You! 3

4. What kind of library is it?
 National library
 Collections cover all known subject
areas; arts & humanities, social
sciences, STM…
 Copy of every print item published in
the UK
 Collections in all formats; sound,
images, video, newspapers, maps,
manuscripts, databases, books and
journals, stamps, photographs, etc.

5. 150 million items
625 km of shelving
Growing at 12 km per year

6. Mailroom Access Web Page
Access Web Service Access DB
Mailroom DB
Client Delivery Of
Objects Object
Put Get
Gateway Access Store
ROT
Cache Manager
Upload
Store
6,500,000 objects
ROT
 Q
Ingest Site
Q
Access Site
VPN
Controller Controller
Temporary
Store
 205 Terabytes Site DB
Storage Node
Q Q
Control
Data
Ingest
Access
Recovery
Object
Integrity
Checker Dark Archive
Preservation
Store
Overnight
Incremental
Backup

7. Science Technology & Medicine
 Links to external data and collections
 TalkScience@BL - quarterly event series that provides a forum
for discussion on topical scientific issues, including a range of
perspectives from academia, industry, government and the third sector.
Geoengineering our Climate: Fixing Earth’s Future? A
discussion with Prof. Tim Lenton
Health in the Headlines: Making Sense of the Science?
A Discussion with Tracey Brown

8. @BL_FranTaylor
 supporting creatives
 Lesser known items ranging
from soundscapes & comics
to Japanese woodcuts &
knitting patterns
 Award winning Sian Zeng,
used the Library collections
to research her dissertation
on Little Red Riding Hood
and fairy-tales. inspired by
the stories she found, Sian
launched a print company
that produces interior
products, including magnetic
animal wallpaper.

9. 1: Guarantee access for future generations.
2: Enable access to everyone who wants
to do research.
3: Support research communities in key
areas for social and economic benefit.
4: Enrich the cultural life of the nation.
5: Lead and collaborate in growing
the world’s knowledge base.

10.  Business and Intellectual Property Centre (BIPC)
 Subject portals
 Digital scholarship and digital curation
 From digital projects to Business As Usual

11. 

12. A selection of BIPC information sources

13. British Library Entrepreneur and SME Network has over 1,800
members.
BIPCTV YouTube channel showcases Inspiring Entrepreneurs
events and success stories.
280,000 views
@Business & IP Centre 3,900 followers, Klout 45
Over 5,000 members
Steve Van Dulken – The Patent Blog
Neil Infield – In from the Outfield

14. Get inspiration

15. Get inspiration Protect your ideas

16. Get inspiration Protect your ideas Develop your business
16

17.  BIPC supports entrepreneurs and small
businesses from that first spark of inspiration
to successfully launching and developing a
business.
 Holds workshops and 1:1 advice session along with Inspiring
entrepreneurs series of events with role model entrepreneurs.
 Between April 2007 and March 2009 the BIPC helped to create
829 new businesses for London, combined turnover of which was
£32 Million.

19.  http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20110209162050/http://www.growingknowledge.bl.uk/To

20. Definition Demand
 The production, use and
 Comprehensive digital
collections
integration of digital content,  Applying tools of scholarship
services and tools to facilitate to digital collections:
scholarship and research annotation, citation,
comparison
 Allow research areas to be  Infrastructure to store,
investigated in new ways, preserve, discover, access
using new tools, leading to
 Ability to apply new tools for
analysis, visualisation, and
new discoveries and analysis experimentation
to generate new  Collaboration through social
understanding networking tools, social
bookmarking, wikis, sharing
drafts with commentary
 Non-traditional forms of
outreach to draw attention to
research

21. TREND DEMAND
 More digital content  Mass and focused digitisation
 More cross-disciplinary
 Improved discovery
 Interfaces for sharing and
 More collaborative building services, annotation
 More analysis  Visualisation tools
 More data-driven  Conversion to data and
analysis tools
 More repurposing of  Open licenses & APIs,
content documented formats