British Library Labs presentation given at Workshop 3: The Infinite Archive: The Archival Perspective Friday 10th May, 2013 16:00 - 16:45

1. British Library Labs
http://labs.bl.uk
British Library Labs and competition information
Friday 10th
May 2013, 16:00 – 16:45
Workshop 3: The Infinite Archive: The Archival Perspective
Mr Mahendra Mahey
British Library Labs Project Manager
Scholarship and Collections, Digital Scholarship

2. http://labs.bl.uk 2
Overview
• Background to the project
• Labs in more detail and how to engage
• Research methods and content used with Labs
• The competition

3. http://labs.bl.uk 3
Mahendra Mahey
• Project Management, Research (Digital Repositories) and Teaching
(Social Science, Computing and Multimedia)
• Technology adviser for academics, researchers and librarians
• Over 20 years experience in UK and European Further and Higher
Education
• Last 4 years
• Developer Community Supporting Innovation (DevCSI) project
• community building with developers and researchers in UK
Academia through knowledge transfer and creating innovative
tools and services for the sector
• Labs project manager since mid March 2013

4. http://labs.bl.uk 4
“Every book tells a story, but
what can 68,000 books tell
you?”
The project in a nutshell…
Encouraging scholars to do research and
development with and across British Library
collections and data (+other)

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Our Brand…

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Background
• Grant from The Andrew Mellon Foundation
• 2 year initial project

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• Michelle 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

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• Stella Wisdom
• Nora McGregor
• Aquiles Alencar Brayner
• James Baker
• Rossitza Atanassova
Digital Curators Digital Scholarship
• Aly Conteh
• Adam Farquhar
People…Digital scholarship team

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• Meet regularly (monthly) to decide on licensing of content
that has been submitted for consideration
People…Access / Reuse Working Group

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People - library curators
• There are around 200 curators at the Library
• Labs work directly with the curators responsible for it’s
digital collections
• Find the collections and engage with the curators
• Curators sometimes suggest ideas for usage
• Participate in events, meetings etc.

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Labs people
• Labs Manager
• Recruiting a Technical Lead (closes 22 May 2013)

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Details (1)
• No digitisation involved, just digitized and born digital
Library content
• Existing content on line and other content 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…
• Transforming services and tools for scholars at the Library
using digital collections

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Details (2)
• Organising competitions, events and various activities
• Creating environment where scholars can work intensively
with Library’s digital collections (winners will be resident),
but not only…
• Encourage research generally with and across collections
(Labs is more than the competition just speak to us!)
• Ideas can be pursued by talking to BL staff , with scholars /
developers who are interested in conducting research /
making things, e.g. meetings, events etc. even business
opportunities where relevant and appropriate

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The plan in time…
• Launch Event – 25th
March 2013 – draft details of competition and feedback
• Competition details launched end of April
• Virtual 17 May and Hack Event 28/29 May
• Road-show – I can come to you!
• June 26th
deadline
• 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
• Case studies produced around Nov/Dec, repeat for 2014

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Components to the plan…
• Policy Framework
• BL Labs Competitions
• BL Labs Services
• BL Labs Hackathons
• Disseminating findings
• Content to be used with BL Labs

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BL 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 but other research and development encouraged too!
• Help develop tools and services to support digital
scholarship (e.g. APIs, data cleansing etc.)

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BL Labs Services
• Identify appropriate services to be developed for scholars /
developers wanting to use digital Library collections for
research and development
• Particularly interested in developing APIs for data /
collections
• Powerful interface for researchers and developers for
conducting innovative and transformative projects
• Lead by Technical lead

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Labs Hack Days…
• Bringing researchers, developers, curators and anyone
interested with collections together at events
• Brainstorming ideas – ideas lab
• Scoping research, ideas, solving problems and developing
prototypes
• 28/29 May – book!

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Disseminating Findings…
• Website
• Email to lists
• Blog
• Interviews
• Case Studies
• Reports

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Case studies…
• Research generated from the competitions and general
activity of Labs
• Inform the Library and other libraries around the world about
the issues, challenges, solutions and benefits generated
when using a Labs approach

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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)

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

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British National Bibliographic Data
• bnb.data.bl.uk
• 2.6 Million individual records
• detailing Title, Author, Subject, Descriptions and more of
books and journals published or distributed in the United
Kingdom and Ireland since 1950.
• It is currently available as Linked Open Data, Basic
RDF/XML and Marc21. An excellent resource for uncovering
publishing trends across the decades!

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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.

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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.
• Representative materials here: britishlibrary19c.tumblr.com
25

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International Dunhuang Project
• IDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make
information and 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/

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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/

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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
Anonymised reader data…
• Anonymised information about our readers

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Resonance FM
• London Community Arts Radio Show
• http://resonancefm.com/
• 10 year sound archive!
• Speech to text?

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Example Research Methods
• Corpus Analysis tools
• Visualisations
• Topic Models
• Location based searching
• Geotagging
• Annotation
• APIs for datasets e.g. Metadata
• Crowdsourcing / Human Computation
• Natural Language Processing
• Transcribing

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Example Ideas
http://labs.bl.uk/Competition+2013+-+Example+Ideas

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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
• Winners announced 6 July 2013
• Working on entry July to November (curatorial and financial support given)
• Other ideas can be worked on too!
• Showcase in November 2013 and winners get up to £3000!

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Competition 2013

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Speak to me: 0207 412 7324
Email me: mahendra.mahey@bl.uk or labs@bl.uk
Labs Website: http://labs.bl.uk/
Enter our competition!
Twitter: @BL_Labs
Hash Tag: #bl_labs
Jiscmail: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=BL-LABS
Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
What next?