The Art of Work in the Age of Mechanical Digital Manual?

Reproduction

Dr. Mia Ridge, @mia_outDigital Curator, British Library

digitalresearch@bl.uk @BL_DigiSchol

Digital scholarship @ British Library

We support new ways of exploring and accessing our collections through:• Getting digital and digitised content available

online• Collaborative projects• Digital scholarship support and guidance• Events, publications and training• Competitions, and awards (BL Labs)

https://ww

w.flickr.com

/photos/britishlibrary/11092384623/Im

age taken from page 384 of 'M

an, embracing his origin, ... civilization, ... m

ental and moral faculties. ...

Illustrated'British Library HM

NTS 10007.g.36

The challenges of scale

The challenges of scale

• The BL holds 180-200 million items, including:• 8 million stamps• 310,000 manuscript volumes• Over 4 million maps• Legal deposit: pamphlets, magazines, newspapers,

sheet music and maps• Television and radio recordings• Websites, e-books, e-journals

• Over 3 million new items are added every year

The challenges of scale

• The online catalogues aren’t (yet) complete

• Imaging and cataloguing takes resources

• Copyright is... complicated

• Only 1-2% of collections digitised

Endangered ArchivesThe challenges of scaleInterfaces need to work for ‘treasures’ and multi-volume, many-paged collections

The challenges of scale

• Migration between systems can take years

• Ingest and processing can take weeks

• Interfaces need to work for casual visitors and scholars who want a reading room experience

Solutions

https://www.flickr.com/photos/sdasmarchives/29529041342/ Catalog:14_027996

IIIF player

'A million images' on Flickr Commons

Mario Klingemann'556 Minerals'

Internal digital scholarship training

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

• Staff are empowered to innovate.• Collaborative digital initiatives flourish across

subject areas within the Library and externally.• Training and skill-sharing in digital scholarship are a

shared responsibility across the Library.

Goals for the training programme

• Applying lessons in other contexts - helping staff match problems to potential solutions

• Finding opportunities to apply new skills

• Balancing depth with time in class

• Finding digital tools for non-Western materials; working with non-textual collections

On-going challenges

• Software tools break/change• Tempting to try to meet external

demand for our courses• Digital Curators need to maintain own

skills and knowledge– Digital Scholarship Reading Group - 1 hour,

once a month– Hack and Yack - 2 hours, once a month– Both are open to all

On-going challenges

Datasets and digital collectionsDatasets about our collections Bibliographic datasets relating to our published and archival holdings Datasets for content mining Content suitable for use in text and data mining research Datasets for image analysis Image collections suitable for large-scale image-analysis-based research Datasets from UK Web Archive Data and API services available for accessing UK Web Archive collections Digital mapping Geospatial data, cartographic applications, digital aerial photography and scanned-in historic map materials http://bl.uk/digital

"I was able to do in minutes with a python code what I'd spent the last ten years trying to do by hand!"

-Dr. Katrina Navickas, BL Labs Winner 2015

BL Labs competitions

BL Labs competitions

Contact us: digitalresearch@bl.uk @BL_DigiSchol @mia_out @Miss_Wisdom

A bigger vision

https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14598110338/ "The Utah Farmer: Devoted to Agriculture in the Rocky Mountain Region”, p250 (1913)

Thank you!Questions?

Mia Ridge @mia_outDigital Curator, British Library

digitalresearch@bl.uk @BL_DigiSchol