Digital Scholarship

Research Innovation Creativity

Adam Farquhar

Head of Digital Scholarship

www.bl.uk 2

150 Million Items

BL Collection

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Growth of the digital library

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2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Source: DLS storage in GB, per node

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Labs: Competitions and experiments

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2015: Alice’s Adventures Off the Map

www.bl.uk 11

Funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation

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http://samplegenerator.cloudapp.net

Labs 2013

• Pieter Francois -

postdoctoral researcher at

the University of Oxford

• Focus on European travel in

the 19th Century

• Uses statistical methods to

support text analysis

• Tool produces representative

samples of texts based on

search criteria

www.bl.uk 13

Labs 2014

Victorian Meme Machine

Bob Nicholson of Edge Hill University

Blog: http://goo.gl/iJy0aT

YouTube: http://goo.gl/mBTlk2

Anna Gerber

Desmond Schmidt from Queensland University

Blog: http://goo.gl/ofpNosl

YouTube: http://goo.gl/iseHTE

Text to Image Linking Tool (TILT)

www.bl.uk 14

One million images on Flickr

200,000,000 views

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Community tagging

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Creative reuse

http://blpublicdomain.wikispaces.com/Creative+Projects

Dickinson's comprehensive pictures

of the Great Exhibition - caption:

'Guernsey, Jersey, Malta, Ceylon'

https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishli

brary/12458858935/in/photostream/

Edushow: a Flickr image remix by

Theo K (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/337856

45@N00/13220021884/in/set-

72157638848353946/

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Free colouring in sheets for children http://www.playingbythebook.net/2014/03/18/barbapapas-new-house-a-book-

so-good-im-featuring-it-for-a-second-time/

Strassburg und seine

Bauten. Herausgegeben

vom Architekten- und

Ingenieur-Verein fur

Elsass-Lothringen. Mit 655

Abbildungen in Text, etc,

1894

www.bl.uk 20

Burning man – David Normal at the

crossroads of curiosity

http://youtu.be/3AOa98RsA2Q

www.bl.uk 21

Tracking innovation

• Peter Balman is developing an analytics dashboard to

measure the use and value of public domain content

https://www.vimeo.com/94067983 Credit: Peter Balman

www.bl.uk 22

Thanks!

• Research, innovation, and creativity

• Explore at scale and in detail

• Use new methods, tools, materials

• International Digital Curation Conference Hack Event, Thursday, Feb 12, 2014 , London

• THAT Camp (The Humanities and Technologies Camp), Friday 13th February 2014, London

• Enter Labs Competition 2015!

#bldigital

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship