Digital Research at the British Library

Digital Scholarship at the British Library:Collecting, Collaboration and Research

Talk for Bath Spa University Digital Writing Research Group20th March 2017

Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator @miss_wisdomBlog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/

www.bl.uk#

The British Library is the national library of the UK

We receive a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland

From 6 April 2013, legal deposit covers e-books, e-journals and other types of electronic publication

Plus other material that is made available to the public in the UK on handheld media such as CD-ROMs and microfilm, on the web (including websites) and by download from a website.

http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/

www.bl.uk#

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Over 150 Million items are stored in London and in Yorkshire

If you saw 5 items a day it would take you 80,000 years to see the whole collection

Digitisation is crucial for opening up access to this content and collections

http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/quickinfo/facts/

www.bl.uk#

The UK Web Archivehttp://www.webarchive.org.uk Three collections:Open Archive (since 2004)Legal Deposit Archive (since 2013)JISC Historical Archive (1996-2013)Statistics:Over eight billion resourcesOver 160TB compressed dataGoals:Preserve UK web historySupport accessEnable research

www.bl.uk#

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The Conservative Party deleted speeches and press releases published on its website between 2000 and the 2010 general election.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24924185 http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/13/conservative-party-archive-speeches-internet

www.bl.uk#

Born-Digital Manuscripts Personal Digital Archives

www.bl.uk#

The Wendy Cope Archivehttp://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/10/british-library-digital-archives

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Digital Scholarship is using computational methods either to answer existing research questions or to challenge existing theoretical paradigms.GeotaggingData VisualisationData MiningGeoreferencingDigital MappingCrowdsourcingText miningCollaboration

www.bl.uk#Digital humanities scholars use computational methods either to answer existing research questions or to challenge existing theoretical paradigms, generating new questions and pioneering new approaches.activities might include incorporation into the traditionalartsandhumanitiesdisciplines use of text-analytic techniques;GIS;commons-based peer collaboration; and interactive games andmultimedia.

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Meet the Digital Research TeamWe support researchers in the innovative use of British Library's digital collections and data through:

Working behind the scenes to get content in digital form and onlineOffering digital research support and guidanceSupporting collaborative projectsRunning events, competitions, and awards

www.bl.uk#Set up in 2010 the team was formed as a way of dedicating focus on the changing research landscape in the digital realm. Now embedded in collection areas, and as youll see later, joining the library explicitly as part of major digitisation projects.

Main activities:

Getting content in digital form and onlineCollaborations, Competitions & AwardsDigital research support and guidance

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www.bl.uk#

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Datasetsdata.bl.uk

As part of its work to open its data to wider use, the British Library is making copies of some of its datasets available for research and creative purposes.

This site is a 'beta', and is in the early stages of development. If you have questions or feedback about this site or our open data work, please emaildigitalresearch@bl.uk.

We'd also love to hear what you've done or made with the data.

www.bl.uk#Story of one digital collection

What can 68,000books tell us? Image: Artwork by Alicia Martin

www.bl.uk#The work of Labs is really about a number of stories, stories about digital collections and about researchers wanting to ask fascinating research questions about them. Lets now tell you a story about one collection and the intended and unintended consequences of working with it.

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Microsoft Partnership Digitisation 2006-868,000 volumes (47,000+ titles) published in the 19th century mostly in English Excluded authors active 1850-1901 and who died after 1936Output: 25 million pages Digitised content is public domain

www.bl.uk#60 seconds

The Library digitised 68,000 predominantly 19th century books from our collections a few years ago (around 2.7 % of the physical total in that period). You can view them from our catalogue or read them on your IPad via the Historical Books app developed by BiblioLabs.There are 22 million individual page images, along with full text scans of these images, all of which contain untold quantity of useful data such as names of people, places, historical events, dates.with no restrictions on use by Microsoft

So the question became then, what next? What can 68,000 books tell us?

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Extracting Images from OCR14Digitisation

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