Digital Scholarship:widening access to BL collections

and services

Dr. Aquiles Alencar-Brayner

@AquilesBrayner

www.bl.uk 2

Digital Research & Curator Team

Formed in 2010 as part of the new Digital Scholarship department

www.bl.uk 3

Our Mission

• Support the BL to adopt clear strategies and operating models for

Digital Scholarship

• Develop innovative models for Digital Scholarship exploiting

digital content and new technologies

• Offer training and support to BL staff on Digital Scholarship

practices and resources

• Involvement with various digital programmes (internal and

external) involving digitisation, born-digital materials, publication

on the Web, etc.

• Engage with new and existing user communities

• Strengthen the BL capabilities

www.bl.uk 4

Digital Libraries: 10 “in” rules1.Integrity: access to digital

object as it has been created

2.Integration: different contents

and file formats available from a

single platform

3.Interoperability: different

programmes and operating

systems compatible with each

other

4.Instant access: unrestricted

access to material, especially

from mobile devices

5.Interaction: catalogues that

provide Web 2.0 features (blogs,

wikis, tags, content sharing, etc)

6.Information: comprehensive

metadata for fast and reliable

retrieval of content

7.Ingest of content: constant

upload of new digital content

8. Interpretation: digital content placed in

relation to other items in the collection

9.Innovation: material to be presented in

innovative ways

10.Indefinite access: digital objects to be

preserved for posterity

www.bl.uk 5

Main Activities

• Staff training

• Promotion of Digital Scholarship within BL

• Curation of digital research data

• Project management

• Engagement with users

• Create and share online content with other libraries and

research centres

• Communication channels

www.bl.uk 6

Staff training: Increasing skills and

awareness

• Objectives:

– Wider engagement from staff in

implementing the 2020 Vision and Digital

Scholarship Strategy

– Increased ability to work with digital content

and services

– Increased ability to shape digital services

– Increased engagement with researchers

– Increased confidence in establishing

collaborations with partners in digital

scholarship

– Improved fluency around data management

www.bl.uk 7

Digital Scholarship Training Programme: 15 courses

(offered 3 times a year) launched in October 2012

1. Social Media: Introduction to Yammer, Twitter, and

Blogging

2. Working collaboratively: Using the BL Wiki

3. Presentation skills: From PowerPoint to Prezi

4. Foundations in working with Digital Objects: From

Images to A/V

5. Behind the Screen: Basics of the Web

6. Metadata for Electronic Resources: Dublin Core,

METS, MODS, RDF, XML

7. What is Digital Scholarship?

8. Digital Collections at British Library

9. Digitisation at British Library

10.Communicating our collections online: Access &

Reuse Policy

11.Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural

Heritage Institutions

12.Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)

13.Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly

Research

14.Geo-referencing and Digital Mapping

15. Information Integration: Mash-ups, API’s and The

Semantic Web

•

www.bl.uk 8

Digital Conversations• Series of talks organised by DRCT on specific themes around ideas, tools and

projects around Digital Scholarship. Contributors have included

entrepreneurs, technologists, librarians, academics and analysts.

• Events held:

1. Search and Discovery

2. Sharing and Annotation

3. Profiling and Privacy

4. Open for Re-use

5. Future of Text

6. Digital Narratives

7. Using the Cloud

• Events are recorded on video and made publicly available on BL Youtube

account: http://bit.ly/XFJrcI

www.bl.uk 9

Curation e-Manuscripts

• Extracting and archiving digital

content from personal devices

• Assist with capture, management,

description, and preservation of

personal digital collections to

facilitate access and content analysis

• Data analysis beyond documents

www.bl.uk 10

Support for digital collections and services

Involvement with BL digital programmes

and services run by other departments

• Born-digital content:

Tools for data analysis: JISC 1996-2010

• Digitised resources:

Codex Sinaiticus

Shakespeare in Quarto

www.bl.uk 11

Engagement with users I:

Growing Knowledge exhibition (2010 – 2011)

Beautiful Science (Feb – May 2014)

Growing Knowledge offered a physical space

where public could walk in and start exploring a

wide number of digital tools used by researchers

from text mining to online collaboration.

Beautiful Science explores how our

understanding of ourselves and our planet has

evolved alongside our ability to diagram, graph,

and map the mass data of the time.

http://bit.ly/1juG9VG

www.bl.uk 12

Engagement with users II: Crowdsourcing projects

• Sound map -Your Accent: The 'Your accents'

interactive map displays a collection of recordings

created between November 2010 and April 2011 and is

a result of the British Library exhibition, Evolving

English: One Language, Many Voices. People all over

the world were invited to record their voice reading a

children’s story, Mr Tickle (© 1971 Roger Hargreaves),

to help the Library capture contemporary English

accents. The recordings are available at

http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/Your-Accents

• Chinese Book Cards Catalogue: project

supported by the Chinese embassy aiming to identify

OCLC records that match 28,000 printed card

catalogues of Chinese publications held at the BL

using crowdsourcing activities. The idea is to derive

matching records from OCLC and ingest the data into

the BL electronic catalogue (ALEPH):

http://www.libcrowds.com/

www.bl.uk 13

Engagement with users III:

BL Labs (Launched March 2013)• Mechanical Curator

Tumblr

Flickr

Wikimedia

How are users engaging with content?

List of projects

Video

Other projects:

• BL Digital Music Lab

• Off the Map

• Victorian Meme Machine

www.bl.uk 14

Engagement with users IV:

Geo-referencing

• http://www.bl.uk/maps/

• Old Map on Google Earth

www.bl.uk 15

Engagement with users V

• Digital Scholarship Survey

i. The Library plays an important role in digital

research according to 82.3% of users: 53.3%

rate the BL as a very important digital

research library and 28.8% rates it as quite

important. This is a significant increase

(+34.5%) in the recognition of the BL as a very

important institution for digital research since

the last DS survey in 2011.

ii. There has been since 2011 an increase in the

use of social media, especially social networks

(+26%), to share research findings and

interests among users.

More information on the BL Digital

Scholarship research can be found at

http://bit.ly/1ugnlh9

0.0%

10.0%

20.0%

30.0%

40.0%

50.0%

60.0%

2014

2011

BL role in digital research

0%10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%

100%

www.bl.uk 16

Creating and sharing digital content

through Social Media:

• Wikimedia Commons

• Pinterest

• Google Maps

• Flickr

• HistoryPin

www.bl.uk 17

Network & partnerships

www.bl.uk 18

Provide wider

access to our

collections

Enable users

to create and

manipulate

data

Enhance

research and

learning

Support of Digital Scholarship:

New tools applied to digital collections: annotation, citation, comparison, analysis, etc.

Awareness of emerging research trends within DS

Strong collaboration between researchers, IT and information professionals

Distinctive through:

Comprehensive digital collections

Core infra-structure to store, preserve, discover and access

Delivered through:

Joint projects

E-platforms

Connecting data sets to research tools Transform

scholarly

production &

communication

Digital Scholarship

Digital Curatorship

Staff training

and support

www.bl.uk 19

Communication Channels

• BL Digital Scholarship Blog:

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

• Connect - DRCT Newsletter (internal)

• Twitter (Digital Curators personal accounts)

• Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LYaclanmcU

www.bl.uk 20

Thank you