Why do we digitise? 20 reasons in 20 pictures

Dr. Mia Ridge, @mia_outDigital Curator, British Library

digitalresearch@bl.uk @BL_DigiSchol

Europeana Network Association AGM 2016Riga, November 2016

Why do we digitise?TL;DR: access to our shared heritages

matters

Digitisation supports education, engagement, research at huge scale

and with computational power.

A splendid assortment of Gceloag and West of England. Tweed ; also Black Doeakin Woollen Cloths alwaya on hand. Snit made to order in six hoars' notice, on most reaainable terms. Mr. M'Mohon, Cutter.

Mysteries of Melbourne lifeby Cameron, Donald, 1848?-1888.

Published 1873Usage Public Domain Mark 1.0Topics Australia -- Fiction

Preservation

Discoverability

Access

Items consulted in Reading Rooms: 1,694,000BL website items consulted: 3,249,000Source: Annual Report 2015/16

Access

If collections are international in scope, they should be internationally accessible

Delight

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/10/how-to-be-a-hedgehog.html

Cool things happen

Video clip for a Malaysian band with images from 19th century books shared on Flickr Commons

'Traditional' outcomes

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nationallibrarynz_commons/5353172318

Crowdsourcing and engagement

Becoming part of the web

Pelagios: Enabling Linked Ancient Geodata

Partnerships without paperwork

Mario KlingemannDetail from '556 Minerals'

'available only because the resources that contained their stories are now available digitally'

Finding sources is easier

Full text search is transformative

Scale is transformative

Digitised sources + computational methods = digital scholarship

Dr. Katrina Navickas and @BL_Labs, Political Meetings Mapper

Efficiency is under-rated"I was able to do in minutes with Python code what I'd spent the last ten years trying to do by hand!"

-Dr. Katrina Navickas, BL Labs Winner 2015

It's easier to follow curiosity

It's easier to see patterns'Distant reading has utterly transformed my view of literary history. ...as we slice libraries in new ways we keep stumbling over long, century-spanning trends that have little relationship to the stories of movements and periods we used to tell. We can see genres differentiating from each other gradually. We can see assumptions about gender gradually shifting. We've learned that the literary standards defining a prestigious style change very slowly. It doesn't happen in a generation; it takes centuries. ...it is clear now that these methods can turn up important patterns that we couldn't see before, and that's what I'm loving about this.'

- The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Ted Underwood

It helps scientists

It helps students

http://bit.ly/sherlocknet

Computer Vision and the History of Printing, Joon Son Chung

We learn more about collections

Thank you!Questions?

Mia Ridge @mia_outDigital Curator, British Library

digitalresearch@bl.uk @BL_DigiSchol