British Library Labs Presentation at Elpub 2014, June 20, 2014

Putting data to use for researchers: How the British Library's Digital Scholarship department is

putting data to use for researchers through its Digital

research Team and British Library Labs project

Mahendra Mahey

18th International Conference on Electronic Publishing (Elpub)

Keynote speech, Friday 20 June, 2014, 0930 – 1030 (EST)

Alexander Technological Education Institute of Thessaloniki, Greece

Manager of British Library Labs

http://labs.bl.uk/

http://labs.bl.uk 2 #bl_labs [email protected]

Overview

• The British Library and a typical scholar

• The Nature of Digital and the Digital Scholar

• The British Library supporting Digital Scholarship

• Experiences of the Digital Research Team and British

Library Labs project in supporting digital scholarship

• Conclusions


The British Library

St Pancras, London, UK Many books are stored 5 stories below the building

Inside the British Library Space for 1200 readers, around 400,000 visitors per year

Uses low oxygen and robots

Storage at Boston Spa

//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/British_Library_+_St_Pancras_7527-31hug.jpg

//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/BritishLibraryInterior02.jpg

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8393710.stm


British Library Collections > 150 million items

> 0.8 m serial titles

> 8 m stamps

> 14 m books

> 3 m sound recordings

> 4 m maps

> 1.6 m musical scores

> 0.3 m manuscripts

> 60 m patents

King’s Library


Our Scholar in Humanities…

• Travel routes in the 19th Century

Pieter Francois Post doctoral researcher at University of Oxford

Bob Nicholson History Lecturer at Edge Hill University

• History lecturer specialising in the Victorian period


The Nature of Digital

Data broken down

recombined and

duplicated Image: Tower of Babble, Book Sculpture by Brian Dettmer


The Digital Scholar

not necessarily be a recognised academic or someone who posts online,

just a specialist

Digital

Networked Open

From Digital Scholar : How technology is transforming scholarly practice, Martin Weller, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011, page 4

It is someone who employs digital, networked and open

approaches to demonstrate their specialism.


Digital Humanities

“The emergence of the new digital humanities isn’t an

isolated academic phenomenon. The institutional and

disciplinary changes are part of a larger cultural shift, inside

and outside the academy, a rapid cycle of emergence and

convergence in technology and culture”

Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2013)

http://emergenceofdhbook.tumblr.com/

http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/it/index.age

Father Roberto Busa (1913-2011)



“Reading individual works is as irrelevant as describing the architecture of a building from a single brick, or the layout of a city from a single church.” -Franco Moretti


Example Digital research methods

http://labs.bl.uk/Launch+Event (has some examples from researchers)

Corpus analysis tools

Text Mining

Visualisations

Location based searching

Geotagging

Annotation

Natural Language

Processing

Using Application Programming Interfaces for

datasets e.g. Metadata, Images

Transcribing

Crowdsourcing /

Human Computation

http://labs.bl.uk/Launch+Event


Digitisation at the British Library


Digitised Books

250,000 books being digitised with Google

68,000 volumes digitised with Microsoft

17th, 18th and 19th Century

Image taken from page 344, Volume 2, Cassell's Illustrated History of

the Russo-Turkish War, etc. by OLLIER, Edmund.

Otto, King of Greece

Image taken from page 10, "The Greece

of the Greeks", PERDICARIS, G. A.,

http://goo.gl/v7p1Lj


Digitised Newspapers

Newspapers stored at Colindale (now closed)

http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/


Digitised Manuscripts

http://goo.gl/JRv7xn


Not just text…Moving Image Collections


Digitisation - Transforming access

Spreading the value of collections, content and expertise

Connecting as much as collecting, e.g. social media

Encouraging others to integrate our materials into their

services – and vice versa


only in

Reading

Rooms due

to ©

only on

site due to

©

not

online –

various

storage

devices

online

and open

British Library

online

behind

paywall

Challenges of Digital access


Digital Scholarship Department

…become a leading centre of digital scholarship

… internationally recognised for innovation and

collaboration in support of research and

learning…

• The Digital Research Team

– Digital Curators

• The British Library Labs project

18


What is a Digital Curator?

• Explore how digital technologies are

re/shaping research and how this

informs how the library does its

business.

• Support staff across the library to identify

the opportunities that digital tools and

collections afford in modern scholarship

and to gain the skills to engage confidently

in this area.

• Partner with libraries and institutions to

enable innovation in digital scholarship.

• No specific collection but rather expertise

in digital scholarship, broadly defined. James Baker Nora McGregor

Stella Wisdom Aquiles

Alencar-Brayner


Training Library Staff

• Foundations in working with Digital Objects:

From Images to A/V

• Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly

Research

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

Semantic Web

Digital Scholarship Training Programme

• Behind the Screen: Basics of the Web

• What is Digital Scholarship?

• Digital Collections at British Library

• Digitisation at British Library

• Text Encoding Initiative & Annotation

• Geo-referencing and Digital Mapping

• Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums

and Cultural Heritage Institutions


Opening up Digital content

• Picturing Canada: Mapping a Collection:

http://bit.ly/13GhLIe

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:British_Library/Picturing_Canada

http://bit.ly/13GhLIe


Crowdsourcing Digitised Maps

http://www.bl.uk/maps/georeferencingmap.html


Creative with Wildlife Sounds

http://goo.gl/s7siv0

Sound Edit Wildlife Films

Competition 2013 http://vimeo.com/60401313

'Dave's Wild Life' by

Samuel de Ceccatty, won first prize!

http://sounds.bl.uk/Environment


The Big Data Experiment

• Microsoft Azure

• University College London’s

Computing and Digital

Humanities department

• Recommender engine for BL

Public domain content

http://goo.gl/VN0Wg2


Technology Strategy Board Competition

Winner

• Competition with Technology Strategy Board

• Focus on understanding the value and impact of making the

British Library’s Digital Content and data open / in the public

domain

• Peter Balman will develop an analytics dashboard for the

Library showing what is happening to our public domain

content

Challenge details: http://goo.gl/Hb6l4A https://www.vimeo.com/94067983

https://www.vimeo.com/94067983

https://www.vimeo.com/94067983


Computer Games

Off the Map Competition 2013

Pudding Lane Productions, 6 second-year students,

De Montfort University, Leicester, won first prize.

Off the Map

Gothic 2014 !

http://youtu.be/SPY-hr-8-M0

http://offthemap.gamecity.org/


Funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation


Digital

Scholarship

Digital

Research

Access &

Reuse Group

©

Developers/

Technical

Staff

British Library

Universities & wider

e.g. companies, start-ups,

independent scholars etc.

Stakeholders involved in Labs

United Kingdom The World

Researchers

Developers

BL Labs

Curators /

Researchers

Digital

Content


What is Labs…

BL Labs

Open

Software

Publications

Tools &

services to

support Digital

Scholarship

Case

Studies

Audience Research

question / idea

idea

idea

Competition

Contact

Events

Meetings

and visits

Experimenting with our

digital collections

Outputs from

engagement Data

Other Digital

Collection / Data

BL Digital

Collection /

Data

Researchers

Developers

Data Driven


Labs audience

Courtesy of Ben O’Steen

Researchers

Developers

Ability to question,

Review or interpret domain in

Potentially meaningful way

Good things

happen here

upskill

Skill and / or capability

To realise that potential

*human and / or hardware

Specific

Domain

Knowledge

People of

interest

Desired outcome

of BL Labs activities


British National

Bibliography

UK Web Archive Data

Text-mining of

electronic journals

Book ordering and

anonymised reader

data

Sample Labs Digital Collections

http://labs.bl.uk/Digital+Collections

• Copyright cleared for research

use

• Curated (Is there someone who

knows the ‘story’ about the

collection?)

• Collection / Item Level

Metadata available? (What state is

and does it need cleaning?)

• Where is it?

http://data.bl.uk coming soon!!

http://data.bl.uk/

http://data.bl.uk/


Engaging with Labs

Brainstorm ideas & group

Consider and choose

Work late and show what has

been done

1 2 3

Labs Data Cards

Ideas Labs

Hack and Data days

Projects

http://dml.city.ac.uk/


The winners of the Labs 2013 competition

Pieter Francois (left) and Dan Norton (right)

and each received a cheque for £2000 in November 2013

as winners of the first British Library Lab Competition 2013

Two entries chosen in June 2013

They both worked in residence from July to October 2013

with Labs to complete their projects

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/.a/6a00d8341c464853ef01901e30bb26970b-pi


Sample Generator: representative samples

• Pieter Francois

• 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

http://goo.gl/YFnZmu


Pieter Francois

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK80Jy0ijkA


Mixing the Library:

The Disc Jockey & the Digital Collection

http://www.tompro.co.uk

http://www.ablab.org/shetland

http://www.ablab.org/pd/di/

Prototype design

Annotation

Preview ‘item’

Selected ‘right’

channel ‘item’

Selected ‘left’

channel ‘item’ Collection ‘stalks’ made of ‘items’. Each ‘item’ is a URL.

The order of the ‘items’ can be ‘shuffled’ and sent to the ‘left’ or ‘right’ channels

‘Play back’ of ‘items’ (Blue)

and annotations (Yellow)

http://212.71.253.54:8000/a

Living Lab: Library of the Future, see: http://alturl.com/284zw

Basic functioning prototype:

http://www.tompro.co.uk/



http://www.tompro.co.uk/



http://alturl.com/284zw


Curatorial for Library metadata

Geo location

http://datatales.artefacto.org.uk/

Timeline Slide show

India Office Select materials


Winners of 2014 Competition

Victorian Meme Machine

Bob Nicholson of Edge Hill University

Anna Gerber and Desmond Schmidt from Queensland University

Blog posting http://goo.gl/iJy0aT

YouTube: http://goo.gl/mBTlk2

Blog: http://goo.gl/ofpNosl

YouTube: http://goo.gl/iseHTE

Text to Image Linking Tool (TILT)

http://goo.gl/iJy0aT



http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2014/06/text-to-image-linking-tool-tilt.html




Bob Nicholson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK95lzaPNp0


Story of one digital collection

What can 68,000 books tell us?

Image: Artwork by Alicia Martin

http://labs.bl.uk 41 #bl_labs

Extracting Images from OCR

41

<?xml version="1.0"

encoding="UTF-8" ?>

- <mets:mets

xmlns:xsi="http://ww

w.w3.org/2001/XML

Schema-instance"

xmlns:mets="http://w

ww.loc.gov/METS/"

xsi:schemaLocation=

"http://www.loc.gov/

METS/

http://www.loc.gov/

standards/mets/ver

sion18/mets.xsd

info:lc/xmlns/premi

s-v2

Image snipped out

Algorithmically

From ALTO XML

Image taken from page 207 of 'London and its Environs. A

picturesque survey of the metropolis and the suburbs ...

Translated by Henry Frith. With ... illustrations'

ALTO XML



Face Recognition of 19th Century Faces

The face-recognition algorithm worked

better for female faces than men’s


The Mechanical Curator

http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com

• #similar_to_77576796197_published_date

• #similar_to_77576796197_slantyness

• #similar_to_77576796197_bubblyness_x

• #similar_to_77576796197_bubblyness_y

• #new_train_of_thought

Image from ‘A Lost Estate, by Mary E.Mann,Volume: 02,

Page: 91, 1889, London, Bentley & Son


1,020,418 images!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/

Each image has a URL

Some metadata, but you can add tags!

Flickr has an API so researchers and developers can build apps

And query the data

Flickr Commons – 1,020,418 images!


Flickr in numbers

163,000,000 !!! image views since launch December 13th, 2013

to June 10th

Almost all images seen at least 5 times

90,699 tags added

18,567 images favourited

Labs involved with 2 potential research projects & 4 grassroots crowdsourcing efforts.


Tagging a million images

- Metadata games and other projects

http://www.metadatagames.org/

Games will probably be developed using Flickr sets

http://goo.gl/j6fxac

Cardiff University’s - Lost Visions Project


Risks of releasing the images

Funny Books for Boys and Girls. Struwelpeter. Good-for-nothing Boys

and Girls. Troublesome Children. King Nutcracker and Poor Reinhold.


Opportunities

– increasing traffic to Library services

You can purchase

a ‘High Res’ Copy

View in the

Library Item Viewer

Download .pdf All illustrations

in book

Other illustrations in books

Published in same year

View the item in

the Library Catalogue Tags auto generated

User generated

Tag

Grouping for image


Flickr coverage in the media!


Creative Uses

http://goo.gl/qPPgxX

http://goo.gl/OH6FSn

Jura’s Sound Skateboard

http://blpublicdomain.wikispaces.com/


Burning Man

http://goo.gl/Htg4XS

David Normal, creating light boxes around the

Burning man, using the British Library’s Flickr Images


Other Labs stories….

• Augmenting news metadata

• Opening up over 100,000 Playbills

• 3D printed objects representing statistical data with possibly

embedded USBs and RFID chips

• data.bl.uk, place for all our open data and digital collections

• Content next to parallel compute power, analysis at scale

• Funding till 2017!


Conclusions

• Huge appetite for openly available digital content,

• There needs to be a continuous dynamic interaction with

data and the researchers to formulate and reformulate

research questions

• Working with Digital Scholars creates new opportunities

• Content and service providers, researchers and technical

people need to talk to each other to create the new tools,

services and data needed to facilitate new discoveries

• Don’t be afraid to experiment and make mistakes too!


Acknowledgements

Ben O’Steen

- Labs Technical Lead

Digital Curator Team Digital Scholarship Head

Stella Wisdom

- Digital Curator

Nora McGregor

- Digital Curator

James Baker

- Digital Curator

Adam Farquhar

- Head of Digital Scholarship

(Wrote Labs proposal)


Email Labs

• Let us know your ideas for engaging with Labs!

• Questions?

[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]