Post on 15-Jul-2015
transcript
Communicating our Collections Online
(and why the aim is to remove the word ‘Online’ from this sentence.)
Ben O’Steen @benosteenBritish Library Labs
“Online”?
It’s a medium, not a method.- mail vs email- books vs ‘ebooks’ (*shudder*)- fax vs carving things on monoliths and
dragging them to the appropriate location.
Language shapes interactions
The language distinction between these electronic media encourages people to approach them as if it were some additional thing to deal with.
Why we communicate is often forgotten.
Ceci n’est pas un livre
Magic paper and physical boundaries
Physical boundaries leak into digital interfaces.
‘Page’ viewers have their place, but they should not be the final destination.
@sebchan at EuropeanaTech2015:Key points for us:- everything should be online
- [every thing should have one URL]- online content should be rich, detailed, connected.- other [external] collections should be visible- everything should be managed with a mesh of
systems.- interfaces should avoid ‘feeling like a database’
Metadata, as the public wants it, but not how we provide it.
David Foster Wallace, on Ambition:“You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous, because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.
Because doing anything results in— It’s actually kind of tragic because it means you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is.”- As told to Leonard Lopate on WNYC on March 4, 1996.
(emphasis my own)http://blankonblank.org/interviews/david-foster-wallace-on-ambition/
Images held hostage
There were over one million separate illustrations, photos and embellishments in just ~65,000 volumes.
Do “traditional” treatments of scanned books enable better research than is possible with paper?
Ceci n’est pas un livre
“Bound” books
Authentic representation is important.
Enabling alternate representations and exploration is just as important.
It all starts with a URL
- have things at discoverable URLs- (eg search in google, does it appear easily?)
- Have those URLs link to other things and vice-versa.- eg Wikipedia, academic articles, blogposts
But what if you don’t have stable and static URLS?
Impact of this change?Hard to measure:
20 million hits on average every month, over 230 million in 13 months.Over 150,000 tags added by volunteers.Dozens of projects already using content (research & creative)Hundreds of contributors.Iterative crowdsourcing is ongoing and essential.eg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:British_Library/Mechanical_Curator_collection/map_tag_status
Burning Man Festival
David Normal created light boxes around theBurning man, using the British Library’s Flickr Images
Burning Man Festival
Spotlight: BL Georeferencer
- Kimberly Kowal (BL) and James Heald (Wikimedia volunteer) http://maps.bl.uk/
- First attempt - crowdsourced 3,221 maps in ~4 weeks (maps found in the Flickr archive.)
- Next attempt… 50,213 maps to go!
My contact details:
ben.osteen@bl.uk@benosteen
Links:http://labs.bl.ukhttp://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com https://flickr.com/photos/britishlibraryhttps://github.com/bl-labshttp://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html \