British Library Labshttp://labs.bl.uk

British Library LabsTuesday 17th September 2013The European Library Annual MeetingAmsterdam

Aly ContehHead of Digital Research & Curator TeamBritish Library

http://labs.bl.uk 2#bl_labs

“Every book tells a story, but what can 68,000 books tell you?”

The project in a nutshell…

Encouraging scholars and developers to do research and development with British Library

digital collections

http://labs.bl.uk 3#bl_labs

About• Grant from The Andrew Mellon Foundation

• 2 year initial project (to September 2014)

• External Advisory Board• Professor Tim Hitchcock (Digital Humanities)

– University of Hertfordshire

• Professor Andrew Prescott (Digital Humanities)– King’s College London

• Bill Thompson (Technology writer)- BBC

• Professor Claire Warwick (Digital Humanities)- University College London

• Professor David De Roure (e-Research)- University of Oxford

http://labs.bl.uk 4#bl_labs

About• British Library Team

• Project Manager – Mahendra Mahey

• Technical Lead – Ben O’Steen

• Supported by a team of 4 Digital Curators

http://labs.bl.uk 5#bl_labs

Labs details…what• No digitisation involved, just digitized and born digital Library content

• Some content online

• Other in digital form but not online yet– e.g. too big, needs work, technical challenges, license restrictions

(e.g. onsite access etc.)

• Examine and analyse the content, especially entire collections (i.e. cross collection research)

• Do research, publish

• Make things, e.g. tools, services, apps etc…

• Transforming processes, services and tools for scholars / developers using Library digital collections

http://labs.bl.uk 6#bl_labs

Lab details…how• Competitions, events and various activities

• Creating environment where scholars / developers can work intensively with Library’s digital collections (winners will be resident)

• Encourage research / developers to do innovative things with British Library digital content

• Labs is more than the competition

• Ideas can be pursued by talking to Library staff , scholars / developers interested in conducting research / making things

http://labs.bl.uk 7#bl_labs

The plan in time…• Launch Event – 25th March 2013 – draft details of competition and feedback, launched end of

April

• Virtual 17 May (Video of Hangout Available), more virtual event?

• Hack Event 28/29 May London

• AHRC research network - 'the infinite archive‘, Open University, University of Nottingham, University of Warwick

• Winners announced at 6 July 2013, York (Digital Heritage Conference)

• Best two ideas work in residence and showcase their work on the 11th November 2013, when the next competition will be launched, deadline end of March 2014, work on entry May to end of October 2014, Nov/Dec Showcase

• Other ideas, look at supporting in other ways e.g. through Labs, other Library departments, Business opportunities etc.

• Case studies produced around Nov/Dec for first iteration 2013 and second iteration 2014

http://labs.bl.uk 8#bl_labs

Labs Hack Days…• Bringing researchers, developers, curators and anyone

interested with collections together at events, want to do more!

• Brainstorming ideas – ideas lab

• Scoping research, ideas, solving problems and developing prototypes

• Watch this space

Brainstorm ideas and group

Consider and choose

Work into the night and showwhat has been done

http://labs.bl.uk 9#bl_labs

Case studies…• Research generated from the competitions and general

activity of Labs

• Inform the Library / other libraries around the world about the issues, challenges, solutions and benefits generated when using a Labs approach

http://labs.bl.uk 10#bl_labs

Labs Content• Work with curators to identify those digital collections that

are suitable for Labs

• Focus on those that are copyright cleared at the moment

• Others considered in light of challenges, i.e. in scope for Labs work

• Engage researchers/developers with these materials through meetings, road-shows, hack days, promotions (including competitions and events)

• Started off with a list of over 300 digital collections

• Needed a filter

http://labs.bl.uk 11#bl_labs

Types of content

• Datasets

• Books / Text

• Images / Music

• Maps

• Sounds

• Multimedia

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

http://labs.bl.uk 12#bl_labs

British National Bibliographic Data• bnb.data.bl.uk

• 2.6 Million individual records

• Title, Author, Subject, Descriptions and more of books and journals published or distributed in the UK and Ireland since 1950.

• Available as Linked Open Data, Basic RDF/XML and Marc21.

• An excellent resource for uncovering publishing trends across the decades, and augmenting records!

http://labs.bl.uk 13#bl_labs

UK Web Archive Data• data.webarchive.org.uk/

opendata

• An example dataset is the JISC UK Web Domain Dataset (1996-2010) which is a 32TB subset of the Internet Archive’s web collection relating to the UK.

• Comparing events across media types?

http://labs.bl.uk 14#bl_labs

19th Century Digitised Books• 68,000 digitised volumes and their

accompanying JP2, PDF, metadata and OCR text files

• Many rare or inaccessible books published between 1789 and 1914 and covers a wide range of subject areas including philosophy, history, poetry and literature, travel

• Representative materials here: britishlibrary19c.tumblr.com

• Text mining?

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Book ordering data…• Every day thousands of items are ordered up from the library

stacks and delivered to researchers in our reading rooms. We can provide daily anonymised reports of these titles including shelfmark information and reading room location

• Visualising what readers are reading?

Anonymised reader data…• Anonymised information about our readers

• Big buckets

• Social trends?

http://labs.bl.uk 16#bl_labs

Bringing Text Mining to the Library

Many electronic journals we have negotiated text mining rights for (50%) journals

A project to get the tools to readers?

http://labs.bl.uk 17#bl_labs

Example Research Methods• Corpus Analysis tools

• Visualisations

• Topic Models

• Location based searching

• Geotagging

• Annotation

• APIs for datasets e.g. Metadata, Images

• Crowdsourcing / Human Computation

• Natural Language Processing

• Transcribing

http://labs.bl.uk 18#bl_labs

Dan Norton

• Mixing the Library: The Disc Jockey and the Digital Collection

• Dan Norton is a PhD Researcher on the Digital Economy Project; SerenA, Chance Encounters in the Space of Ideas, based at the University of Dundee and is Artist in Residence at Hangar, Centre for Art and Research, Barcelona.

• Builds an interface for interacting in digital collections developed from the DJ's interaction with information. His project uses selecting and mixing as creative behaviours for exploring, learning, and authoring with digital collections.

• The prototype will demonstrate the interface requirements necessary for collecting, enriching (organizing, annotating),and mixing information from digital libraries; for building aesthetic, experimental, or logical links between resources; and for developing ad hoc visualizations, or publishing annotated data.

• The template to be produced during the project will inform future developments of a fully functioning platform for learning and authoring in digital collections, by selecting, mixing, and sequencing.

• Working on functioning prototype to collect URLs for different media types e.g. text, video, sound and images, shuffle order and then comparing two digital objects and being able to annotate in real time

http://labs.bl.uk 19#bl_labs

Pieter Francois

• The Sample Generator for Digitised Texts

• Pieter Francois is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford.

• The ‘Sample Generator for Digitized Texts’ is a relatively simple piece of software which connects one or more major catalogues or bibliographies with one or more collections of digitized texts through the metadata.

• The ‘Sample Generator’ allows users to create custom-made samples of fully digitized texts that mirror the distribution of certain key parameters, like genre, year and place of publication, language, gender of the author, ..., as found within the catalogues and bibliographies. Whereas the applicability of the ‘Sample Generator’ is universal, this proposal will focus on testing out this novel approach by connecting the nineteenth-century holdings of the Integrated Catalogue of the British Library with the ‘19th Century Books’ digital collection.

• The main aim is to tell the story of over a million nineteenth-century books through a structured sampling of 68,000 books, focus is on travel routes/accounts

• Creating demonstrator which searches across 1 million records and where possible find highly significant samples for further research

http://labs.bl.uk 20#bl_labs

@acontehalyconteh@bl.uk

labs.bl.uk/ @BL_Labs#bl_labs

Thank You