British Library LabsWorking with the British Library’sDigital Content and Data

Wednesday 12th August 2015

Mahendra MaheyManager of British Library LabsPresentation to Business Marketing Department Team Meeting, British Library

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

180 Million Items

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

Digitisation at the British Library

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

Growth of the digital library

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

UK Web Archive

http://labs.bl.uk 6#bl_labs labs@bl.uk6

Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Knowledge Quarter

• Partners: Universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, University College London, Warwick

• Funded at £42m over 5 years

• Headquartered @ British Library

• Part of Knowledge Quarter

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

Digital is changing research

Data broken downrecombined and

duplicatedImage: Tower of Babble, Book Sculpture by Brian Dettmer

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

British National BibliographyUK Web Archive Data19th Century Books

Environmental SoundsText-mining of

electronic journals

Book ordering and anonymised reader

data

Resonance FM10 year CommunityArts Radio Show

Datasets, Books / Text, Images / Music, Maps, Sounds, Multimedia

http://labs.bl.uk/Digital+CollectionsTo become http://data.bl.uk/

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

Example Digital research methods

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

Corpus analysis toolsText Mining

Visualisations

Location based searching

Geotagging

Annotation

Crowdsourcing / Human Computation

Natural Language Processing

Using Application Programming Interfaces for datasets e.g. Metadata, Images

Transcribing

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

Funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation

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

Competition

Tell us your ideas of what to do with our digital content

Awards

Show us what you have done with our digital content

Projects

Talk to us about working on collaborative projects

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

Awards 2015

• Work that uses our digital collections

• Recognition of outstanding work in one of three areas:

Research, Creativity and Entrepreneurship

• Closing date 14th of September 2015

• Shortlist Monday 12th of October 2015

• Winners announced on November 2, 2015, £500 per category.

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

Mahendra MaheyManager of British Library Labs

https://goo.gl/lLsiaY/@mahendra_mahey

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

Ben O’SteenTechnical Lead ofBritish Library Labs@benosteen

http://labs.bl.uk 15#bl_labs labs@bl.uk

Hana LewisProject OfficerBritish Library Labs

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

Story of just *one* digital collection

What can 68,000books tell us?

Image: Artwork by Alicia Martin

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

Snipping out imagesfrom 65,000 Digitised Books

Face recognition

Mechanical Curator

Flickr

Worked better for female faces than men’s

Press

http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com> 270,000,000 views

> 400,000 tags

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

1,020,418 imagesneed tagging!

Creative uses of imageshttp://goo.gl/qPPgxX

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

Tagging a million imagesHarnessing Crowdsourcing

http://www.metadatagames.org/

http://goo.gl/j6fxac

Cardiff University’sLost Visions ProjectAdam Crymble

BL Labs 2015 Competition Winner

What if crowd sourcing

looked like this?

http://goo.gl/LBfJ4W

Drawing on downtime

Drawing on scarcity of access

Drawing on energy reserved for ‘play’

James Heald

Mario Klingemann

Chico 45

Use computational methods

Human Tagger

Top British Library Flickr Commons Taggers

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

Crowdsourcing Flickr and OtherDigitised Maps

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

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

Visibility - Technology Strategy Board Competition Winner 2014

Understanding value / impact of making the BL’s data open / in the public domain

Peter Balman developed an analytics dashboard for the Library showing what is happening to our Flickr

Images

Initial Pitch: https://www.vimeo.com/94067983

Challenge details: http://goo.gl/Hb6l4A

http://labs.bl.uk 21#bl_labs labs@bl.uk

Political Meetings MapperBL Labs Competition Winner 2015

Katrina Navickas

http://labs.bl.uk 22#bl_labs labs@bl.uk

Victorian Meme MachineBL Labs 2014 Competition Winner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK95lzaPNp0Bob Nicholson

http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/

http://labs.bl.uk 23#bl_labs labs@bl.uk

Sample GeneratorBL Labs 2013 Competition Winner

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

Pieter Francois:

http://labs.bl.uk 24#bl_labs labs@bl.uk

Burning Man 2014 – David NormalCrossroads of Curiosity

http://labs.bl.uk 25#bl_labs labs@bl.uk

David Normal Interview

https://youtu.be/Q3SBxO34Zlc

http://labs.bl.uk 26#bl_labs labs@bl.uk

Crossroads of Curiosity at the British Library until late Nov 2015

http://labs.bl.uk 27#bl_labs labs@bl.uk

What stories can other digital

collections tell us?

http://labs.bl.uk 28#bl_labs labs@bl.uk

Anna Gerber and Desmond Schmidt:Text to Image Linking Tool (TILT)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl4bjZSJ4cY&feature=youtu.be

http://labs.bl.uk 29#bl_labs labs@bl.uk

Dan Norton: 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)

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