Digital ScholarshipInnovative ways of engaging researchers with digital content

Aquiles Alencar-Brayner

@AquilesBrayner

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Digital Research & Curator Team

Formed in 2010 as part of the new Digital Scholarship department

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Our Mission• Support the BL to adopt clear strategies and operating models for

Digital Scholarship

• Develop innovative models for Digital Scholarship exploiting digital content and new technologies

• Offer training and support to BL staff on Digital Scholarship practices and resources

• Involvement with various digital programmes (internal and external) involving digitisation, born-digital materials, publication on the Web, etc.

• Engage with new and existing user communities

• Strengthen the BL capabilities

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More than resource discovery…

• Libraries and archives have spent the last two decades making digital assets and harvesting born-digital objects.

• We can now do much more than use technology to discover these digital objects and embrace the opportunities afforded by an intellectual turn toward digitally-driven research

• So digital research is about:– New tools– New discoveries– New understanding

“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)

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Scalability: how to filter, find and analyse the information I need?

• How many data is generated in ONE day?

1. Twitter: 7 TB

2. Facebook: 10 TB

• By 2020 we will have approximately 35 ZB (1.1 Trillion GB) of Data available

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Digital Libraries: 10 “in” rules1.Integrity: access to digital object as it has been created2.Integration: different contents and file formats available from a single platform3.Interoperability: different programmes and operating systems compatible with each other4.Instant access: unrestricted access to material, especially from mobile devices5.Interaction: catalogues that provide Web 2.0 features (blogs, wikis, tags, content sharing, etc)6.Information: comprehensive metadata for fast and reliable retrieval of content7.Ingest of content: constant upload of new digital content

8. Interpretation: digital content placed in relation to other items in the collection

9.Innovation: material to be presented in innovative ways10.Indefinite access: digital objects to be preserved for posterity

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Main Activities

• Staff training

• Promotion of Digital Scholarship within BL

• Curation of digital research data

• Project management

• Engagement with users

• Create and share online content with other libraries and research centres

• Communication channels

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Staff training: Increasing skills and awareness

• Objectives:– Wider engagement from staff in

implementing the 2020 Vision and Digital Scholarship Strategy

– Increased ability to work with digital content and services

– Increased ability to shape digital services– Increased engagement with researchers– Increased confidence in establishing

collaborations with partners in digital scholarship

– Improved fluency around data management

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Digital Scholarship Training Programme: 15 courses (offered 3 times a year) launched in October 2012

1. Social Media: Introduction to Yammer, Twitter, and Blogging

2. Working collaboratively: Using the BL Wiki

3. Presentation skills: From PowerPoint to Prezi

4. Foundations in working with Digital Objects: From Images to A/V

5. Behind the Screen: Basics of the Web

6. Metadata for Electronic Resources: Dublin Core, METS, MODS, RDF, XML

7. What is Digital Scholarship?

8. Digital Collections at British Library

9. Digitisation at British Library

10.Communicating our collections online: Access & Reuse Policy

11. Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions

12.Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)

13.Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research

14.Geo-referencing and Digital Mapping

15. Information Integration: Mash-ups, API’s and The Semantic Web

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Digital Conversations• Series of talks organised by DRCT on specific themes around ideas, tools and

projects around Digital Scholarship. Contributors have included entrepreneurs, technologists, librarians, academics and analysts.

• Events held:

1. Search and Discovery

2. Sharing and Annotation

3. Profiling and Privacy

4. Open for Re-use

5. Future of Text

6. Digital Narratives

7. Using the Cloud 

• Events are recorded on video and made publicly available on BL Youtube account: http://bit.ly/XFJrcI

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Curation e-Manuscripts

• Extracting and archiving digital content from personal devices

• Assist with capture, management, description, and preservation of personal digital collections to facilitate access and content analysis

• Data analysis beyond documents

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Support for digital collections and services

• Involvement with BL digital programmes and services run by other departments

• Web Archive team:

• Collection development: Video games

• http://bit.ly/ZwVAgJ

• Tools for data analysis: JISC 1996-2010

• http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/visualisation

• DIPS (Digital Image Presentation System):

• www.bl.uk/manuscripts

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Engagement with users I:Growing Knowledge exhibition (2010 – 2011)Beautiful Science (Feb – May 2014)

Growing Knowledge offered a physical space where public could walk in and start exploring a wide number of digital tools used by researchers from text mining to online collaboration.

Beautiful Science explores how our understanding of ourselves and our planet has evolved alongside our ability to diagram, graph, and map the mass data of the time. http://bit.ly/1juG9VG

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Engagement with users II: Crowdsourcing projects

• Sound map -Your Accent: The 'Your accents' interactive map displays a collection of recordings created between November 2010 and April 2011 and is a result of the British Library exhibition, Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices. People all over the world were invited to record their voice reading a children’s story, Mr Tickle (© 1971 Roger Hargreaves), to help the Library capture contemporary English accents. The recordings are available at http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/Your-Accents

• Europeana 1914 – 1918 Roadshows: Public was invited to bring WW1 photographs, letters, diaries, film or audio recordings, together with the stories of who they belonged to and why they are important to their families to the Europeana 1914-1918 while staff from museums and BL digitised the objects and uploaded them to the dedicated europeana1914-1918.eu website on the spot.

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Engagement with users III:BL Labs (Launched March 2013)

• The BL Labs project, sponsored by A. Mellon Foundation, designed to support the BL to provide access to its digital resources and enable scholars to research entire collections rather than just individual items by:

• 1. Reviewing the BL’s approach to licensing: moving towards a coherent licence framework and setting the standard for access to catalogue metadata and out-of-copyright materials in digital form.

• 2. Enabling scholars to use and implement novel services; to access, download, and analyse digital content; and to link data to other data and digital collections in order to allow research that analyses entire collections. This will be achieved by providing access to catalogue and digital materials through simple open protocols and semantic linking.

• 3. Creating BL Labs so that scholars can work intensively with the Library’s digital collections to collaboratively define and implement the services that they need in the digital age.

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New Discoveries

• British Library Mechanical Curator

Unlocking design

• Off the MapCreativity using BL digital collection

• http://www.bl.uk/maps/

Georeferencing

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Creating and Sharing Digital Content• Europeana 1914 – 1918:

• The BL is digitising 10,000 items (up to 250,000 digital images) of a wide range of material related to the First World War. Digitised content will be retrievable via the Europeana portal, as well as via the BL website, and this will form the Library’s contribution to the Europeana Collections 1914-1918.

• http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/en

• http://www.bl.uk/world-war-one

• International Image Interoperability Framework (iiif)

• The BL and Stanford University, with a half dozen of the world’s leading research libraries and funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, are working collaboratively to produce an interoperable framework for image delivery. With shared technology, common application programming interfaces (APIs), and rich user interfaces, this framework will surpass the current crop of image viewers, page-turners, and navigation systems, giving scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to image-based resources. http://lib.stanford.edu/iiif

•

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Creating and Sharing Digital Content through Social Media:

• Wikimedia Commons

• Pinterest

• Google Maps

• Flickr

• HistoryPin

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Network & partnerships

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Provide wider access to our collections

Enable users to create and manipulate data

Enhance research and learning

Support of Digital Scholarship: New tools applied to digital

collections: annotation, citation, comparison, analysis, etc.

Awareness of emerging research trends within DS

Strong collaboration between researchers, IT and information professionals

Distinctive through: Comprehensive digital collections Core infra-structure to store,

preserve, discover and access

Delivered through: Joint projects E-platforms Connecting data sets to research

tools

Integration

Engagem

ent

Innovation

Transform scholarlyproduction &communication

Digital Scholarship

Digital Curatorship

Staff trainingand support

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Communication Channels

• BL Digital Scholarship Blog:

• http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/

• Connect - DRCT Newsletter (internal)

• Twitter (Digital Curators personal accounts)

• Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LYaclanmcU

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Thank you