British Library Labshttp://labs.bl.uk

Saturday 26th October 2013, 1000 – 1100 (15 min slot)Ed Tech Hackathon 2013 (Apps for Learning and Teaching)hackathoncentral.comCentral Working Canteen, Google Campus4–5 Bonhill Street, London, EC2A 4BX, UK

Mr Mahendra MaheyBritish Library Labs Project Manager

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

Encouraging scholars and developers to do research and development with and across British Library digital collections and data

British Library Labs is about…

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

What activities does Labs do?• Encourage researchers / developers to do interesting things with BL

digital content (+other) with and across collections (a data driven approach)

• Competitions and events (hack events)

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

• Work with your ideas

• Help develop tools and services to support digital scholarship

• Case studies for the library and research communities

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

How Labs works…

BL LabsCompetitions

Events

Contact

Software

Publications

Tools and services to

support Digital Scholarship

BL Digital Collection /

Data

idea

BL Digital Collection /

Data

Other Digital Collection

idea

idea

idea

idea

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

British Library Digital Collections

Over 600 digital collections and rising…Filter is needed…

•Copyright cleared for research and commercial use or non commercial

•Curated (Is there someone who knows about the collection?)

•Collection / Item Level Metadata available?

•Where is it?

Available only in

Reading Rooms due

to ©

Available on site only at the moment

due to ©

Digital but not online –

various storage devices

Available only onsite at the momentHack Events, In residence

Digital and

online

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

Some data / digital collections

British National BibliographyUK Web Archive Data 19th Century Books

Environmental Sounds

Text-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+Collections

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

Example Research Methods• Corpus analysis tools

• Visualisations

• Location based searching

• Geotagging

• Annotation

• APIs for datasets e.g. Metadata, Images

• Crowdsourcing / Human Computation

• Natural Language Processing

• Transcribing

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

Ideas from first competition

• Text mining tool in the reading rooms

• Curatorial…repackaging metadata for teaching and learning in a CMS e.g. Drupal

• Visualising large collections of sound at a glance (thumbnails)

• Using sheet music and OMR software

• Working to re-use a radio archive

• The winners are…

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

Mixing the Library: The Disc Jockey & the Digital Collection

Dan Norton completed a PhD at the University of Dundee and is an Artist in Residence at Hangar, Centre for Art and Research, Barcelona.

His idea is to build a ‘mixing’ interface for interacting with BL digital collections and wider developed from the DJ's model of interaction with information.

Dan Norton’s prototype ‘mixing’ interface

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://labs.bl.uk 10#bl_labs

In this example, the ‘Sample Generator’ searches across 1.8 million bibliographic records from the 19th Century for items about ‘Travel Routes’ and where possible

(digitised items permitting) provides unbiased digital ‘samples’ for further research.

Generates a randomised unbiased sample

Work 1

Generated sample URL (unique & citable after creation)

Work 1

Work 2

Work 3

Work 4

Work 5

Work 6

Work 7

Work 8

Terms used: ‘Travel Routes’ from ‘1888-1899’, sample size ‘8’. Set created on ‘16/10/2013’ by ‘Pieter Francois’

Travel Routes From To1888 1899

Digitally available content only

Account, Tour, Adventure, Visit. Journey, Expedition, Excursion, Trip, Holiday, Guide, Plan, Route

Sample Size 8 Generate

British Library Labs Sample Generator1

Travel route extracted from ‘Work 1’ for further research

3

Pieter Francois is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford. The ‘Sample Generator’ connects one or more major catalogues or collections of digitized texts through metadata.

The Sample Generator for Digitised Texts

Search terms

Distribution of items in catalogue

Researcher carries out research on works in the sample generated. Here it used for the basis

of generating travel routes as shown in 3.

2

Synonyms

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

Next Competition

• Starts 11 November 2013 and ends around April 2014

• Submit idea, engage during this period to formulate a good idea

• First prize £3000 and residency (expenses paid) and we will work with you to make your shiny thing between May and October 2014

• Work with us anyway and our content at Data / Hack events:

• 12 Dec 2013, 13 January 2014, 12 February 2014, 10 March 2014

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

Data / Items brought

• British National Bibliography in RDF Triples

• Digitised books from 17th, 18th and 19th and 20th Century

• Image metadata

• 10 x USB Sticks

• 1 x 500 Gb hard drive

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

British National Bibliographic Data• http://bnb.data.bl.uk (part of data.bl.uk) –

download here, SPARQL end point

• 2.8 Million individual records

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

• On USB• Hard Drive Augmenting Author records

– London Review of BooksCombining with other data sources?

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

19th Century Digitised Books• 65,000 digitised volumes. Many rare or inaccessible books

published between 17, 18, 19 and 20th Century including philosophy, history, poetry and literature, travel

• 25 million pages (OCR text available, 75% accuracy) on hard drive as .txt, .json and metadata as .xml (50 Gb) (metadata as .tsv metadata on USB stick), items identified by unique numbers

• 420,000 images / illustrations available on Flickr (around 70% and counting) http://goo.gl/OrCKZz (use their API) and on hard drive (100 Gb – 20 mins? – illustrations and covers)

• See Mechanical Curator on Tumblr - http://goo.gl/uvE5Yw

• For images - Jigsaw, crowdsourcing metadata, image recognition (machine learning)

• For Text – dirty data, cleaning up exercise, with educational purpose?

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

Image Metadata

• .CSV files on USB stick and hard drive

• Contains links to images

• Re-purpose metadata and images?

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

Speak to me: 0207 412 7324 Email me: mahendra.mahey@bl.uk or labs@bl.ukLabs Website: http://labs.bl.uk/ Twitter: @BL_LabsHash Tag: #bl_labsJiscmail: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=BL-LABS

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

What next?