Digital Librarian:Maximising access and re-use of digital collections

Aquiles Alencar-Brayner

@AquilesBrayner

www.bl.uk 2

Digital Curatorship: an emerging field in libraries and other cultural institutions

Redefining the concept of “Digital Curation”

Curation not only of objects but working on definition, expansion, training and support of Digital Scholarship amongst researchers and general users

Understand life and use of digital resources in the context of emerging technologies

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Our Mission

• Support institutions 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 staff on Digital Scholarship practices and resources

• Support of programmes involving digitsed and born-digital materials

• Engagement with new and existing user communities

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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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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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Main Activities at the BL

• 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

• Born-digital content:

Tools for data analysis: JISC 1996-2010

• Digitised resources:

Codex Sinaiticus

Shakespeare in Quarto

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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

• Chinese Book Cards Catalogue: project supported by the Chinese embassy aiming to identify OCLC records that match 28,000 printed card catalogues of Chinese publications held at the BL using crowdsourcing activities. The idea is to derive matching records from OCLC and ingest the data into the BL electronic catalogue (ALEPH): http://www.libcrowds.com/

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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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Million image corpus

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BL Labs• Mechanical Curator

Flickr

Wikimedia

How are users engaging with content?

List of projects

Video

Other projects:

• BL Digital Music Lab

• Off the Map

• Victorian Meme Machine

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

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

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Take two key British Library collections: 19th century newspapers & geo-referenced historic maps

Explore a key story in the history of British democracy: the Chartist movement of the 1830s & 1840s

Discover local & national histories of protest places:

Katrina Navickas: Political Meetings Mapper

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Katrina Navickas: Political Meetings Mapper

k.navickas@herts.ac.uk

A tool to extract and geo-code textual data

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Engagement with users IV:Geo-referencing

• http://www.bl.uk/maps/

• Old Map on Google Earth

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Engagement with users V• Digital Scholarship Surveyi. The Library plays an important role in digital

research according to 82.3% of users: 53.3% rate the BL as a very important digital research library and 28.8% rates it as quite important. This is a significant increase (+34.5%) in the recognition of the BL as a very important institution for digital research since the last DS survey in 2011.

ii. There has been since 2011 an increase in the use of social media, especially social networks (+26%), to share research findings and interests among users.

More information on the BL Digital Scholarship research can be found at http://bit.ly/1ugnlh9

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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

Engagement

Innovatio

n

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