1. Digital Scholarship
Innovative 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” rules
1.Integrity: access to digital
object as it has been created
2.Integration: different contents
and file formats available from a
single platform
3.Interoperability: different
programmes and operating
systems compatible with each
other
4.Instant access: unrestricted
access to material, especially
from mobile devices
5.Interaction: catalogues that
provide Web 2.0 features (blogs,
wikis, tags, content sharing, etc)
6.Information: comprehensive
metadata for fast and reliable
retrieval of content
7.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 ways
10.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/visualisatio
n
• 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 Map
Creativity 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 Transform
scholarly
production &
communication
Digital Scholarship

Digital Curatorship
Staff training
and 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