Presentation by Stella Wisdom to The Chinese Academy of Social Science 29/06/2015

1. Digital Scholarship
Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator
@miss_wisdom
Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/

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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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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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Digital Scholarship Training Programme: 15 courses
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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Engagement: Crowdsourcing projects
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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Off the Map videogame competition for 2013
Three sub themes:
• Stonehenge, including a proposed plan to rebuild
Stonehenge
• Pyramids at Giza
• 17th Century London, including a survey map made
months after the Great Fire of 1666

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C.J. Visscher, London , 1616 (detail) Maps C.5.a.6

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John Leake, An exact surveigh of the streets lanes and churches contained within the
ruines of the City of London, 1667. Maps Crace port 2.58

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2013 winning team: Pudding Lane Productions from De Montfort
University, Leicester who created an interpretation of 17th Century London
http://puddinglanedmuga.blogspot.co.uk/
http://youtu.be/SPY-hr-8-M0 (Flythrough starts at 0:50)

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Gothic theme, tie-in with the Library's exhibition
Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination
3 October 2014 - 20 January 2015
• Fonthill Abbey
Home of William Beckford, author of Vathek
• Edgar Allan Poe’s
Masque of the Red Death
• Whitby and its association with Bram Stoker’s
novel Dracula
Off the Map 2014

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Off the Map
2014 Winners
• 2014 winning team:
Gothulus Rift
University of South
Wales
• Created a Fonthill Abbey
inspired game called Nix
using Oculus Rift
• Blog:
http://nixgamedevblog.bl
ogspot.co.uk
• YouTube flythrough:
http://youtu.be/8ESieZO
4VHw

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http://youtu.be/NzzQLaltmVA
Off the Map videoclips of 2013 & 2014 winning entries

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Alice’s Adventures Off the Map
Part of the British Library's celebrations
for the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland
http://gamecity.org/alices-adventures-off-the-map/
Off the Map 2015

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Some work in progress: The Wondering Lands of Alice
Team Off our rockers:
Amber Jamieson, Braden May, Dan Bullock, Denzil Forde, Freddy Canton & Luke Day
https://youtu.be/uuG5sAtEZzs

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Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator
@miss_wisdom
Digital Scholarship Blog
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/