Experimenting with the British Library Digital Collections: BL Labs Worksho...
Event Information
Description
Experimenting with the British Library Digital Collections: A workshop organised by British Library Labs and Department of Library & Information Science, City University London as part of the British Library Labs Roadshow (2016).
Location: Tait Building, Room C304, City University London, EC1V 0HB
Map: http://www.city.ac.uk/visit#9605=1
Date: Monday 1st Februrary 2016
Registration: 17:00-17:30. Event start: 17:30. Event ends: 20:00pm
Cost: Free. Open to the public. Members of the public please pre-register for free in advance here. Limited capacity.
Wireless access: EduRoam; guest password to be announced on the day. Livetweeting encouraged using the #citylis and #bl_labs hashtags.
*Please bring a laptop if you would like to access the Labs Digital Data for yourself on the evening!*
Drinks/snacks will be provided
BL Labs Roadshow (2016)
Hundreds of thousands of digital items and objects are being created and collected for researchers to use such as digitised manuscripts, sheet music, newspapers, maps, archived websites, radio, performances, TV news broadcasts, and artworks, as well as the more expected items like scanned versions of books.
This wonderful cacophony of content is having a significant effect on how institutions like the British Library support the research needs of their users. Will people discover new information when they are no longer restricted to viewing a single page from a single book at a time? How can the BL build systems that provide a coherent route across its content, regardless of whether it is a televised news report or a unique signature drawn in the margins of a map? How can we use crowd-sourced information, computer vision and machine-learning techniques to provide people with better tools to better judge and interpret the context of illustration or work? How can we exploit animations and interactive infographics to better convey the information found in our holdings?
This is the research space that British Library Labs explores and we want to encourage researchers and scholars to work with us and share their research questions and innovative ideas around this. This informal workshop will showcase some of the British Library's digital content and data, and give attendees the opportunity to hear from recent library and information science students who have engaged with Labs in various ways, and then to think ideas for innovative uses of the unique digital data collection.
Programme*:
1700 Registration.
1730 Introduction. Lyn Robinson, Head of Library & Information Science, City University London.
1735 The Digital Research Team. Aquiles Alencar Brayner, Digital Curator at the British Library, will talk about this cross-disciplinary mix of curators, researchers, librarians and programmers who support the creation and innovative use of British Library's digital collections. In this talk Aquiles will highlight how they work with those operating at the intersection of academic research, cultural heritage and technology to support new ways of exploring and accessing our collections through collaborative projects.
1750 The British Library Labs Project. Mahendra Mahey, Manager of the British Library Labs Project, British Library, will talk about the British Library Labs project which encourages scholars to use the British Library's incredible digital collections for their research, through various activities such as competitions, awards, events and projects.
1800 #citylis student panel. #citylis students Ludi Price, Alison Pope, Daniel van Strien and Dimitra Charalampidou will host a question-and-answer panel sharing their experiences of working with the British Library which includes entering the British Library Labs competition, working as a placement student with Labs, working at International Gaming Day and attending various events at the Library.
1820 Overview projects that have used British Library’s Digital Content and data. Ben O’Steen, Technical Lead for British Library Labs, will go into further detail about BL Labs projects and ideas. He will highlight some of the challenges and issues faced with using the digital content and data and importantly what the British Library has learned. He will also briefly show how to access some of the terabytes of data available on the day.
1850 Ideas Lab. Led by the British Library Labs team. Delegates will be encouraged to work together and think of ideas of what they might do with the digital collections and data in light of some of the challenges of working with it. The Labs and #citylis team will be on hand to help and advise.
1915 Pitching and Feedback. Panel comprising of British Library Labs and #citylis staff. Delegates will be asked to pitch their ideas and be given direct feedback from the panel.
1930 Goody bags! Goody bags will be given to the best idea decided by the panel.
* Programme and timings subject to change.
Speaker Biographies:
Dr Aquiles Alencar-Brayner, Digital Curator, British Library.
Aquiles has worked at the British Library as a Digital Curator since 2010. He holds a PhD in Latin American Literature from King’s College, University of London, and an MSc in Library and Information Science from City University London. He has been involved in various digital projects and is a member of The British Academy and Peer Review Committee for the Economic and Social Research Council.
Dimitra Charalampidou
Dimitra Charalampidou is a graduate of Library Science and Information Systems at the Alexander Technological Institute of Thessaloniki (A.Te.I.Th.), Greece. She wrote a dissertation during her training period at the British Library’s BL Labs, which focuses on the upload of digitised collections, more specifically the British Library’s Digitised Bookbindings, on Wikimedia Commons. She has participated in the organisation of the ‘Crossroads of Curiosity’ event at the British Library and has helped organise a number conferences such the ElPub 2014 and the KNOWescape 2014 Conferences in Thessaloniki, Greece as well as events at the Alexander Technological Institute’s library.
Mahendra Mahey, Project Manager of British Library Labs.
Previous to Labs he was at UKOLN (University of Bath) working for 4 years on the Jisc funded the UK Developer Community Supporting Innovation (DevCSI) initiative (organising several Developer Happiness” conferences (dev8d.org)) and 5 years together on a project focussing on how academic institutions could manage their research information using a common metadata standard and one supporting research in digital repositories of scholarly outputs. He was an adviser for the Jisc Regional Support Centres encouraging academics / librarians to use electronic learning resources and make effective use of e-learning technologies and techniques in their practice. He also worked as a lecturer for over 10 years in Social Sciences, Computing, Multimedia and English for Speakers of Other Languages in Further and Higher Education internationally.
Alison Pope
Alison is a Business Analyst in Information Technology Services at the University of Reading working on enterprise architecture with a focus on business and information architectures. Most of Alison's career has been spent in higher education designing and improving information systems in a changing education and technology landscape. Alison has implemented library systems, virtual learning environments and digital repositories; supported the transition to the Research Excellence Framework with new systems for research data and management information; and worked with researchers on a variety of digital scholarship projects. Alison recently studied Information Science at #citylis with a particular interest in digital information technology architectures, data visualisation and sport informatics.
Ludi Price, PhD candidate in Information Science, Department of Library & Information Science, City University London.
Ludi is a third year Ph. D. student in Information Science at City University London. Her research is focusing on the digital information behaviour of fans and how their high-quality, amateur creation, organisation and sharing of cultural artefacts is challenging traditional models of information provision in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) sector. She is also active in promoting the appreciation of fanworks and fan practices in the library world, most recently participating in the International Games Day at the British Library. She also works part time as Far Eastern cataloguer at the SOAS, University of London library.
Lyn Robinson, Head of Library & Information Science, City University London
Lyn is well known as Founder and Director of the innovative Library School, #citylis, and as a researcher, writer and presenter within the field of library & information science. She describes herself as an academic and a Londoner.
Ben O'Steen, Technical Lead of British Library Labs.
Previous to working for Labs he was a freelance developer in the academic sector. While his expertise lies in solving interesting problems using computers, his formal training is in chemistry: He has authored a Physics GCSE training course, created electronics for art installations, co-founded the “Developer Happiness” conference (dev8d.org), and he was the lead developer in the Bodleian Library’s Research and Development department building their Resource Description Framework (RDF) - powered repository and digital asset management systems. In recent years, he has worked on Jisc funded projects (OpenBibliography, OpenCitation), wrote reports for funders on topics such as text-mining and sat on technical advisory boards for the Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD) protocol , ORCID and other groups.
Daniel van Strien, Library Science Masters student, City University London.
Daniel is a #citylis student who has recently submitted a dissertation assessing the role of research funders in the transition to open access, focusing on policies relating to the payment of Article Processing Charges. Alongside an interest in open access, Daniel is passionate about the potential uses of technology in libraries and the new ways in which libraries can support research. Recently Daniel facilitated a workshop on GitHub as part of ‘Library Carpentry’, a series of ‘four three-hour software skills sessions focused on the needs and requirements of the library professionals’. Daniel currently works as an Assistant Librarian at Newcomb Library, Homerton University Hospital.
More info:
https://blogs.city.ac.uk/citylis
