Experimenting with British Library’s Digital Content and Data for your research and teaching (University of Wolverhampton)

A workshop organised by British Library Labs and the University of Wolverhampton’s Directorate of Academic Support and Faculty of Social Sciences as part of the British Library Labs Roadshow (2016).

The workshop will showcase some of the British Library’s digital content and data, addressing some of the challenges and issues of working with it and how interesting and exciting projects from researchers, artists, and entrepreneurs have been developed via the annual British Library Labs Competition and Awards. This will be followed by presentations about research at the University of Wolverhampton. Finally, the session will end with an ‘Ideas Lab’ encouraging participants to explore, experiment and think of ideas of what they might do with the British Library’s digital content and data. A panel will give feedback on the ideas and there will be a British Library goody bag for the best one!

Date and Time:
Friday 4th March 2016, 1230 - 1645

Cost:
Free

Location:
Room MU505, Executive  Education Suite, Lord Swraj Paul Building, Wolverhampton Business School, The University of Wolverhampton, City Campus North, Stafford Road, Wolverhampton, WV1 1SG.

Map:
The Lord Swraj Paul Building is located on City Campus North (see Map). General directions for the University of Wolverhampton can be found here.

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 teachers at the University of Wolverhampton to work with us and share their research questions and innovative ideas around this.

Technical Requirements: We recommend that you bring a laptop to the event if you would like to access the Labs digital data (see: http://goo.gl/E8aRyQ). If you bring a mobile device such as an IPad, Galaxy Tab and Mobile Phone, you will need to install a File Explorer application in order to browse our digital content!

Programme:

1230  Registration and Lunch

1300  Introduction
Dr Richard A. Hawkins, Reader in History at the University of Wolverhampton

1305  The Express & Star Photograph Archive Digitisation Project
Scott Knight, Project Manager, University of Wolverhampton
Gillian Roberts, City Archivist, Wolverhampton City Archives

The Express & Star is a Black Country success story. For many years it has been the UK’s biggest selling regional newspaper, read by more than 170,000 people every night. Having moved into the digital age, it reaches an average daily online audience of more than 100,000 people.

1320  Doing digital research at the British Library
Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library

The Digital Research Team is a cross-disciplinary mix of curators, researchers, librarians and programmers supporting the creation and innovative use of British Library's digital collections. In this talk Stella will highlight how they work with those operating at the intersection of academic research, cultural heritage and technology to support new ways of exploring, accessing the Library's collections through; getting content in digital form and online; collaborative projects; offering digital research support and guidance. Stella will give an overview of the 'Off the Map' competition which she has been running for the last 3 years which encourages computer games developers to use British Library digital asset packs to create games and interactive experiences for users based on a theme that is linked to a British Library exhibition.

1350  Digital Collections and doing digitisation at the British Library
Andrew Longworth, Digitisation Project Analyst, British Library

Andrew will give an overview of the process of digitisation at the British Library and give a brief outline of the work he has been doing to help analyse and improve the process. He will also give a brief overview of some of the Library's digital resources.

1405  British Library Labs
Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs.

The British Library Labs project supports and inspires scholars to use the British Library’s incredible digital collections in exciting and innovative ways for their research, through various activities such as competitions, awards, events and projects.

Labs will highlight some of the work that they and others are doing around digital content in libraries and also talk about ways to encourage researchers to engage with the British Library. They will present information on the BL Labs Competition, which closes this year on 11th April 2016. Through the Competition, Labs encourages researchers to submit their important research question or creative idea which uses the British Library’s digital content and data. Two Competition winners then work in residence at the British Library for five months and then showcase the results of their work at the annual Labs Symposium in November 2016.

Labs will also discuss the BL Labs Awards which recognises outstanding work already completed, that has used the British Library’s digital collections and data. This year, the Awards will commend work in four key areas: Research, Artistic, Commercial and Teaching / Learning. The deadline for entering the BL Labs Awards this year is 5th September 2016.

1425  The Political Meetings Mapper
Dr Katrina Navickas, Senior Lecturer, University of Hertfordshire

Katrina Navickas’ one of the winners of the BL Labs Competition (2015) will talk about her project Political Meetings Mapper, a tool for text mining and geo-locating the records of political meetings, enabling anyone to access the maps and data on an interactive website.

1445  Overview other projects that have used British Library’s Digital Content and data
Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs.

Labs will further present information on various projects such as the ‘Mechanical Curator’ and other interesting experiments using the British Library’s digital content and data.

Labs will be coming along with terabytes of the British Library’s digital data on the day which the team will give an overview of how to access them, highlighting some of the challenges faced when working with “messy” data.

1515  Ideas Lab and Discussion  (Coffee available after introduction)
Labs and British Library Team

The Labs team will run through this informal activity, where delegates will have the opportunity to work in small groups (min 2 up to 6) and come up with their own ideas they will also take questions from the previous presentations. The Labs and Wolverhampton teams will be on hand to help and advise. For detailed instructions and information see the Ideas Lab Pack on your table.

1630 Pitching ideas to the panel
University of Wolverhampton and British Library Team

Each group will pitch their ideas to the British Library and University of Wolverhampton panel who will give feedback on how they might be implemented - and there’s even the chance to win a goody bag!

1645  Finish

Feedback about the event
Please complete the following feedback form for the event.

Speaker Biographies:

Scott Knight, Project Manager, University of Wolverhampton
Scott is a Business Development Manager at with the Faculty of Arts at the University. Having joined the University in 2008, Scott was introduced to the early stages of the partnership between the Faculty, Wolverhampton City Archives and the Express & Star. Scott has since been at the centre of the project linking the partners and Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).

Gillian Roberts, City Archivist, Wolverhampton City Archives
Gillian has worked previously as Borough Archivist at Dudley Archives and Local History Service providing technical input into the design of their recent building.  Previously she worked at Worcestershire Archives and Birmingham City Archives on HLF community engagement projects and at The National Archives of Scotland with private owners and in Government Records Branch on digital preservation.  In addition to her current post she is undertaking an MSt. in Building History at Wolfson College, Cambridge.

Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator, British Library
Her role at the British Library explores and promotes new methods of research using both born digital content and digitised collections. In 2013, she co-founded with GameCity a competition for Higher Education videogame design students called Off the Map, where students are challenged to create videogames inspired by British Library collections. Prior to working in Digital Research, she managed Collection Storage at the British Library's site at Boston Spa in Yorkshire. She has also previously worked at the Library and Information Statistics Unit based at Loughborough University, the Warburg Institute Library and the National Library of Scotland.

Andrew Longworth, Digitisation Project Analyst, British Library
He recently joined the British Library to help analyse and improve its digitisation processes and is excited about growing and enhancing the Library’s digital collections. Possessing academic qualifications in physics, mathematics, law and history from The University of Sydney and Birkbeck, University of London, he was once the editor of Symbian Software’s developer website where he encouraged and supported mobile software engineers and helped them to deliver their products. In addition to this he has been an English teacher in Tokyo, worked in the Health industry, found time to help produce an arts and culture magazine called The Freaky Jason

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.

Katrina Navickas, Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire
Her research interests are the history of popular protest and democratic movements in 18th and 19th century Britain. She is currently developing her digital skills in applying Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Space Syntax methods to historical research. Her new book, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 and was published by Manchester University Press on 1st December 2015.