A workshop organised by British Library Labs and the University of East Anglia 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 working with data from the British Library’s digital collections. 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:
Wednesday 9th March 2016, 12:00 - 15:00

Cost:
Free

Location:
University of East Anglia, Union House, Seminar Room 6, Norwich, NR4 7TJ

Map:
Please refer to the following map detailing how to get to the event.

BL Labs Roadshow (2016)
Digital technologies have the power to enable new ways of working with library collections: 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 at the University of East Anglia, and Eastern ARC, 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:

1200 Arrivals and lunch

1230 Introduction
Dr Paul Gooding, University of East Anglia

1235 British Library Labs
Hana Lewis, Project Officer, 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 annual 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 annual 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 useful links below:

• Previous Ideas (http://labs.bl.uk/Ideas+for+Labs)
• Projects (http://labs.bl.uk/Other+Uses+of+Collections)

1255 The Political Meetings Mapper
Katrina Navickas, Senior Lecturer at the 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.

1325 Overview of other Labs projects and data
Ben O'Steen, Technical Lead 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 it, highlighting some of the challenges faced when working with “messy” data.

There will be an opportunity for questions at the end of this session for the British Library Team.

1400 Discussion, questions and ideas
Labs Team

Labs will present an outline of the various ideas and suggestions from other researchers that have been made which explore working with the British Library’s digital content and data. The delegates will then have the opportunity to work in small groups and come up with their own ideas. The team and East Anglia staff will be on hand to help and advise.

1445 Pitching ideas to the panel
University of East Anglia and Labs Team

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

1500 Finish

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

Speaker Biographies:

Hana Lewis, Project Officer of British Library Labs
Hana’s role provides support for the everyday management of the Labs project. She also has experience of working as a Leading Library Assistant in the British Library’s reading rooms. Hana was previously a senior archaeologist at Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) and holds a BA and an MA in archaeology. She specialises in London archaeology and Anglo-Saxon studies and has produced several publications. She is currently undertaking a PhD at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL.

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.

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 was published by Manchester University Press on 1st December 2015.