A workshop organised by British Library Labs and the Open University as part of the British Library Labs Roadshow (2017).

A series of presentations exploring the British Library's digital collections, how they have been used and the lessons learned by working with researchers who want to use them. This will be followed by discussions and feedback around potential ideas of working with the Library's data.

The Roadshow will showcase examples 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, educators and entrepreneurs have been developed via the annual British Library Labs Competition and Awards. This year we intend to focus on some of the lessons we have learned over the last four years of working with the Labs, promote our awards and get attendees thinking of what they might do with the British Library's collections. The team will also talk about future plans at the Library to support Digital Scholarship. The day will include presentations from the researchers who are working on interesting Digital Humanities projects at the Digital Humanities Hub.

Date and Time:
Wednesday 3rd May 2017, 1300 - 1630

Cost:
Free

Location:
Open University Library, Milton Keynes: Library IL Suite

Map:
Please refer to the following map detailing how to get to the event. The Library Presentation Room is on the ground floor of the Betty Boothroyd Library.

BL Labs Roadshow (2017)

The British Library Labs project has been running since 2013 and the Labs team are regular visitors the Open University. Labs will reflect on the lessons they have learned over the last four years and focus on some of the typical questions researchers first ask and the common misconceptions they have of working with the the British Library's digital collections and data. They will also provide examples of what researchers were able to actually achieve and the challenges they faced.

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 British Library 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 Open University to work with us and share their research questions and innovative ideas around this.

Programme

1300 Introductions

1315 Working Lunch

1330 Introduction - What is 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.

Labs will 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.

Finally, there will be an examination and reflection on the lessons the Labs team have learned by working with those who have wanted to use the over the last four years.

1430 The UK Web Archive
Jason Webber, Web Archiving Engagement & Liaison Manager (British Library)

Jason will give an overview of the Web Archive which is stored at the British Library, identify some challenges and examples of how it has been used in research.

1450 Coffee Break

1520 Reusing and enhancing library linked data to catalogue listening experiences in literature
Dr Alessandro Adamou, Research Associate, Knowledge Media Institute

The Listening Experience Database collects documented evidence of listening to music as found in literature and social media and publishes them in freely searchable and explorable form as well as open data. It incorporates linked data from the British National Bibliography as a primary source of reference and re-publishes them with the added output of its life-cycle of detecting evidence of listening.

1535 Linked data without the pointy brackets: capturing place information in BL maps
Valeria Vitale (Pelagios Commons Community Manager (End Users) & Institute of Classical Studies Research Fellow)

Linked Data is a way of connecting online resources that have something in common. Since 2010 Pelagios has been pioneering the means of linking documents (texts, maps, databases) through common references to places, using the process of annotation. In this presentation I will talk about our Web-based, Open Source platform, Recogito, a DIY annotation toolkit for people interested in capturing place information that enables the linking of data to take place "under the hood".

1555 Collaborative Doctoral Research with the British Library
Dr Vincett Trott, Lecturer in History, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, Open University

In this presentation, I will talk about my experiences working as a collaborative doctoral researcher with the Open University and the British Library between 2011 and 2014. My research explored the cultural memory of the First World War, and informs part of my forthcoming monograph Publishers, Readers and The Great War: Literature and Memory since 1918 (Bloomsbury, 2017). I will discuss the range of resources that I used for my research (including a number of digital archives and databases), and I will reflect on some of the challenges and opportunities that these presented.

1610 British Library data and collections and discussions and feedback on ideas, challenges and issues.

Labs will give an overview of some of the Library's digital collections and lead on a discussion on how they can be used. The team will also give feedback on ideas delegates might have on using the collections.

1630 Finish

Feedback Form
Please complete the following feedback form for the event

Speaker Biographies:

Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs.
Mahendra came to the British Library 4 years ago to manage the Andrew W. Mellon funded British Library Labs (@BL_Labs) project. Together with Ben O’Steen (Technical Lead) and colleagues in Digital Scholarship, they have been working pragmatically to open up the wealth of the British Library's digital collections and data for those that want to use it in transformative and innovative ways. Importantly, they are learning what researchers, educators, artists and entrepreneurs want to do with the Library’s data and in turn helping them together with others in the Library to try and achieve this. As a result, Mahendra and the team are also discovering where the gaps are and what tools, services and processes the Library will have to modify or develop to support the ever increasing demand to use the Library’s digital collections. Currently, he is working on a possible new project to build on the work of Labs to design, create and implement a business model to support scalable sustainable services for scholars to use the British Library’s digital collections in their research.

He has a long background of working with digital technology as a manager, educator and adviser in Further and Higher Education for researchers, educators, librarians and businesses both in the UK and internationally. He spent 4 years working on a unique project which built a network of nearly 2000 software developers working in UK universities and colleges, the Jisc funded Developer Community Supporting Innovation (DevCSI) initiative. He organised several very well received ‘Developer Happiness’ conferences (Dev8D) and carried out research to understand and articulate the value and impact software developers bring to UK academia as well as exploring existing and new career pathways for them.

Before that, he worked on several projects. One which focussed on how UK and European academic institutions could manage their research information and processes more efficiently using a common standard.(CERIF). Another which carried out research and supported several other projects which focussed on several aspects of open access digital repositories (e.g. technical, legal, strategic, metadata etc.) for scholarly outputs such as peer-reviewed articles, research data and grey-literature.

For five years, he was an adviser and trainer encouraging scholars, educators and librarians to access, re-use and re-purpose digital resources in their work and at the same time showing them how this can be augmented through the effective and best-practice use of digital technologies, techniques and methods.

Finally, he has worked as a manager and educator in Further and Higher education in the public and private sector for over 10 years in Social Sciences, Computing, Multimedia and English for Speakers of Other Languages both in the UK and internationally in Poland.

Dr Vincett Trott, Lecturer in History, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, Open University
I recieved a BA in History from the University of Manchester in 2008, and an MA in History from Queen Mary University of London in 2010. I then embarked on a collaborative doctoral degree with the Open University and the Britsh Library, completing my thesis in 2014. Since then I have worked for the Museum of London, in addition to teaching Book History at Oxford Brookes University. I returned to the Open University as Lecturer in early 2017.

Dr Alessandro Adamou, Research Associate, Knowledge Media Institute
Alessandro Adamou is a research associate at the Knowledge Media Institute. His main research and software development focus is on the means to make the Semantic Web state of the art available to, and usable by, a variedly specialised public. These means include integrated ontology development environments, dynamic ontology network management, semantic content management and end-user generation of quality Linked Data. Alessandro received his master degree in Computer Science at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", and his Ph.D. at the University of Bologna. In between, he has also worked as a research assistant at the Italian Institute for Cognitive Science and Technologies (ISTC-CNR). Alessandro has been actively involved with the EU research projects NeOn, Interactive Knowledge Stack and LinkedUp, as well as the Listening Experience Database, a joint effort between the OU and Royal College of Music. He is a committer and project management board member at the Apache Software Foundation for the Stanbol software project.

Valeria Vitale (Pelagios Commons Community Manager (End Users) & Institute of Classical Studies Research Fellow)
Valeria Vitale joined the ICS in January 2017 as a Research Fellow on the A. W. Mellon funded project Pelagios Commons, for which she works as Community Manager and part of the investigative team. After her degree in Communication Science awarded by La Sapienza University in Rome, she worked for several years on the study and promotion of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, with major Italian cultural institutions. In 2012 she graduated with an MA in Digital Humanities at King’s College London, where she also completed her PhD on the use of Linked Open Data to document 3D visualisations of ancient cultural heritage. Her case study was the Temple of Isis in Pompeii, its variant restoration hypotheses and multiple cultural interpretations. Her doctoral research involved the development of a documentation standard for scholarly 3D visualisation called SCO3CH.

She has an extensive experience in teaching 3D tools and methods to humanists and showing how spatial technologies can enhance the study and understanding of the Past. Valeria has also collaborated with various digital projects that focus on ancient geography, including the Heritage gazetteer of Cyprus, i.Sicily, the Pleiades Gazetteer and the Heritage Gazetteer of Libya. She co-directed the CALCS (Cross-cultural AfterLife of Classical Sites) project in 2016.