A workshop organised by British Library Labs, the Sheffield Hallam University 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. The event will include presentations about research at Sheffield Hallam University. 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 18th March 2016, 1030 - 1615

Cost:
Free

Location:
Room No. 15104, Building: Aspect Court, Sheffield Hallam University.

Map:

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

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 at Sheffield Hallam University 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:

1030 Registration and Coffee

1100 Introduction
Professor Wayne Cranton Assistant Dean, Research, for the Faculty of Arts, Computing, Engineering and Sciences at Sheffield Hallam University.

1105 Research at Sheffield Hallam University - Presentation 1 “making data”
Dr Ian Gwilt, Professor of Design and Visual Communication, Art and Design Research Centre at the Sheffield Hallam University

For many parts of the community scientific graphics and data sets remain abstract and unintelligible. This presentation will introduce the concept of the data-object as a way to bring better understanding and increased accessibility to scientific data through the creation of material/physical objects as communication tools.

1120 Research at Sheffield Hallam University - Presentation 2 “meSch - material encounters with digital cultural heritage”
Dr Daniela Petrelli, Professor in Interaction Design, Art and Design Research Centre at the Sheffield Hallam University

This presentation will introduce meSch, an EU funded project with the goal of co-designing novel platforms for the creation of tangible exhibits at heritage sites, that offer visitors new interactive experiences with cultural content.

1135 The Digital Research Team.
Aquiles Alencar Brayner, Digital Curator at the British Library
Aquiles 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.

1205 British Library Labs
Mahendra Mahey, Project 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 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 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)

1230 Lunch

1315 The Political Meetings Mapper Dr Katrina Navickas, Senior Lecturer, University of Hertfordshire

Katrina Navickas is 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.

1335 An Overview of EThOS
Sara Gould, Development Manager of Services for Researchers

EThOS aims to demonstrate the quality of UK research by making UK doctoral theses discoverable and openly available online. It supports the UK Government’s open access principle that publications resulting from publicly-funded research should be made freely available for all researchers, providing opportunities for further research. Sara Gould will give an overview of the data and highlight some interesting uses of an applications of the data.

1350 Overview of Other projects and Data

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.

1430 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 Sheffield staff will be on hand to help and advise.

1500 Coffee and continue discussion

1545 Pitching ideas to the panel
Sheffield Hallam University and Labs Team

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

1615 Finish

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

Speaker Biographies:

Professor Wayne Cranton Assistant Dean, Research, for the Faculty of Arts, Computing, Engineering and Sciences at Sheffield Hallam University.
Wayne Cranton is the Assistant Dean, Research, for the Faculty of Arts, Computing, Engineering and Sciences at Sheffield Hallam University. His research is concerned with the study of thin film materials for electronic displays, sensors, and light emitting devices. This has involved a number of collaborative applied research and development programmes on the deposition and processing of phosphors, dielectrics, and metal oxide semiconductors, with recent emphasis on the localised photonic processing of materials for low temperature fabrication of flexible electronics and displays. Additional research includes the characterisation of visual interfaces.

Dr Ian Gwilt, Professor of Design and Visual Communication, Art and Design Research Centre at the Sheffield Hallam University
His personal areas of research include practice and theory into: visual communication and social practice; information visualisation/materialisation, augmented artefacts and locations; hybrid creative practices such as design for museum interaction, interactive installations and augmented reality for mobile devices. He is also interested in how we can incorporate visual communication design practices into trans-disciplinary research teams. His practice/thesis PhD examined how the computer-based graphical user interface can be seen as a creative/cultural artefact.

Dr Daniela Petrelli, Professor in Interaction Design, Art and Design Research Centre at the Sheffield Hallam University
Is a Professor in Interaction Design at the Art & Design Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University. Her current research brings together the material and digital worlds in the context of personal memories and cultural heritage. She coordinates the meSch project (Material Encounters with Digital Cultural Heritage), a 4-year, 12-partner European project aiming at developing technology to allow curators, designers and artists to make smart exhibits and spaces to better engage visitors with cultural heritage. Other interests include data and information visualization, intelligent user interfaces and personalization. For her work, Daniela has received a number of awards and recognition from both academia and industry. She has a diverse background in fine art, computing, and social research. She publishes regularly at international conferences and journals, and has presented her work in several international venues.

Aquiles Alencar Brayner, Digital Curator at the British Library
Aquiles joined the British Library in 2006 as curator of Latin American collections and in 2010 was promoted to the position of Digital Curator, which he has been supporting the Library to establish its role as a provider of information and electronic content amongst academics and other users. He has managed various programs and activities related to digital services and collections at the BL including digitisation projects, creation and control of metadata, training librarians and researchers in the use of digital content, and the design and development of interoperable platforms for dissemination and aggregation of data between libraries in the UK and abroad. Aquiles holds a PhD in Brazilian literature from King's College (University of London).

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.

Sara Gould, Development Manager of Services for Researchers
Part of the British Library’s Information Services team, Sara manages EThOS, the UK’s national open access e-theses service. She joined the EThOS team in 2011 to work with UK universities to transition EThOS from an early British Library thesis digitisation and supply project to become a sustainable British Library service supporting UK Higher Education in increasing the visibility and use of UK theses. Sara was part of the British Library’s Higher Education engagement team for several years, and previously managed a variety of projects in HE developments, document supply and international library co-operation. A qualified librarian, Sara’s work involves a combination of continuous improvement of the EThOS service, collaborative activities with UK universities to ensure HE requirements are being met, and wider strategic engagement with research funders, open access initiatives and UK doctoral researchers.