Working with the British Library’s Digital Content, Data and Services for your research (University of Kent)

Organised by British Library Labs and the University of Kent as part of the British Library Labs Roadshow (2018).

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 programmes, 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 no longer have the restriction of 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 evaluate and interpret the context of the item? 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 to work with us and share their research questions and innovative ideas around this.

This year’s event will include a series of presentations exploring the British Library's digital collections, how they have been used and the lessons we have learned by working with researchers who want to use them, including researchers from the University of Kent.

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.

The BL Labs team is keen to learn about the services researchers would like to be developed at the British Library to support Digital Scholarship and there will be a presentation around some ideas of we have been developing. Delegates will be invited to discuss and give feedback, suggest improvements and present their own ideas.

Date and Time:

Wednesday 25 April 2018, 12:30 - 16:00

Cost:

Free

Location:

Seminar Room NW08, Cornwallis North West Building, University of Kent, UK.

Map:

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

BL Labs Roadshow (2018)

Programme:

12:30 Lunch

13:00 Introduction and Welcome
Professor Catherine Richardson, University of Kent

13:10 What is British Library Labs?
Mahendra Mahey, Manager, British Library Labs

13:30 Special Collections at Kent and across Eastern ARC
Karen Brayshaw, Special Collections & Archives Manager, University of Kent

13:50 British Library Labs working with University of Kent Researchers

Working with BL Labs in search of Jagadis Chandra Bose
Dr Christin Hoene, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, School of English, University of Kent

Working with BL Labs on 17th Century maps of India
Bonisha Bhattacharyya, Doctoral Candidate at the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Kent (in collaboration with Steve Riffe of Stellar One Consulting, California)

14:10 Example patterns of working with the British Library's Digital Collections and Data
Mahendra Mahey, Manager, British Library Labs

Labs will give an overview of some of the Library's digital collections and how have we engaged researchers, artists, entrepreneurs and educators in using our digital collections.

14:40 The Future of Labs and Digital Research at the British Library
Mahendra Mahey, Manager, British Library Labs

The team will outline the future of Labs and Digital Research at the Library and get feedback from the audience about the types of support and services they would like developed at the British Library to support Digital Research.

15:00 Working break

15:15 The Future of Labs and Digital Research at the British Library / Panel discussion and feedback on ideas, challenges and issues.
Mahendra Mahey, Manager, British Library Labs and Eleanor Cooper, Project Officer British Library Labs.

The team will wrap up the previous session and then give feedback on ideas delegates might have on using the collections.

15:50 Conclusion and wrap up
Mahendra Mahey, Manager, British Library Labs

16:00 Finish / Optional Tour of the Templeman Library Special Collections

Feedback for the event

Please complete the following feedback form.

Speaker Biographies

Professor Catherine Richardson, Professor of Early Modern Studies in the School of English
Catherine joined the University of Kent in 2007 from the University of Birmingham, where she was lecturer in English and History and Fellow of The Shakespeare Institute. She's interested in the relationship between texts and the material circumstances of their production and consumption – for instance the way individuals described objects as they wrote them into probate inventories, or how theatre audiences ‘saw’ spaces in relation to the dialogue of a play, the physical nature of the theatre and their own memories and imaginations. Her research, then, focuses on the movement between living and writing, between experience and narrative.

Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs
Mahendra has a long background of working with digital technology in further and higher education for researchers, educators, librarians and businesses both in the UK and internationally. He joined 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 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.

Karen Brayshaw, Special Collections & Archives Manager, University of Kent
Karen Brayshaw is the Special Collections and Archives Manager at the University of Kent. Karen is responsible for the University’s diverse range of unique and distinct collections, which include the British Cartoon Archive, The British Stand-up Comedy Archive, Victorian Theatre Collections as well as the Modern Day first editions and early printed book collections. Karen’s special interests are in book culture and book production in the Early Modern period. Karen gained her MA in Mediaeval and Early Modern Studies from the University of Kent and her qualification in Librarianship through the University of Wales at Aberystwyth. While working as the Cathedral Librarian, Karen developed and team taught undergraduate and postgraduate classes and master classes.

Dr Christin Hoene, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, School of English, University of Kent
Christin is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of English at the University of Kent (UK). She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh, and her book Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature was published by Routledge in 2015.

Bonisha Bhattacharya, Doctoral student, Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent
Bonisha completed her Masters in Literature at the University of Delhi in 2012 and a diploma in Digital Humanities from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in 2014. She then worked on a collaborative project (Famine and Death in India and Britain, 1550-1800: Connected Cultural Histories of Food Security) led by the University of Exeter and Jadavpur University, funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. She is now pursuing her interest in early modern travel narratives and their digital mapping, as a doctoral student at the University of Kent.

Bonisha has collaborated with Steve Riffe (who she met at the BL Labs roadshow hosted in Kent last year) on the digital mapping aspect of her PhD project. Steve is a Data Visualization and Analytics Consultant, currently based at Stellar One Consulting in Lake Forest, California. He develops interactive data visualizations to help clients better understand their businesses using Tableau, R and other tools.