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

Organised by British Library Labs and the University of Leeds 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 Leeds.

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 we have been developing. Delegates will be invited to discuss and give feedback, suggest improvements and present their own ideas.

Date and Time: Tuesday 5th June, 12:00 - 16:00

Cost: Free

Location: Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery, Parkinson Building, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT

Map: Here's how to get to the event.

BL Labs Roadshow (2018)

Programme:

12:00 Lunch

12:30 Introduction and Welcome - Professor Alison Fell, Director of the Leeds Humanities Research Institute

12:40 What is 'British Library Labs'? How have we engaged researchers, artists, entrepreneurs and educators in using our digital collections? - Mahendra Mahey, Manager, British Library Labs

13:10 The British Library's Hebrew Digitisation Project - Ilana Tahan, Lead Curator, Hebrew and Christian Orient Studies, British Library

13:30 Breaking down barriers in the class-room: engaging students with digitised Hebrew manuscripts - Eva Frojmovic, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds

13:35 Reforming Owls and Hamlet's Braves/Brains - Dr Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Leeds University Academic Fellow in Textual Studies and Digital Editing

13:55 The Endangered Archives Programme - Ruth Hansford, Grants Portfolio Manager (EAP), British Library

14:15 Break

14:30 Beyond Digitisation: Projects at the University of Leeds Special Collections - Joanne Fitton, Head of Special Collections and Galleries, University of Leeds

14:50 Archives, Content and the balance of power - Simon Popple, Director of Impact; Senior Lecturer in Photography and Digital Culture

15:10 Places of inspiration; Playing and Making in the Library - Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator, British Library

15:35 British Library data: discussions and feedback on ideas, challenges and issues/ Developing Services for BL Labs at the British Library - Eleanor Cooper, British Library Labs

15:50 Conclusion and wrap up

16:00 Finish

After the event, please complete our feedback form.

Speaker Biographies

Professor Alison Fell

Alison Fell is a cultural historian who works mainly on women’s experiences of the First World War – her latest book, Women as Veterans in Britain and France after the First World War, will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year. She is currently Director of the Leeds Humanities Research Institute, which supports interdisciplinary research in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures, and in this role works closely with colleagues in the University library and in Special Collections.

Mahendra Mahey

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.

Stella Wisdom

Stella Wisdom has been promoting new methods of research and creative innovation using born digital and digitised collections. Stella is especially interested in the use of digitised library images and sounds for making apps, games and interactive fiction. Stella is actively involved with a number of collaborations; these include the Off the Map competition with The National Videogame Arcade, the Poetic Places geolocation literature app with TIME/IMAGE, the Playing Beowulf project with University College London's Institute of Education and Minecraft project Litcraft with Lancaster University. Stella chartered with the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in 2006; the same year she joined the British Library. Previously she worked at National Library of Scotland.

Ruth Hansford

Ruth Hansford has a background in languages and literature and moved via library and information science to managing collaborative projects in the arts and education sectors. She joined the British Library at the end of 2016 to manage the grants portfolio for the Endangered Archives Programme which provides grants for digitisation of at-risk archives all around the world. She is particularly interested in how making these alternative stories available has the potential to disrupt the way we think about the past, making other voices heard. Before joining the BL Ruth was at the BBC where she worked on the pilot of The Space and on a major cross-sector project on music, noise and musicians’ hearing – which is the basis of her PhD: ‘listening to musicians’.

Joanne Fitton

Joanne has been Head of Special Collections and Galleries at the University of Leeds since 2015. She is an archivist by background and first joined Leeds University Library in 2011. Joanne has led Special Collections in the implementation and development of a collections management system and online search, including the presentation of digitised content. She led a Wellcome research resources project in 2017 involving the digitisation of Leeds General Cemetery records and the creation of a digital resource, to enable use of content in teaching and research. Joanne is a member of working groups for the Cultural Institute (Culture on Campus and Fundraising). External to the University Joanne is a committee member and secretary of the UK Group on Literary Archives and Manuscripts (GLAM); an assessor on the Archives and Records Association (UK and Ireland) CPD scheme and a member of the Research Libraries UK (RLUK) Special Collections Leaders Network. Joanne has served on the boards of the National Council on Archives and the Archives and Records Association.

Dr Eva Frojmovic

Dr Frojmovic, examines the intersection between Jewish studies, art history, medieval studies, and postcolonial and feminist theories. She studied in Freiburg (Zwischenprufung 1983), Jerusalem (exchange scholarship 1983/4) and Munich (MA 1988). After a term’s internship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1988) she returned to do a Ph.D. in Munich, and spent 1990-2 researching in Rome (Bibliotheca Hertziana and Vatican Library). After gaining a Ph.D. on the cultural and visual worlds of Francesco da Barberino, she became Frances Yates Scholar at the Warburg Institute (1993-5). She has taught at the University of Leeds since 1995, helping to set up a Centre for Jewish Studies, being part of the Institute for Medieval Studies, and teaching Medieval and Renaissance art.

Dr Brett Greatley-Hirsch

Dr Brett Greatley-Hirsch is University Academic Fellow in Textual Studies and Digital Editing. He is Coordinating Editor of Digital Renaissance Editions, Co-Editor of the Routledge journal Shakespeare, and a Trustee of the British Shakespeare Association. His book, Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship (Cambridge UP, 2017; co-authored with Hugh Craig), brings together his research interests in early modern drama, computational stylistics, and literary history.

Simon Popple

Simon Popple is Senior Lecturer in Photography and Digital Culture at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds. His research interests are focused on archival practices and the roles communities and institutions can play in developing open and collaborative archive spaces using digital and co-produced tools.

Ilana Tahan, Lead Curator, Hebrew and Christian Orient Collections, Asian and African Studies, The British Library

Ilana Tahan (OBE), received her education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel and at Aston University, Birmingham, UK, where she was awarded a Master of Philosophy degree. Ilana joined the British Library as Hebraica Curator in 1989. In 2002 she became Head of the Hebrew Section, in charge of one of the finest Hebraica collections in the world, comprising some 3,000 Hebrew manuscript volumes, approximately 7,000 Genizah fragments and over 70,000 printed books. Since 2010 Ilana has been Lead Curator of Hebrew and Christian Orient Studies, thus also managing the Library's Christian Orient collections, which include the Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Georgian and Syriac holdings. Additionally, in 2012 she was given the role of Lead Curator of the Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project, a major and on-going externally funded project. In 2009 Ilana was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to scholarship.