British Library Labs Roadshow - Open University

Editor's Notes

• #2: 25 Seconds (68 Words) My name is Mahendra Mahey and I work on a project called British Library Labs. We are based at the British Library in London, in the Digital Scholarship department and we work closely with the Digital Research team there. It’s been running for three years now and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
• #5: 140 seconds The British Library is the national library of the UK and one of the largest research libraries in the world . The Library moved to a new purpose built building in 1997 <click> the largest of it’s kind that was built in the UK in the 20th century. Many frequently used items are stored 5 stories below the main building at St Pancras in London and many might not know that part of the building is meant to look like a ship on a journey to discovery!<click>. <click to switch off> The building can sit 1,200 researchers at any one time across 5 reading rooms. <click>Medium and long term requested items are held at Boston Spa in Yorkshire in a low oxygen warehouse, using robot to retrieve items. In total, the library has 625 km of shelving, growing by 12 km every year. Whilst we acquire items through purchase or gifts, much of the collection has been built up through legal deposit. That is, by law, a copy of every UK and Ireland print publication must be given to the British Library by its publishers. Around 3 million items are added per year. In 2013, legal deposit was extended to cover non-print material which means by law we take in digitally published items as well, which means regular mass crawls of the entire UK web domain as well as ebooks, ejournals etc.
• #7: 85 seconds The picture you can see is inside the main building in London, it’s the King’s Library – King George the Third’s personal library! Sometimes known as the ‘stack’, I walk past this everyday and I sometimes forget that the collections the British Library have are truly staggering! We currently estimate them to exceed <click>150 million items, representing every age of written civilisation and every known language. Our archives now contain the earliest surviving printed book in the world, the Diamond Sutra, written in Chinese and dating from 868 AD…. So some big numbers… Over …<click>14 million books <click>60 million patents <click>8 million stamps <click>4 million maps <click>3 million sound recordings <click>1.6 million music scores <click>over .3 million manuscripts <click>0.8 million serials titles (which are of course made up of many many volumes/editions), this is where a lot of our content is, just in case you thought the numbers didn’t add up!
• #8: 33 Seconds (100 Words) In a nutshell the project encourages researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators and anyone else, <Click> to ‘experiment’ with our digital collections and data. We are particularly interested in those who have questions which focus on the potential to find and create NEW things through access to the digital content. For example, being able to ask a question across thousands of digitised books or newspapers using computational techniques would not feasible using manual methods. Let’s look at a clear example. <Click>
• #9: 33 Seconds (100 Words) In a nutshell the project encourages researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators and anyone else, <Click> to ‘experiment’ with our digital collections and data. We are particularly interested in those who have questions which focus on the potential to find and create NEW things through access to the digital content. For example, being able to ask a question across thousands of digitised books or newspapers using computational techniques would not feasible using manual methods. Let’s look at a clear example. <Click>
• #10: https://goo.gl/WutNyi http://goo.gl/nNKhQ2 https://goo.gl/9NWZUW https://goo.gl/7QQ5Tf https://goo.gl/x7b4tg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Interactive_whiteboard_at_CeBIT_2007.jpg
• #11: Get clearer annotation image and transcription (perhaps TILT)
• #16: 6 Seconds (20 Words) So <Click> ‘how’ do we try and engage those who might be interested in the BL’s digital collections and data? <Click>
• #17: 17 Seconds (53 Words) <Click>The British Library is one of the largest Library’s in the world <Click> with an estimated 180 million physical items, with only a small proportion being digitised. <Click>We estimate this is around 1-2%, but no one really knows exactly how much. However, increasingly more items are being stored as ‘born’ digital, such as the UK Web Archive<Click>
• #18: Have balance of Multimedia Broadcast news and radio, sounds asave our sounds Books and newspapers Images BNB Qatar Digital library Hebrew manuscripts
• #26: 21 Seconds (65 Words) Katrina Navickas was particularly interested in the <Click>Chartist Movement who were a group who were campaigning for the vote for working people. <Click>They were the biggest popular movement for democracy in 19th century British history, just as this is early picture shows a huge monster meeting at Kennington Common<Click>She wanted to use a combination of manual and computational methods to explore our Digitised Newspapers to find out when and where they met and plot them on map. <Click>and hopefully unearthing new history.
• #32: 970 files from a selection of 19th century newspaper titles from the BL corpus for us to correct using the overProof post-OCR correction software The best way to measure the improvement made by the correction process is to compare the OCR'ed text and the automatically corrected text with a perfect correction made by a human (known as the "ground truth"). Hannah-Rose's 5 small human-corrected samples are show as green dots. These are not only smaller than the other files, but their raw error rate is much lower at 13.3%. OverProof was measured as reducing this to 5.4%, a removal of almost 60% of errors. The red dotted-line indicates the correction "break-even" point: the further under the line, the better the quality of the document after correction. In the graph below, the grey line shows distribution of files across error rates before correction and the green line after correction.
• #35: Posts small illustrations taken almost at random from the digitised book corpus to a Tumblr blog. This experiment with undirected engagement was a by-product of work to uncover the hidden wealth of illustrations within the digitised pages.
• #36: 50 seconds Here is the anatomy of a Flickr record, importantly we have created links to many of the Library’s services <click>some of this lovely traffic is going back to the Library and hopefully generating more interest in our services, from downloading a pdf of the book to purchasing a high res scan of the image. <click>Tags are added from the original book record, including the approximate page number the image came from<click>users of Flickr can add their own tags, and I have mentioned they have already started doing it.
• #39: 18 Seconds (56 Words) Indexing BL the 1 million & Mapping the Maps – was led by James Heald and collaboration with others <Click>They produced an index of 1 million 'Mechanical Curator collection' images on <Click>Wikimedia Commons from a collection of largely un-described images. <Click>This gave rise to finding 50,000 maps within the collection partially through a map-tag-a-thon <Click>These are now being geo-referenced. <Click>
• #40: 27 Seconds (82 Words) Adam Crymble <Click>wanted to harness the power of playing fun games on arcade machines to help with crowdsourcing the tagging of un-described images. He particularly wanted to engage a younger audience into crowdsourcing .<Click>On the right you can see a replica 1980’s arcade machine we built and <Click>and on the bottom left some tagging games that were developed through a ‘Games Jam’ for the machine. <Click>. Let’s take a closer look at two of the games…<Click>
• #45: 17 Seconds (53 Words) <Click>The British Library is one of the largest Library’s in the world <Click> with an estimated 180 million physical items, with only a small proportion being digitised. <Click>We estimate this is around 1-2%, but no one really knows exactly how much. However, increasingly more items are being stored as ‘born’ digital, such as the UK Web Archive<Click>
• #49: <click>The British Library faces many challenges of access to our Digital collections! <click> Sometimes digital content is only available onsite due to license restrictions, <click>or even only on a specific computer in a reading room! Technically there are very few reasons why digital content can’t be online <click> though it might be too big or hasn’t been transferred from other digital storage media. <click>Sometimes access is through a paywall. Finally, <click>some content is in the happy sunny place, online, open and freely available. The real reasons why there are challenges to accessing digital content are of course human. They require different approaches from the Library and may often involve an honest, open dialogue and negotiation with the publishers. The Labs project has tried to address this problem my creating a ‘residency model’ for researchers to work intensively with a digital collection on-site, so as to not infringe access conditions, I will say more about this later.
• #53: <click>The British Library faces many challenges of access to our Digital collections! <click> Sometimes digital content is only available onsite due to license restrictions, <click>or even only on a specific computer in a reading room! Technically there are very few reasons why digital content can’t be online <click> though it might be too big or hasn’t been transferred from other digital storage media. <click>Sometimes access is through a paywall. Finally, <click>some content is in the happy sunny place, online, open and freely available. The real reasons why there are challenges to accessing digital content are of course human. They require different approaches from the Library and may often involve an honest, open dialogue and negotiation with the publishers. The Labs project has tried to address this problem my creating a ‘residency model’ for researchers to work intensively with a digital collection on-site, so as to not infringe access conditions, I will say more about this later.