Building Better GLAM Labs - Keynote Presentation at Simon Fraser University

Editor's Notes

• #2: Morning everyone. <CLICK> I’m Mahendra Mahey, from the British Library in London, England, ‘Hello’. I am here to tell you my personal story about the experiences and lessons I’ve had working for my institution as well as with other Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums or ‘GLAMS’ at National, State, Public, University organisations and charitable and commercial organisations around the world. My story will focus particularly on how we have engaged with researchers, artists, educators and entrepreneurs from school children to adults who have used digitised and born digital cultural heritage collections and data to inspire them to create innovative, fun and inspiring projects. I would love it if my experiences can help other organisations build better ‘GLAM’ Labs, but I am also here to learn too from you. <CLICK> For the last 6 years, I have been running ‘British Library Labs’ a digital Laboratory to encourage anyone to experiment with our vast, incredible, sometimes totally unique and mind blowing digital collections and data. Our work has been generously funded over these years by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation and the British Library. We are in fact waiting for news any day now to see if the Library will be moving our work into its core business on a long term basis. <CLICK> During and after my presentation, please feel free to use twitter to amplify anything that resonates with you. My slides include much more information than I will have time to talk about, including links for you to delve deeper into the subject. On the right hand side in the footer there is a link to download all my slides, this will appear on all my slides. Please feel free to reuse them but it would great if you could attribute me and the Library when you do. My presentation will last about an hour. I will do my best to keep your attention. If there are any questions, something springs to mind, please make a note as. I will take questions at the end of my presentation, though I may ask you some quick ones along the way. So like all stories, lets start at the beginning and let me take you on my personal journey.
• #3: I have always loved Libraries. They are places to time travel, to get lost and captivated. They take us on adventures in our minds and give us an experience that the web simply cannot give. The digital cannot replicate the tactile and physical experience of touching a book or looking at a manuscript for instance. <CLICK> They allow us explore vast stores of information that are not simply available on the web and national libraries in some way have a responsibility to capture our nations’ memories when we are long gone and turned to dust. They hold the creative potential to inspire us. They can change us, and they can change our world as well as future generations to come. <CLICK> The British Library’s mission is to support research, to inspire and enable enjoyment for everyone in the world.
• #4: The origins of the British Library stem back to the beginnings of the British museum in 1753, and it’s Library forms the foundations of our vast collection today. It would take another 200 years and an act of parliament before the British Library was born legally in 1973 and then another 24 years before our London collection was transferred from the British Museum to its current building at St Pancras which you can see, where around 20% of our physical items are stored. <CLICK> Designed by Colin St John Wilson, part of it is designed to look like a ship. In fact, many have said the Library represents a ship of knowledge sailing though a gothic landscape perhaps provided by the backdrop of the St Pancras Renaissance hotel. <CLICK> Incidentally, the hotel is a place of history itself. This where the Spice girls, ‘wannabe video’ was filmed, a song incidentally that is one of the most instantly recognisable studies have shown, back then it was called the St Pancras Grand. The Library is one of 5 legal deposit reference libraries in the UK, it’s not a lending library. 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 publication must be given to the British Library automatically with around 3 million physical items added each year. In 2013, legal deposit was extended to cover non-print material which means by law we take in digitally published items as well. This includes regular mass crawls of the entire UK web domain as well as ebooks, ejournals etc which means our digital content is rapidly beginning to out grow our physical collections as our digital items number billions of webpages for example. <CLICK> The building in London can sit 1,200 researchers at any one time across 5 reading rooms, we get around half a million visitors per year. <CLICK> Medium and long term requested items are held at Boston Spa in Yorkshire in a low oxygen warehouse, using robot to retrieve items. Boston Spa also has a reading room too where you can request items. In total, the library has nearly 1000 km of shelving, growing by 12 km every year. <CLICK> The British Library manages the UK public lending right, that is a living author’s right to payment/royalty each time their books are borrowed from public libraries.
• #5: Roly Keating our CEO, launched his vision for the Library in 2015. Whilst most people understand the Library’s role is as a custodian of knowledge it is also one of the largest research library’s on the planet and we carry out our own research. Our vision states our purpose is to make our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone for research, inspiration and enjoyment for everyone and be the most open, creative and innovative institution of its kind by it’s 50th anniversary. <CLICK> To achieve this, we also help Businesses grow through a national network of Business and Intellectual Property centres (BIPC) offering IP advice, access to huge amounts of resources such as business intelligence, patents as well as events and training, we also engage in significant commercial activity through our commercial services. We are also a cultural heritage organisation and have an ambitious programme of cultural activities to include exhibitions such as Harry Potter: History of Magic and host spectacular events during the day and when the library is closed concerts, performances, and soon even an Algorave, look it up! We have a range of activities to support learning such as onsite and online courses for school children to adults and other activities around the local community in London as well as UK regionally. Finally, we work with partners internationally on a range of projects to advance knowledge and mutual understanding. The key to working with us on collaborative projects is to understand the way we see the world. In fact, we try to ensure that our requests for collaboration are prioritised and closely aligned to our vision. I would encourage you to delve deeper into our vision, especially if you would like to collaborate with us, it’s actually really fascinating read and it has helped me really understand the complex place where I work.
• #6: 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, Mad King George! Sometimes known as the ‘stack’, I walk past this everyday and it gives me a sense of awe and reminds that the collections the British Library have are truly staggering and almost impossible to comprehend. <CLICK> We currently estimate them to exceed <click>180 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….only around 8% of our collections are books and as you can see we have so much more, please note the numbers are only really guesses as to exactly what we do have. If you saw 5 items a day it would take you over 80,000 years to see the whole collection.
• #7: For me, this is what it is like trying to find a physical item at the Library. It feels like a huge hypermarket, or perhaps even a factory or warehouse. It stocks a random assortment of things and if you ask the assistants they can tell you about things that are simply not visible on the shelves in huge storage facilities.
• #8: Moving on to our digital collections which is where my work largely sits. What percentage/proportion of our physical collections are digitised? <CLICK> What surprises many people is that only an estimated 3% of our physical holding are digitised. This is because digitisation costs time and money and we have to achieve this through partnerships with commercial and other philanthropic organisations. <CLICK> Through one of the first BL Labs project, ‘Sample Generator’ we discovered that our digital collections are not truly representative of our physical collections. There will be all sorts of reasons why certain items get digitised and others do not. In reality, all our collections be them digital or physical have selection biases. Our collections are hundreds of years of decisions made by people as to which items to buy, keep and which ones to discard. <CLICK> In terms of licensing and using/reusing digital collections, a Lab like ours has further challenges. Out of our over 720 digital collections, only around 15% have an open license. The remainder are only available onsite at the moment. This is in part because many legacy digitisation projects didn’t always consider licensing when items were digitised. Trying to retrospectively establish rights and licensing on previously digitised collections costs time and money. <CLICK> As a National Library, we have been collecting born digital items for over many decades. We are the home of the UK Web Archive that periodically captures billions of UK websites to keep for posterity and research and we are the home of the Alan Turing institute centre for AI and data science where we are an active research partner. For example, Living with Machines is a five-year £9.2 million research project that will take a fresh look at the well-known history of the Industrial Revolution using data-driven approaches. <CLICK> A new digitisation programme Heritage Made Digital is trying to learn from past digitisation projects, especially on digitising collections based on research demand.
• #9: Since 2012, we have developed a more systematic approach for agreeing terms of access to digital collections and data. What’s important to understand that the process is sometimes subject to competing concerns such as reuse, open research, licensing, ethics, revenue generation.
• #10: What’s important to understand is that if you really want to work with our digital collections, it sometimes pays to learn the ‘back story’ of how the collection came about, this was a really early and important lesson I learned. Knowing it, can have a significant impact on what you might want to do with it. On the screen you can see many factors. I simply haven’t got time to go into them all, but perhaps the most important one is the last one. Is there a human being around in the organisation who can tell you about the collection, as communicating with them may be the quickest way to learn more about the digital collection you want to work with. Often, they will have access to important information that isn’t written down.
• #11: As a Labs manager, I faced a significant challenge of how we would enable those who want to access to our 85% of digital collections that are only available onsite at the moment. If we look at this, we can see onsite at the Library may mean that the digital materials are only available in the reading room on a specific PC, or that the materials are still on their original storage media and may need obsolete equipment to access them or they still are as yet to be transferred onto a more modern system. <CLICK> Some digital materials are only available through payment <CLICK> Only a small fraction of digital materials are in the shiny happy carefree open web (more about how to access these later) <CLICK> What we developed to tackle this situation was to develop a ‘Residency Model’ initially through an annual competition that we ran and now this has evolved in application process where researcher’s can apply to carry out digital research onsite at the British Library. These researchers in residence have special access to digital collections that our regular readers do not have. Access is strictly controlled depending what they would like to access and what they want to do with the materials.
• #12: At the Library, interpretations vary of what ‘onsite means’, does it mean only on a PC in a specific room, on all PCs in all reading rooms on all sites, <CLICK> In order for Labs researchers to be resident, they need to be security cleared to gain access to specific collections . Once done they can get access to a hot desk in a staff area, and we are trailing something similar in the reading room in a secure space, sometimes they can get access to their desktop remotely too via Citrix and Virtual Machines. <CLICK> Sometimes further permissions are required even after security clearance depending on what they want to get access to and what they want to do with it <CLICK> Digital material can be on various media formats (not always online) and they need to be mounted on obsolete devices or transferred onto more modern equipment <CLICK> We are getting better at providing access to our digital collections but we still have a lot of work to do.
• #13: So remember this? What is it like looking for digital collections at the British Library?
• #14: It can often feel like this…It’s much smaller, we have some free stuff, some can only be consumed on site, some you need to buy. If you speak to shop keeper, they may be able to get you to see what’s under the counter, because they couldn’t display it. You might be able to get special permission to get a look in the warehouse at the back of the shop which has even more goodies there. If you are looking for vegetables you have come to the wrong shop!
• #15: How do you find our open cultural heritage collections? On way is to use our collection guides which offer subject pathways into our collections, each guide will have a section non what’s available digitally if at all.
• #16: I haven’t got time to go into all our digital collections. Here is a small snap shot, which you are welcome to explore at your leisure at a later date, there are lots of links on this slide. The important thing to note is that it’s not just digitised books we have. It’s also playbills, magazines, newspapers, images, manuscripts, maps, usage data, catalogue data, broadcast news on TV and radio, sounds, music, sheet music.
• #17: What actual engagement do we have when we speak to people wanting to use our digital content? Well first of all people think you are a waling catalogue? And secondly, remember we only have around 3% of physical stuff digitised? <CLICK> ‘You are in luck’, we have what you are looking for! Or ‘You are in not luck’ but we have this instead <CLICK> Engagement is constantly required to maintain interest in our digital collections. No engagement no Lab! <CLICK> We tend to attract projects with ‘fuzzier’ research boundaries. <CLICK> We have a tendency to work on more flexible, interdisciplinary and collaborative research proposals. <CLICK> Artists / Creatives often find engagement with our digital collections easier than scholars who often want a specific thing…
• #20: I haven’t got time to go into detail about this is slide, but these are the kinds of things we were hoping researchers would do with our digital collections, especially things that would be very difficult to do manually!
• #74: We then brought this to the British Library!
• #87: I would like to thank Simon Fraser University for hosting me, especially for Professor Colette Colligan for inviting me and her team for organising this trip!