Lightning Talk - LDCX 2015 Stanford
- 1. So, What is the Labs? Ben O’Steen ben.osteen@bl.uk @benosteen (“Technical Lead, British Library Labs” is my unhelpful but official title.)
- 4. The unifying theme to (pretty much) all the requests used to be: Give me EVERYTHING*! (* unsaid: that might be important to my work)
- 5. “I am interested in travel accounts in Europe during the 19th Century”
- 8. As this is all in the public domain anyway... What’s the harm in making it a bit more accessible? The Mechanical Curator twitter account has only got a handful of people following it after all. Maybe there isn’t much appetite for it?
- 11. Impact? Hard to measure but: - ~18-20 million hitsevery month, over 250 million in 13 months. - Over 200,000 tags added. - Hundreds of contributors. - Iterative crowdsourcing is ongoing. - https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/Commons: British_Library/Mechanical_Curator_collection/ map_tag_status
- 12. Look after the few with the time and energy to make a difference. Tagging, folksonomies and curating collections on the fly is key! Don’t ignore the crowd! → Tagged as “map” Not precise but just one step on the road to better knowledge.
- 17. Burning Man Festival David Normal created light boxes around the Burning man, using the British Library’s Flickr Images
- 19. Off the Map 2015 •Alice’s Adventures Off the Map •Part of the British Library's celebrations for the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland •http://gamecity.org/alices-adventures-off-the-map/
- 21. tl;dr Bringing together Data we already hold and Researchers who want to do interesting things. softening the learning curve, building better bridges making temporary things to solve real and specific problems now, to work out what general things to take forward