The British National Bibliography (BNB) has resumed publication, following a period of unavailability due to a cyber-attack in 2023.

Having started in 1950, the BNB predates the founding of the British Library, but despite many changes over the years its purpose remains the same: to record the publishing output of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. The BNB includes books and periodicals, covering both physical and electronic material. It describes forthcoming items up to sixteen weeks ahead of their publication, so it is essential as a current awareness tool. To date, the BNB contains almost 5.5 million records.

As our ongoing recovery from the cyber-attack continues, our Collection Metadata department have developed a process by which the BNB can be published in formats familiar to its many users. Bibliographic records and summaries will be shared in several ways:

• The database is searchable on the Share Family initiative's BNB Beta platform at https://bl.natbib-lod.org/ (see example record in the image below)
• Regular updates in PDF format will be made freely available to all users. Initially this will be on request
• MARC21 bibliographic records will be supplied directly to commercial customers across the world on a weekly basis

This image includes photographs of the very first BNB entry from 1950 (“Male and female”) and the first one we produced in this new process (“Song of the mysteries”)

Other services, such as Z39.50 access and outputs in other formats, are currently unavailable. We are working towards restoring these, and will provide further information in due course.

The BNB is the first national bibliography to be made available on the Share Family initiative's platform. It is published as linked data, and forms part of an international collaboration of libraries to link and enhance discovery across multiple catalogues and bibliographies.

The resumption of the BNB is the result of adaptations built around long-established collaborative working partnerships, with Bibliographic Data Services (who provide our CIP records) and UK Legal Deposit libraries, who contribute to the Shared Cataloguing Programme.

The International Federation of Library Associations describes bibliographies like the BNB as "a permanent record of the cultural and intellectual output of a nation or country, which is witnessed by its publishing output". We are delighted to be able to resume publication of the BNB, especially as we prepare to celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2025.

For further information about the BNB, please contact [email protected].

Mark Ellison, Collection Metadata Services Manager

Research Software Engineer James Misson writes...

On the 4^th and 5^th of September the Digital Humanities Congress was held in Sheffield, where the University of Sheffield continues to affirm its reputation as a hub for all things DH. The conference was a testament to the wide scope of DH methods, as well as researchers' abilities to adopt cutting edge technology to further our knowledge of human culture.

A common theme that emerged between papers was the application of machine learning to historical linguistics. Kate Wild, from the Oxford English Dictionary, shared the initial stages of the Oxford Corpus of Historical English, which will unite a vast amount of linguistic data spanning from the fifteenth century to the present day. The equally impressive Ansund project was presented by Mark Faulkner and Elisabetta Magnanti — a comprehensive corpus of Old English texts enriched from their manuscript sources by computer vision.

Keynote lectures were given by Melissa Terras and Simon Mahony, whose extensive experience gave them ideal vantage points from which to survey the Digital Humanities and the twists and turns it has taken since the beginnings of their careers. Likewise, Paola Marchionni and Peter Findlay (formerly of the British Library) presented the history of Jisc, elucidating its critical role within research institutes.

Conversations beyond the lecture hall were instructive for the Digital Scholarship team, especially for the BL’s recovery following the cyberattack last year. It was clear that the English Short Title Catalogue is a crucial resource for many scholars in attendance, not only as a finding aid but also as a dataset — encouraging to know, as the library works towards getting the ESTC back online. This is especially true of Fred Schurink’s research on the importation of early continental books to early modern England, which is an innovative contribution to the burgeoning field of Bibliographic Data Science. We look forward to learning more about this field at Dr Schurink’s upcoming workshop at the John Ryland’s Library in Manchester.

Digital Curator Mia Ridge writes...

While the British Library works to recover from the October 2023 cyber-attack, we're putting some information from our currently inaccessible website into an easily readable and shareable format. This blog post is based on a page captured by the Wayback Machine in September 2023.

Crowdsourcing at the British Library

Example of a crowdsourcing task

For the British Library, crowdsourcing is an engaging form of online volunteering supported by digital tools that manage tasks such as transcription, classification and geolocation that make our collections more discoverable.

The British Library has run several popular crowdsourcing projects in the past, including the Georeferencer, for geolocating historical maps, and In the Spotlight, for transcribing important information about historical playbills. We also integrated crowdsourcing activities into our flagship AI / data science project, Living with Machines.

• Agents of Enslavement uses 18th/19th century newspapers to research slavery in Barbados and create a database of enslaved people.
• Living with Machines, which is mostly based on research questions around nineteenth century newspapers

Crowdsourcing Projects at the British Library

• Living with Machines (2019-2023) created innovative crowdsourced tasks, including tasks that asked the public to closely read historical newspaper articles to determine how specific words were used.
• Agents of Enslavement (2021-2022) used 18th/19th century newspapers to research slavery in Barbados and create a database of enslaved people.
• In the Spotlight (2017-2021) was a crowdsourcing project from the British Library that aimed to make digitised historical playbills more discoverable, while also encouraging people to closely engage with this otherwise less accessible collection of ephemera.
• Canadian wildlife: notes from the field (2021), a project where volunteers transcribed handwritten field notes that accompany recordings of a wildlife collection within the sound archive.
• Convert a Card (2015) was a series of crowdsourcing projects aimed to convert scanned catalogue cards in Asian and African languages into electronic records. The project template can be found and used on GitHub.
• Georeferencer (2012 - present) enabled volunteers to create geospatial data from digitised versions of print maps by adding control points to the old and modern maps.
• Pin-a-Tale (2012) asked people to map literary texts to British places.

 

Research Projects

The Living with Machines project included a large component of crowdsourcing research through practice, led by Digital Curator Mia Ridge.

Mia was also the Principle Investigator on the AHRC-funded Collective Wisdom project, which worked with a large group of co-authors to produce a book, The Collective Wisdom Handbook: perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, through two 'book sprints' in 2021:

This book is written for crowdsourcing practitioners who work in cultural institutions, as well as those who wish to gain experience with crowdsourcing. It provides both practical tips, grounded in lessons often learned the hard way, and inspiration from research across a range of disciplines. Case studies and perspectives based on our experience are woven throughout the book, complemented by information drawn from research literature and practice within the field.

More Information

Our crowdsourcing projects were designed to produce data that can be used in discovery systems (such as online catalogues and our item viewer) through enjoyable tasks that give volunteers an opportunity to explore digitised collections.

Each project involves teams across the Library to supply digitised images for crowdsourcing and ensure that the results are processed and ingested into various systems. Enhancing metadata through crowdsourcing is considered in the British Library's Collection Metadata Strategy.

We previously posted on twitter @LibCrowds and currently post occasionally on Mastodon https://glammr.us/@libcrowds and via our newsletter.

Past editions of our newsletter are available online.