Tim Hitchcock will launch the second annual British Library Labs Symposium with a keynote focusing on “Big and small data in the humanities”. Roly Keating, the Library’s Chief Executive, will then present awards to the 2014 Labs competition winners.

The event will take place on Monday 3rd of November, between 0930 and 1730 at the Conference Centre, British Library.

The 2014 competition’s winners will present their work followed by presentations from researchers who are actively using the Library's digital content; such as text mining scanned books to help build a cityscape of Edinburgh, analysing the performance characteristics of some of our digitised live music recordings and how it might be possible to measure the impact of releasing digital content and data into the public domain.

The Labs Team will talk about some of their surprising findings and the impact of the project, for instance, the tremendous appetite for openly licensed digital content when the team released over 1 million images on to Flickr, with the collection already having over 200 million views in less than a year and stirring great interest from artists, researchers and the general public.

Adam Farquhar will highlight key lessons that we’ve learned working closely with researchers since the Labs were formed and discuss how the Labs is transforming our approach to providing services to support digital research and scholarship. He will also outline plans for the Labs over the coming years and give further details of the 2015 Competition.

The event will end with a reception to celebrate the end of the first phase of the project and there will be an entertaining talk and live music performance which tries to connect the 'old' with the new digital world. Sarah Angliss, composer, automatist and sound historian will explore some unlikely affinities between sound making today and in the Victorian era through presentation and musical performance and she will be facilitate a D.I.Y. session where you can record your own voice on wax cylinder. The Labs team will be around to talk about their Data Giveaway if you are interested in getting hold of large of amounts of open and free digital content for your institution / organisation on portable devices.

 For more information about the event and to register, please visit the Labs Symposium page.