Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of of British Library Labs.

The BL Labs Awards formally recognises outstanding and innovative work that has been created using the British Library’s digital collections and data.

The closing date for entering the BL Labs Awards (2017) is midnight BST on Tuesday 11^th October. So please submit your entry and/or help us spread the word to all interested and relevant parties over the next few months or so. This will ensure we have another year of fantastic digital-based projects highlighted by the Awards!

This year, the BL Labs Awards is commending work in four key areas:

• Research - A project or activity which shows the development of new knowledge, research methods, or tools.
• Commercial - An activity that delivers or develops commercial value in the context of new products, tools, or services that build on, incorporate, or enhance the Library's digital content.
• Artistic - An artistic or creative endeavour which inspires, stimulates, amazes and provokes.
• Teaching / Learning - Quality learning experiences created for learners of any age and ability that use the Library's digital content.

After the submission deadline of midnight BST on Tuesday 11^th October for entering the BL Labs Awards has past, the entries will be shortlisted. Selected shortlisted entrants will be notified via email by midnight BST on Friday 20th October 2017. 

A prize of £500 will be awarded to the winner and £100 to the runner up of each Awards category at the BL Labs Symposium on 30^th October 2017 at the British Library, St Pancras, London.

The talent of the BL Labs Awards winners and runners ups of 2016 and 2015 has led to the production a remarkable and varied collection of innovative projects. In 2016, the Awards commended work in four main categories – Research, Creative/Artistic and Entrepreneurship:

• Research category Award (2016) winner: 'Scissors and Paste', by M. H. Beals. Scissors and Paste utilises the 1800-1900 digitised British Library Newspapers, collection to explore the possibilities of mining large-scale newspaper databases for reprinted and repurposed news content.
• Artistic Award (2016) winner: 'Hey There, Young Sailor', written and directed by Ling Low with visual art by Lyn Ong. Hey There, Young Sailor combines live action with animation, hand-drawn artwork and found archive images to tell a love story set at sea. The video draws on late 19th century and early 20th century images from the British Library's Flickr collection for its collages and tableaux and was commissioned by Malaysian indie folk band The Impatient Sisters and independently produced by a Malaysian and Indonesian team.

Image: 'Scissors and Paste', by M. H. Beals (Top-left)
'Curating Digital Collections to Go Mobile', by Mitchell Davis; (Top-right)
 'Hey There, Young Sailor',
written and directed by Ling Low with visual art by Lyn Ong; (Bottom-left)
'Library Carpentry', founded by James Baker and involving the international Library Carpentry team;
(Bottom-right) 

• Commercial Award (2016) winner: 'Curating Digital Collections to Go Mobile', by Mitchell Davis. BiblioBoard, is an award-winning e-Content delivery platform, and online curatorial and multimedia publishing tools to support it to make it simple for subject area experts to create visually stunning multi-media exhibits for the web and mobile devices without any technical expertise, the example used a collection of digitised 19th Century books.
• Teaching and Learning (2016) winner: 'Library Carpentry', founded by James Baker and involving the international Library Carpentry team. Library Carpentry is software skills training aimed at the needs and requirements of library professionals taking the form of a series of modules that are available online for self-directed study or for adaption and reuse by library professionals in face-to-face workshops using British Library data / collections. Library Carpentry is in the commons and for the commons: it is not tied to any institution or person. For more information, see http://librarycarpentry.github.io/.
• Jury’s Special Mention Award (2016): 'Top Geo-referencer -Maurice Nicholson' . Maurice leads the effort to Georeference over 50,000 maps that were identified through Flickr Commons, read more about his work here.

For any further information about BL Labs or our Awards, please contact us at labs@bl.uk.

I was fortunate enough to travel to Kolkata recently along with other members of the Two Centuries of Indian Print team where we ran a workshop on ‘Developments with Optical Character Recognition for Bangla’. The event, which took place at Jadavpur University, proved an excellent forum to share knowledge in this area of growing interest and was reflected in the range of library professionals, academics and computer scientists who attended from ten institutions across Bengal and from the US.

Applying Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to printed texts is one of the key expectations of 21st century scholars and library users, who want to quickly find information online that accurately meets their research needs. Cultural institutions are gateways to millions of items containing knowledge that can transform modern research. The workshop looked at the developments, challenges and opportunities of OCR in opening up vast quantities of knowledge to digital researchers.

Dr. Naira Khan from the University of Dhaka’s Computational Linguistics department kicked off the workshop by introducing the key process of how OCR works, including ‘pre-processing’ steps such as binarisation which reduces a scanned page of text to its binary form to remove background noise, isolating only the text on the page. Skew detection, another pre-processing technique, corrects scans with angular text that can cause problems for OCR systems that require perfectly horizontal or vertical text. Dr. Khan moved on to explain how OCR systems segment pages into text and non-text regions right down to pixel detection to recognise word boundaries. When it comes down to recognising individual characters, Bangla script presents some unique challenges, containing such a vast range of compound characters, vowel signs and ligatures, not to mention the distinctive top line connecting characters known as the ‘Matra’. Breaking the characters into their geometric features such as lines, arcs and circles enables combinations of features to be formed, classified as characters and expressed in digital form as OCR output.  

Dr. Khan introducing the concepts of OCR

After Dr. Khan’s inspiring talk attendees learned of the British Library’s particular challenge searching for an OCR solution for our 19^th century Bengali books currently being digitised, and the potential use of an OCR’d dataset for Digital Humanities researchers wanting to perform text and data mining. The books span an enormous range of genres from works by religious missionaries, to those covering food, science and works of fiction. So obtaining OCR would enable automated searching and analysis of the full text across hundreds of thousands of pages that could lead to exciting research discoveries in South Asian studies.   

The event concluded with a practical session during which attendees used different OCR software on a sample of the BL’s digitised Bengali books. They experimented with Tesseract, Google Drive, i2ocr and newOCR. The general consensus was Google Drive proved to be the most accurate! Although, there are other tools we have only just begun to try out such as Transkribus that may be useful.

Workshop participants trying out various OCR tools

All-in-all the workshop proved a really worthwhile exercise in widening knowledge among Indian institutions about the challenges and possible uses of OCR for Bangla. The work currently being undertaken by universities and technology centres using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to perform text recognition will hopefully close the gap between Bangla (as well as other Indic scripts) and Latin scripts when it comes to efficient OCR tools.

 

This is a post by Tom Derrick, Digital Curator for the Two Centuries of Indian Print project.

Finding digitised books in the Russian language in a collection of 65,000 books

Posted by Nadya Miryanova BL Labs School Work Placement Student, currently studying at Lady Eleanor Holles, working with Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

Background

Although there are 200 million items in the British Library, contrary to popular belief, only 1-2% of these items are digitised. The ‘Microsoft’ books are 65,000 digitised volumes - about 22.5 million pages, and they were published between 1789 and 1914; digitised in partnership with Microsoft. They cover a wide range of subject areas including topics such as philosophy, poetry and history and they include Optically Character Recognised (OCR) text from the millions of pages.

In discussion with Mahendra Mahey, Project Manager of BL Labs, we explored making a ‘sub collection’ from this larger set which will hopefully be of use to the library in the future. At first, I simply brainstormed possible ideas and looked at different possibilities for this project, and I thought that since 2017 celebrates a century since the Russian Revolution, I would do some research into the concept of ‘revolution’.

Revolution

Definition - A forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favour of a new system.

Etymology - Late latin ‘revolvere’, meaning to roll back, which turned into the Old French or Late Latin ‘revolutio’, from which came about our contemporary English word ‘revolution’.

Revolutions date back to as early as 2730 BC, where there was a set rebellion against the reign of the pharaoh Seth-Peribsen of the Second Dynasty of Egypt. The most recent revolution actually happened only last year in 2016, when there was a Turkish coup d'état attempt.

About the Russian Revolution

The British Library have recently opened an exhibition perfectly capturing not only the events that took place in this particularly intense period in history, but also the atmosphere that was omnipresent at the time and on my very first day here at the British Library, I got the chance to explore and study this fascinating exhibition in great depth.

The Russian Revolution was initiated by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who hoped to create a socialist government, and in 1917, they successfully dismantled Tsarist autocracy in the hope of making society less stratified. The revolution resulted in the rise of the USSR and in the words of Karl Liebknecht, “The Russian revolution was to an unprecedented degree the cause of the proletariat of the whole world becoming more revolutionary”. However, this revolution also led to months of social and political turmoil and provoked the tragedy of the Russian Civil War on an unforeseeable scale, in which 10 million lives were lost. The revolution also produced myths that entered the artistic and intellectual fabric of the modern world, which the exhibitions uncovers and investigates. Learn more about the Russian Revolution by booking your tickets for the Russian Revolution Exhibition at the British Library on the website http://goo.gl/FL9FFt.

Russian Revolution Exhibition Poster at the British Library

As part of my research project, I also wanted to incorporate some of the other subjects that I had studied at GCSE, and so I thought this would be a brilliant opportunity to compare the Russian Revolution to the French Revolution, both French and Russian being subjects that I wish to at A-level. The French Revolution was a period of far-reaching social and political upheaval in France that lasted from 1789 until 1799, and was partially carried forward by Napoleon during the later expansion of the French Empire.

Below is a mind-map I made detailing the differences and similarities between the French and the Russian Revolution.

French and Russian Revolution Comparison

Although my initial focus for the project was revolution, we soon established that it was too specific a topic and it would be more beneficial to focus on something broader, that would be useful to a larger group of researchers.

I soon discovered that the Russian titles within the digitised collection had never previously seperated and categorised, and being a native Russian speaker, I thought that this would be a better avenue to go down and explore. This would be a project in commemoration of the 100^th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which would hopefully help researchers looking at books in the Russian language in the future.

Facts about the Russian Language

• Largest European native language.
  • 7^th most spoken language in the world.
• There are only 200,000 words in the Russian language in comparison to 1,000,000 in English.
• The stress pattern in a word can drastically change its meaning, e.g. :
  • я плачу  (emphasis on second syllable) - I pay.
  • я плáчу (emphasis on first syllable) -I cry.

Approach

My first task included examining a huge spread sheet containing information about the 65,000 books in the collection.

• In order to make this task a little less daunting, I first used the ‘Filter’ function in the language column of my Excel spreadsheet, and selected the Russian language. As a result, I found 583 books in total that were written in the Russian Language.
• I now had to think of a way to organise these books. The possibilities seemed endless, should I sort them into history books? Science books? Books about Russia?
• In the end, I decided to establish two broad categories as a starting point, fiction vs non-fiction, as this seemed like a logical place to start.
• In order to access the Russian keyboard, I went onto the site translit.net, which turns normal Latin letters into Cyrillic.
• I typed in a Russian word, using the English keyboard, that related to one of my two categories, e.g. for non-fiction, I wanted to find history related books, so used the simple word ‘history’, which translates as история.
• I then copied this word, and pasted it into my spreadsheet.
• I used the filter function on the 'Titles' section, and this would hopefully produce a number of books that included the word history in their title.

Screenshot of my spread sheet.

Challenges

In this project, I found that I had to overcome a number of difficulties.

• In Russian, nouns can have up to 12 inflections and adjectives can have as many as 16. This clearly shows that looking up different versions of the same word was necessary.
• Like I previously said, I first experimented with simple words, such as history. You would think that there would definitely be books relating to history lurking somewhere in a collection of nearly 600 Russian titles. However, when I conducted my search, the spread sheet had no results. Confused, I tried another simple word, and once again had no definitive results.

Scanning more closely through the list of books, I soon noticed that there were certain spellings and letters that I did not recognise. I decided to research this matter more closely, looking at the history of the Russian language, and found out that the Russian of the 19^th century does not directly resemble the Russian language used today. Why? Because of the Russian Revolution, of course.

Bolshevik Spelling Reform of 1918 Research, detailing the causes for the reform and the changes made to the Russian language

Suddenly, everything made a lot more sense.

This discovery meant that I had to change my approach a little bit, so rather than typing in the Russian words in the spelling that I knew today, I would have to go for a sort of hunt throughout the spreadsheet, looking for words in the titles of the books that could encompass a number of books. In a way, this made the process of my project even more interesting, despite the fact that it took longer.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, the majority of the Russian language books were actually non-fiction. As a result, I decided to create sub-categories for the non-fiction set, which can be seen in the speech-bubble I created below.

Speech bubble containing non-fiction categories

To help me in this task, I decided to create a colour-coding system for classification, so that I could keep track of my progress.

• Yellow=Classified
• Purple= латиницa (latin letters)- quite often I found titles which where written in Russian but using latin letters. Purple also used for titles written in another language
• Blue=unknown classification
• Orange= near classification

Screenshot of my spread sheet showing the colour coding system that I used.

Evaluation

In conclusion, I managed to categorise the Russian language books into two broad categories, fiction and non-fiction, and I created 25 sub-collections within the non-fiction category. This project has been extremely enjoyable to work on, and although there were many challenges involved in the process, I have learnt lots during my research journey. In order to improve this project, I would definitely say that more work needs to be done on splitting up the 'history' sub-collection of my non-fiction title, since it is very broad and covers political accounts, as well as books about Russian History. Additionally, I think that this project would also considerably benefit from undergoing a thorough check with curators, in order to help classify some of the books I have not organised into separate collections yet. 

An illustration from one of the Russian books, По Сѣверо-Западу Россіи, available in the digitised collections. Image can be accessed on British Library Flickr Commons.

 

 

Posted by Nadya Miryanova BL Labs School Work Placement Student, currently studying at Lady Eleanor Holles, working with Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

Day 6

Despite the fact that a week of my work experience here has already elapsed, I still can’t quite believe that I am lucky enough to find myself in this magnificent institution, let alone have access to ‘staff-only’ areas and actually be able to work here. One thing I particularly love is that I can enter the library in the early morning, before official opening hours, and see it evolve from a certain peaceful stillness to its usual excited buzz of activity as the day progresses and watch as the library is brought to life once more by the people that visit it.

A photograph of me by the book tower in the British Library

Previously, in a very serious and sophisticated catch-up session (including, of course, only work-related matters), Mahendra had discovered that I was a huge fan of the Harry Potter series. Although this subject may seem quite unexpected and completely out of context in this blog, it is actually very relevant, since on the next day, Mahendra had informed me that I would be able to meet the Harry Potter curator. This was something that caught me completely by surprise, but it also shamelessly sparked a child-like excitement within me, having loved the franchise ever since I was seven. A meeting was set for Monday morning, and I waited, with some impatience, to meet Julian Harrison, the curator of medieval manuscripts and also the man who was involved in the organisation of the Harry Potter exhibition.

People looking at an exhibition in the British Library

During the meeting, I was able to gain an insight into the working life of a curator. Julian explained the sorts of things involved in this role, and also talked more about the exhibitions themselves, where inspiration comes from, as well as previous exhibitions and their structure. 

In addition to this, I was able to find out lots of details about the Harry Potter exhibition (it’s fascinating and definitely worth a visit, trust me!). Furthermore, we had an in-depth discussion about the Harry Potter series itself, and we talked about some of the key themes as well as key characters in the books. You’ll soon be able to find out more about the exhibition too, be sure to book your tickets early and visit the British Library to be part of what will truly be a magical experience!

A preview of the "Harry Potter- A History of Magic" Exhibition, coming soon on 27th October 2017

In the afternoon, I went to a classical music concert at the British Museum. As I stepped into the light interior of the museum, I felt a hundred memories instantly come to mind, dating back to various visits with my family and numerous school projects over the years. The British Library and British Museum singers presented a concert performance of ‘Trial by Jury’, an opera in one act, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. ‘Trial by Jury’ is set at a Court of Justice in 1876. The defendant, Edwin, has recently promised to marry a beautiful woman, Angelina, but has since changed his mind, for which reason Angelina is now suing him for Breach of Promise. After a multitude of entertaining events, involving the Jury, the public, the Usher, and many comic disagreements over the issue, a decision is finally reached. The Judge decides the only real logical solution to the problem is to marry Angelina himself, resulting in happiness for all parties. The choir then performed Te Deum, op 103, by Dvorak, a true choral masterpiece, and the performance itself was very moving.

Although the choir was relatively small in number, their bright and beautiful voices resonated across the room, creating a light-hearted and friendly atmosphere, upheld by the choir’s energy and enthusiasm. I always love seeing how music can unite people to interpret a piece together, and each member was fully involved in this collaborative effort to create stunning music, making the performance an unquestionable success.  

The British Museum and British Library Singers

When I returned to the office, I checked my e-mails and saw that Laurence Roger, Project Support Officer in the Collections Division, had very kindly offered to help me examine a book about Catullus’ poetry. The book that I eventually saw was dating back to the 18^th century, and I spent the last section of my day looking at this book with Laurence, who is very nice, and I felt extremely lucky to be able to have access to it.

One of the books that Laurence herself had lent me to look at.

Day 7

My seventh day of work experience arrived, and almost as soon as I got into the office, I set up my desk and eagerly launched straight into my working day. My morning consisted of independent work, where I further developed my research project and carried on with the interview storyboard for Hannah-Rose Murray, a finalist of the BL Labs competition in 2016. Her project was centred on black American activists in the 19^th century, particularly their speeches and lectures from the 1830s to the 1890s. This was a period of history that I previously knew little about, and so I enjoyed learning about the influence that black Americans had on British society and seeing the way Hannah went around creating her project, bringing history to life. Read more about her project here. 

Map displaying the locations of Frederick Douglass’ lectures in the United Kingdom and Ireland, a small section of Hannah-Rose Murray's project

At 12:30, I attended a Welcome Day at the British Library, and this presented me with an excellent opportunity to not only find out more about the different departments of the library, but also to tell some new members of staff about some of the work the Digital Scholarship Department does (I was also provided with a free lunch, always a bonus!). I talked to a variety of departments, ranging from Human Resources to Publishing and Retail, and everyone was extremely friendly, helpful and accommodating.

In the afternoon, I worked independently once again, more specifically on a YouTube transcription of an interview with Melodee Beals, a 2016 research award winner, who created an amazing project entitled ‘Scissors and Paste’. This project utilises the 1800-1900 British Library Newspapers collection to explore the possibilities of mining large-scale newspaper databases for reprinted and re purposed news content.

Melodee Beals presenting her project, 'Scissors and Paste'

After finishing my working day, I decided to wonder around and explore the British Library. The amazing thing about this place is that it really does resemble a maze, I constantly find myself discovering new places and rooms, with each day presenting something new and different to the previous one.

Day 8

As I entered the lift, I looked at the hard copy of my schedule, and I noticed that a meeting with a fashion company and members of the British Fashion Council was fixed that very morning. Feeling suddenly a little more self-conscious than usual about my appearance, I glanced cautiously in the mirror that was in the lift and my reflection stared back, wondering if anything could be done to cover the consequences that a malfunctioning alarm clock and getting ready in five minutes that morning could bring. After a few fruitless attempts of trying to somehow tame my hair, I finally accepted defeat and entered the meeting room.

The meeting at 9 o’clock was with a luxury womenswear brand. During the meeting, Mahendra introduced BL Labs, showing a presentation that informed the company about Digital Scholarship and detailed previous projects that the department had worked on, including ‘Burning Man’. A project with the fashion company was then initiated, which would involve the Library's collections, and some possible ideas for the project were also brainstormed. The fashion company talked more about their collections and how ideas for projects generally come about. It is inspiring to think how each individual collection, whether an assortment of garments or a literary exhibition of novels, tells its own unique story, and I found out that in many ways the research for the project is itself a sensational journey.

After this meeting, I returned back to my desk and had a quick catch-up with Mahendra, where we evaluated the YouTube transcription work, and the general progress made over the first half of this week. To finish off, I was whisked off to another meeting, this time with Wayne Boucher, a photographer who has a very big interest in beautiful stain-glass windows, and will be keeping in contact with the British Library to promote this stunning artwork.

A Tiffany stain-glass window

Day 9

In the morning, I hurriedly entered the British Library through the staff entrance, as usual, but instead of walking over to the doors of the lift, I took a sharp right turn, and walked over to the Post Room. Mahendra had previously organised for me to visit the Post Room with Peter Clarke, Service Delivery Manager, Messenger/Post Service, and today I would be having a tour of certain sections of the building that are off bounds to not only the general public, but also to many members of staff. I was able to see the process of delivery take place, and even help with this crucial procedure, without which many of the library books that researchers and readers need would not be available. I was shown the delivery room by Keiran Duncan-Johnson, Late Team Leader LMS, Messenger/Post Service, Finance Division, and this was a huge, open space, which once more reminded me of the sheer scale of the place. 

I was also kindly shown round other areas of the library  I was previously unfamiliar with by Keiran, such as the modern languages sector and the Alan Turing Institute, both of which are incredible departments that work tirelessly to make great leaps in their corresponding fields of study to change the world for the better.

The Alan Turing Institute

The afternoon commenced with a meeting with the music curator, Chris Scobie. For the second time that day, I was lucky enough to visit a new area of the library that is of limited access, and Chris showed me the music reading room, and most notably, the basement. The basement is where all the music scores and manuscripts lie, and needless to say, I was incredibly excited. As we browsed through the shelves of the collections, I saw multiple familiar names of composers, such as Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, and I even got to read and touch some of Elgar’s letters to Vaughan Williams and look at his original manuscript for his Enigma Variations!  

A digitised version of the original Elgar manuscript for the theme of the Enigma Variations

Day 10

As I walked down the second floor corridor, I soon came to face the wooden door of the office for what it seemed was the last time. I sighed and a miserable thought came into my head, as I began to contemplate what on earth I was going to do with myself on Monday, when I was no longer going to work here. However, I soon brushed it off, and decided to make the most of my final day at the British Library.

The door to the office of the Digital Scholarship Department

My final day consisted of making concluding touches to my numerous projects, including refining and making last minute edits to some of the transcriptions I had done. I then met Christin Hoene from the University of Kent, who was working on a project that was based on the concept of sound within novels. I was able to show her some of the work that I did on Excel with my independent research project, which can be accessed here.

At lunchtime, rather than eating in the staff canteen as usual, I decided to eat my lunch in a free reading space in the centre of the library, whilst reading my book, ‘Mother Tongue’ by Bill Bryson. What I love most about libraries is that there are so many untold stories hiding in the shelves, and I feel like I could sit comfortably in here for hours. In fact, in the space of an hour, you could travel to as many as 10 countries, should you only have the will to open a few different books and immerse yourself in their stories. As Lloyd Alexander once said “Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves”.

Another great Lloyd Alexander quotation

Lastly, and most importantly, I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has made this experience a possibility for me, especially Mahendra, who has not only been very kind and patient, but has also provided me with so many wonderful opportunities and has helped me hugely with a multitude of different things. I have always loved books since a young age, and to be surrounded by so many was in itself very special, but to be able to work in the library and help the Digital Scholarship Department was just incredible. My experience here has taught me multiple valuable things, which is something I am eternally grateful for.

The same way I would never judge a book by its front cover, I will not judge a building by its name, for the British Library is infinitely more than just a residence for books. It is a museum in which there are many exhibitions, it is a research centre, and most importantly, it is an institution that stores the world’s knowledge behind its brick walls.

The British Library

Inspiration can really come from absolutely anywhere, and from something small you can make something incredibly vast. It makes you think what you could do and what a difference it could make, if only you just choose to try. Inevitably, in life, you have to take risks, but more often than not, lots of these are worth taking in an attempt to brighten and bring artistic colour as well as creativity to the world. In the words of Stephen King, “books are a uniquely portable magic”, something which certainly rings true within the walls of this institution, where so many items are kept and so many new ones are constantly being acquired and discovered.

So, I send a big thank you to the British Library and all who work here, for making what was essentially a childhood dream into a reality and this will truly be a chapter of my life that I will always remember.

Nadya Miryanova

Posted by Nadya Miryanova BL Labs School Work Placement Student, currently studying at Lady Eleanor Holles, working with Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

Introduction to the British Library

Day 1

It was with a mixture of anticipation, curiosity and excitement that I opened the door to the staff entrance and started my two week work placement in the world’s largest library. I have been placed with BL Labs in the Digital Scholarship department, where I am working with Mahendra Mahey (Project Manager of BL Labs) for the following two weeks. After the inescapable health and safety induction, I am now extremely well acquainted with the BL’s elaborate fire alarm system, and following lunch at the staff restaurant, Mahendra provided me with an introduction to the British Library and explained the work undertaken by the BL Labs.

When most people hear the word ‘library’, conventional ideas typically spring to mind, including a copious number of books, and, of course, a disgruntled librarian ironically rather loudly encouraging silence every five minutes. I must admit that initially, my perspective was the same.

However, my viewpoint was soon to be completely turned around.

British Library interior

An extraordinary institution, the British Library is indeed widely known for its remarkable collection of books, it is home to around 14 million. However, contrary to popular belief, these are only a small section of the Library’s vast collections. In fact, the British Library actually has an extremely diverse range of items, ranging from patents to musical scores, and from ancient artifacts dating as far back as 1000 BC to this morning’s newspapers, altogether giving a grand figure of approximately 200 million documented items. I was also delighted to discover that the British Library has the world’s largest collection of stamps! It is estimated that if somebody looked at 5 items each day, it would take an astonishing 80,000 years to see the whole of BL collections. 

I learnt that the objective of the BL Labs is to encourage scholars, innovators, artists, entrepreneurs and educators to work with the Library's digital collections, supporting its mission to try to ensure that the wealth and diversity of the Library’s intellectual digital heritage is available for the research, creativity and fulfillment of everyone. At BL Labs, anyone is invited to address an important research question(s) or ideas which uses the Library’s digital content and data, by entering the annual Awards or becoming involved in a collaborative project or even just using the collections in whatever way they want.

Although initially a little nervous when entering this immense institution, my fears evaporated completely, when on my very first day of working here, I was brought immediately into a friendly, welcoming atmosphere, promoted by the sincere kindness and interest that I was met with from each member of the Library's staff. 

The George the IV British Library book collection

Day 2

At precisely 9 o’clock in the morning, I found myself seated at my office desk, looking at the newly filled out Outlook calendar on my computer to see what new and exciting tasks I would be faced with that day and looking out for any upcoming events. My Tuesday consisted mostly of independent work at my desk, and after a quick catch-up with Mahendra at 9.30, where we discussed the working plan for the day and reviewed yesterday’s work, I sat down to start my second full day of work at the British Library.

British Library Labs leaflet

Between 2013-2016, the British Library Labs held a competition, which looked for transformative project ideas which used the British Library’s digital collections and data in new and exciting ways. The BL Labs Awards recognises outstanding and innovative work that has been carried out using these collections. Mahendra had previously introduced me to the Labs Competition and Awards pages of the BL Labs website, and my main objective was to update the ideas and project submissions on this page, specifically adding the remaining Competition 2016 Entries, reviewing the 2015 and 2014 entries and checking that they were all complete with no entries missing. The competition entries can be accessed on the website http://labs.bl.uk/Ideas+for+Labs.

This was an excellent opportunity for me to work on a new editing platform and further enhance my editing skills, which will doubtlessly prove very useful in everyday life as well as in the future. As I worked through editing and updating the pages, what struck me most was the incredible diversity and wide variety of ideas within the competition entries. From a project exploring Black Abolitionists and their presence in Britain, to the proposed creation of a Victorian meme machine, and from a planned political meeting’s mapper, to a suggested Alice in Wonderland bow tie design, each idea was entirely unique and original, despite the fact that each entry was adhering to the same brief. I was mesmerised by the amount of thought and careful planning that was evident in every submission, each one was intricately detailed and provided a careful and thorough plan of work. 

An example of a Victorian meme

After finishing lunch relatively early, I found myself with half an hour of my allocated break still left, and took the opportunity to explore the library. I walked down to the visitor’s entrance, and took a moment to admire the King’s library, a majestic tower of books standing in the British Library's centre. Stepping closer, I was able to read some of the inscriptions on the spines of the books, and was delighted to see that one of them was a book of Catullus’ poetry, poetry that I previously had studied in Latin GCSE. The scope of knowledge that lies within this library is practically endless, and it led me to reflect on the importance of the work of the BL Labs. I thought back to the competition entries, they prove that the possibilities for projects truly have no limit. The BL Labs are able to give scholars, academics and students the opportunity to access some of these digital collections such as books very easily and in any part of the world. Without this access, many of the wonderful projects that the BL currently works on would not be possible.

With that thought fresh in my mind, I was brought back to reality, and returned to my desk to continue working, this time on my mini-project. My last task for the day involved brainstorming ideas for this project. A direct focus was soon established, and I decided to explore the Russian language titles in the 65,000 digitised 19th Century Microsoft books. Later on, I shall be writing a blog post detailing my experience of working on this project.

Day 3

As the Piccadilly line train arrived at St Pancras, I actually managed to step and head off in the completely right direction for the first time that week (needless to say, my sense of direction is not the best). Feeling rather proud of myself, I walked with a skip in my step, ready to immerse myself in whatever plan of work awaited today.

I looked at the schedule of the day and my heart leapt, I was to be attending my first ever proper staff meeting. It was a very technical meeting, started off by the Head of Digital Scholarship, Adam Faquhar, who talked about current activities taking place in the Digital Scholarship department. Everyone made contributions to the general discussion in the meeting and Mahendra talked about the development of the BL Labs work and the progress made so far. It also provided me with an opportunity to talk about some of the things I was presently doing and I found that everybody was very receptive and supportive. I found it very interesting to be introduced to people who work in the same area on a day-to-day basis with the British Library and enjoyed hearing about all the different projects currently being undertaken.

SherlockNet web interface

I then began working on some YouTube transcription work on the winners of the 2016 BL Labs competition, the first one being SherlockNet. The SherlockNet team worked to use convolutional neural networks to automatically tag and caption the British Library Flickr collection of digitised images taken largely from 19th Century books. If that doesn't sound impressive enough, consider the fact that this entry was submitted by three people, who were just 19 years old (undergraduate university students). My work involved listening carefully to each one of the interviews, and typing on a separate word document exactly what Luda Zhao, Karen Wang and Brian Do were talking about. This word document would then be used to make subtitles for the final film and would prove invaluable when creating a storyboard for the final cut down interview. 

British Library Alice in Wonderland Poster

Day 4

As I turned the corner of Midland Road and stood to face the traffic lights, my gaze wondered over to the now familiar Alice in Wonderland poster that had the ‘British Library’ printed on it in block capitals. I smiled as I looked up at the Cheshire cat that was perched neatly on top of the first 'I' in the words 'British Library' and the cat smiled back, revealing a wide toothy grin. Alice, likewise, was looking up at the Cheshire cat, and in that moment, her situation was made very credible to me. She was surrounded by this entirely new world of Wonderland, and in a similar way, I find myself in a parallel world of continuous acquisition of knowledge, as each day I am learning something new, with the British Library being the Wonderland. A wonderful and well-known literary extract from Lewis Carol came to mind:

 “`Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' (Alice)

That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.

`I don't much care where--' said Alice.

`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.

`--so long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation.

`Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.'

With this in mind, I briskly walked over to the doors of the office.

The beginning of my day consisted mostly of working on my own project, further classifiying a sub collection of Russian titles from the digitised collection of 65,000 books mostly from the 19th century. I worked on further enhancing the organisation and categorisation of these books, establishing a clear methodical approach that began with sorting the books into 2 categories-fiction and non-fiction. Curiously, the majority of the titles were actually non-fiction. After an e-mail correspondence with Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator East European Collections, I discovered that most of the books that were part of the digitisation were acquired at the time when they were published, so they were selected by Katya’s distant predecessors, a fact I found remarkable.

The Act of Abdication of Nicholas II and his brother Grand Duke Michael,
published as a placard that would be distributed
by hand or pasted to walls (shelfmark: HS.74/1870),
an example of a Russian language title that is now digitised

For the second-half of the day, I focussed once more on the YouTube transcriptions work and managed to finish transcribing the interviews for SherlockNet. I then discussed with Mahendra how I would storyboard the interviews in preparation for the film editing process. First, I would have to pick out specific sections of the interview that were most suitable to use in the film, marking the exact timings when the person started speaking to when they finished, and I then placed the series of timings in a chronological order. I was also able to choose the music for the end product (possibly my favourite part!), and I based my selection of the music on the mood of the videos and my perception of the characters of the individuals. I concluded my day by finding a no-copyright YouTube music page and discovered an assortment of possible music tracks. I managed to narrow down the selection to four possible soundtracks, which included titles such as ‘Spring in my Step’ and ‘Good Starts’.

Day 5

As I swiped my staff pass across the reader which permits access into the building, I checked my phone to see what the time was. It was 8.30am and concurrently, I caught sight of the date, Friday 14th July. I stopped in my tracks. Today was marking my first full working week at the British Library, I could hardly believe how quickly the time went! It forcibly reminded me of the inscription on my clock at home, ‘tempus fugit’ (time flees) because if there’s one thing that has gone abnormally fast here at my time at the BL, it’s time.

Digitised Hebrew Manuscript available through the British Library

In the morning, I attended a meeting discussing an event Mahendra is planning around the Digitised Hebrew manuscripts, and I was lucky enough to meet Ilana Tahan, the Lead Curator of Hebrew and Christian Orient Collections. The meeting included a telephone call to Eva Frojmovic, an academic at the Centre for Jewish Studies in the School of Fine Art of the History of Art and Cultural Studies in the University of Leeds. The discussion was centered mostly on an event that would be taking place where the BL would be talking about its collection of digitised Hebrew manuscripts in order to promote their free use to the general public. The very beautiful Hebrew manuscripts could actually have a very wide target audience, perhaps additionally reaching outside the academic learning sphere and having the potential to be used in the creative/artistic space.

Contrary to popular belief, the collection of 1302 digitised manuscripts can be used by anyone and everyone, leading to exciting possibilities and new projects. The amazing thing about the digital collections is that it makes it possible for someone who does not live in London to access them, where ever they may be in the world, and they can be looked at digitally, and can be used to enhance any learning experience, ranging from seminars or lessons to PhD research projects. The actual hard-copy of the manuscripts can also be, of course, accessed in the British Library. The structure and timings of the event were discussed, and a date was set for the next meeting and for the event. To finish the meeting, Mahendra offered an explanation of the handwriting recognition transcription process for the manuscripts. There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and each individual handwritten letter is recognised as a shape by the computer, though it's important that the computer has ground truth (i.e. examples of human transcribed manuscripts). Each letter and word is recognised and processed and will very cleverly convert the original Hebrew handwritten-script written into computerised Hebrew script. This means it would then allow someone to search for words in the manuscript, easily and quickly using a computerised search tool. 

Ilana Tahan, Lead Curator of Hebrew and Christian Orient Collections,
looking through Hebrew manuscripts

For the majority of the afternoon, I was floating between a variety of different projects, doing more work on the YouTube transcriptions and enhancing my mini-project, as well as creating a table of the outstanding blogs that still had to be published on the British Library's Digital Scholarship blog.

At the end of the day, I did a review of my first week, evaluating the progress that I had made with Mahendra. Throughout the week, I feel that I have enhanced and developed a number of invaluable skills, and have gained an incredible insight into the working world.

I will be writing about my second week, as well as my mini-project soon, so please come and visit this blog again if you are interested to find out more about some of the work being done at the British Library.

 

 

Recently I posted about the Ambient Literature project, which is investigating how situated storytelling is changing through pervasive and ubiquitous computing. As this week, at the British Library, we are hosting the first Ambient Literature work to be made available; this is "It Must Have Been Dark By Then" by Duncan Speakman.

The work is an audio walk, delivered via an app and a printed book. Each reader is invited to reflect on their fragile relationship with the world around us. Field recordings and stories from the edge of the Sahara, abandoned Latvian villages, and the disappearing swamplands of Louisiana weave into the audience’s drift through a landscape both familiar and foreign. 

"It Must Have Been Dark By Then" by Duncan Speakman

Today (05/07/2017) we have slots starting at: 12:00, 13:30, 15:00, 16:30, 18:00.  It is too late to book in advance, but places are available, so please just drop in. Our stand is in the Library's entrance foyer; underneath the Shakespeare sculpture and next to the shop. For the following three days, please book, details are:

Tomorrow (06/07/2017) there are five slots, starting at: 12:00, 13:30, 15:00, 16:30, 18:00.  To book, go to https://www.bl.uk/events/it-must-have-been-dark-by-then-06-july

On 07/07/2017 (Friday) there are four slots, starting at: 12:00, 13:30, 15:00, 16:30. To book, go to https://www.bl.uk/events/it-must-have-been-dark-by-then-07-july

On 08/07/2017 (Saturday) there are four slots, starting at: 11:00, 12:30, 14:00, 15:30 To book, go to https://www.bl.uk/events/it-must-have-been-dark-by-then-08-july

Participants need to bring their own smartphones (iOS or Android), but headphones and instructions will be provided. To get started quickly once you arrive, it would really help if you can download the app on your smartphone before coming to the library, the app is available on iOS and Android. Also please open the app, and download the additional content once prompted. These are the audio files that accompany the app itself, and are about 200MB. We also advise to make sure your phone is well charged and if you have a portable power bank it is a good idea to bring it with you!

 
Duncan Speakman and Tom Abba from Ambient Literature standing next to the pop-up stall in the British Library

Furthermore, this evening,  on 5 July 2017, we are holding an evening panel discussion about the relationships between digital technology, location and literature. Join Ambient Literature project leader Tom Abba and writers Kate Pullinger, James Attlee and Duncan Speakman who will be talking about location-based reading experiences using pervasive technology, which respond to the reader and use digital media as a bridge between story and place. We do have a few places left, so if you want to come along, book a free place from  https://www.bl.uk/events/ambient-literature-panel-discussion. 

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom, on twitter as @miss_wisdom and member of the Ambient Literature Advisory Board.

This post is by BL Labs collaborator Gary Green from Surrey Libraries, on twitter as @ggnewed. Gary collaborates with Digital Curator Stella Wisdom on games and interactive fiction initiatives and events.

Stella and I have organised and been involved in a range of games and libraries events and initiatives over the past few years, including International Games Day in Libraries (now International Games Week for 2018), pop-up board game parlours at Library Lates events, WordPlay festival, Off The Page: Literature and Games; a London Game Festival fringe event, and interactive fiction workshops at places including MozFest. During these events we've also had the opportunity to showcase games that have either have a literary or writerly theme to them, or have been inspired by British Library collections.

At the Off The Page event we had the chance to share what's going on in libraries in relation to games with a wider audience, including highlighting The British Library's Off The Map competition for student game developers; online game jams such as Odyssey Jam (where some entries used British Library digitised images); and plans for International Games Week in Libraries.

However, we are fully aware that we are not the only ones running game related activities in libraries. Other librarians and library staff are just as passionate about games as we are, and you'll find libraries throughout the UK running table-top, board game and Minecraft clubs, along with other types of game related events, including game making workshops and the use of games for learning and literacy.

With their common themes of narrative and storytelling, games and libraries are a great fit.

It's not only libraries in the heritage sector that are promoting the benefits of games and game play. We're also part of an online discussion group Games & GLAMS set up by British Library collaborator, Sarah Cole, that focuses on game related activities in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums sector. It's open to anyone with an interest in games in any of these areas. There (amongst other things) you can find out about activities such as The National Archives and University of York's Great Steampunk game jam; and games commissioned by the Wellcome Trust to promote their work and collections. There is also an associated Games & GLAMS Twitter account: @Games_GLAMS.

With all of this game related activity throughout the UK we, along with Darren Edwards of Bournemouth Libraries and lead on International Games Week in the UK, thought it would be a great opportunity to bring folks interested in gaming in libraries together for an event, to share ideas and develop the network of interested people and organisations.

So we've organised an event to do just that - Game Library Camp and set up a blog to document planning and discussions: http://gamesandglams.blogspot.co.uk/. Places are free, but you do need to book.

The event is happening on Saturday 12 August, 12:30 to 16:30, at the Knowledge Centre, The British Library, 96 Euston Rd, London, NW1 2DB. For info on how to get there, go to https://www.bl.uk/aboutus/quickinfo/loc/stp/

This event is also intended as a warm up to International Games Week in the autumn and to inspire librarians and library staff from all sectors to host their own game events. As the name suggests, this event is a game themed Library Camp. Library Camps are unconferences that are participant led and enable informal discussions. For more information about unconferences go here. 

The key thing about unconferences is that the programme isn't set by the organisers - participants propose and facilitate their own sessions to be run throughout the event. The only requirement for a session is that it fits within the theme. Game Library Camp participants can propose ideas for sessions on the day at the event, or if you already have an idea you can propose them beforehand on this page: http://gamesandglams.blogspot.co.uk/p/game-library-camp-sessions.html. We'll have the use of a number of rooms at the Knowledge Centre, so will be able to run a few sessions in parallel during the event.

Programme:

• Registration from 12 noon
• Introduction and session pitches 12:30pm
• 1st session 1pm - 1:40pm
• 2nd session 1:45pm - 2:25pm
• 3rd session 2:30pm - 3:10pm
• 4th session 3:15pm - 3:55pm
• Closing session 4pm
• Finish by 4:30pm
• Post-event social meetup (nearby location to be confirmed)

Please note lunch is not provided, but there are ample cafés on site, or bring your own snacks.

We'll be using #GameLibCamp17 to discuss the event on Twitter etc.

So, if you're into games and libraries, come and join Darren, Stella and myself and other like minded game/library enthusiasts on the afternoon of 12 August at The British Library. 

Places are free, but must be booked via: https://gamelibcamp.eventbrite.co.uk, see you there!

Does where you read affect how you read?

How can digital media create a bridge between story and place?

Ambient Literature is a project seeking to answer these questions.  This is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the University of West England, Bath Spa University and the University of Birmingham, investigating how situated storytelling is changing through pervasive and ubiquitous computing. Drawing on literary studies, creative writing, design, human-computer interaction, performance and new media studies it is examining emergent forms of literature; challenging the locational and technological future of the book.

Forming the heart of the project, three authors; Kate Pullinger, James Attlee and Duncan Speakman are each creating new experimental works that respond to the presence of a reader, and aim to show how we can redefine the rules of the reading experience through the use of technology.

The first of these works to be made available is "It Must Have Been Dark By Then" by Duncan Speakman, this is an audio walk, within which each reader is invited to reflect on their fragile relationship with the world around us. Field recordings and stories from the edge of the Sahara, abandoned Latvian villages, and the disappearing swamplands of Louisiana weave into the audience’s drift through a landscape both familiar and foreign. 

Here at the British Library we are delighted to be hosting sessions for members of the public to experience this work. These will be taking place 4-8 July 2017; to book a free place go to http://www.bl.uk/events/it-must-have-been-dark-by-then. Participants will need to bring their own smartphones (iOS or Android), but headphones and instructions will be provided. If you book a place, to get started quickly once you arrive, it would really help if you can download the app on your smartphone before coming to the library: iOS and Android. Also please open the app, and download the additional content once prompted. These are the audio files that accompany the app itself, and are about 200MB. We also advise to make sure your phone is well charged and if you have a portable power bank it is a good idea to bring it with you!

Furthermore, on 5 July 2017, we are hosting an evening panel discussion about the relationships between digital technology, location and literature. Join Ambient Literature project leader Tom Abba and writers Kate Pullinger, James Attlee and Duncan Speakman for a fascinating event talking about location-based reading experiences using pervasive technology, which respond to the reader and use digital media as a bridge between story and place. To book your place, go to https://www.bl.uk/events/ambient-literature-panel-discussion. Hope to see you there.

Ambient Literature writers: Kate Pullinger, Duncan Speakman and James Attlee

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom, on twitter as @miss_wisdom and member of the Ambient Literature Advisory Board.