Digital scholarship blog

Enabling innovative research with British Library digital collections

32 posts categorized "South Asia"

21 September 2023

Convert-a-Card: Helping Cataloguers Derive Records with OCLC APIs and Python

This blog post is by Harry Lloyd, Research Software Engineer in the Digital Research team, British Library. You can sometimes find him at the Rose and Crown in Kentish Town.

Last week Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert delved into the invaluable work that she and others have done on the Convert-a-Card project since 2015. In this post, I’m going to pick up where she left off, and describe how we’ve been automating parts of the workflow. When I joined the British Library in February, Victoria Morris and former colleague Giorgia Tolfo had prototyped programmatically extracting entities from transcribed catalogue cards and searching by title and author in the OCLC WorldCat database for any close matches. I have been building on this work, and addressing the last yellow rectangle below: “Curator disambiguation and resolution”. Namely how curators choose between OCLC results and develop a MARC record fit for ingest into British Library systems.

A flow chart of the Convert-a-card workflow. Digital catalogue cards to Transkribus to bespoke language model to OCR output (shelfmark, title, author, other text) to OCLC search and retrieval and shelfmark correction to spreadsheet with results to curator disambiguation and resolution to collection metadata ingest
The Convert-a-Card workflow at the start of 2023

 

Entity Extraction

We’re currently working with the digitised images from two drawers of cards, one Urdu and one Chinese. Adi and Giorgia used a layout model on Transkribus to successfully tag different entities on the Urdu cards. The transcribed XML output then had ‘title’, ‘shelfmark’ and ‘author’ tags for the relevant text, making them easy to extract.

On the left an image of an Urdu catalogue card, on the right XML describing the transcribed text, including a "title" tag for the title line
Card with layout model and resulting XML for an Urdu card, showing the `structure {type:title;}` parameter on line one

The same method didn’t work for the Chinese cards, possibly because the cards are less consistently structured. There is, however, consistency in the vertical order of entities on the card: shelfmark comes above title comes above author. This meant I could reuse some code we developed for Rossitza Atanassova’s Incunabula project, which reliably retrieved title and author (and occasionally an ISBN).

Two Chinese cards side-by-side, with different layouts.
Chinese cards. Although the layouts are variable, shelfmark is reliably the first line, with title and author following.

 

Querying OCLC WorldCat

With the title and author for each card, we were set-up to query WorldCat, but how to do this when there are over two thousand cards in these two drawers alone? Victoria and Giorgia made impressive progress combining Python wrappers for the Z39.50 protocol (PyZ3950) and MARC format (Pymarc). With their prototype, a lot of googling of ASN.1, BER and Z39.50, and a couple of quiet weeks drifting through the web of references between the two packages, I built something that could turn a table of titles and authors for the Chinese cards into a list of MARC records. I had also brushed up on enough UTF-8 to fix why none of the Chinese characters were encoded correctly.

For all that I enjoyed trawling through it, Z39.50 is, in the words of a 1999 tutorial, “rather hard to penetrate” and nearly 35 years old. PyZ39.50, the Python wrapper, hasn’t been maintained for two years, and making any changes to the code is a painstaking process. While Z39.50 remains widely used for transferring information between libraries, that doesn’t mean there aren’t better ways of doing things, and in the name of modernity OCLC offer a suite of APIs for their services. Crucially there are endpoints on their Metadata API that allow search and retrieval of records in MARCXML format. As the British Library maintains a cataloguing subscription to OCLC, we have access to the APIs, so all that’s needed is a call to the OCLC OAuth Server, a search on the Metadata API using title and author, then retrieval of the MARCXML for any results. This is very straightforward in Python, and with the Requests package and about ten lines of code we can have our MARCXML matches.

Selecting Matches

At all stages of the project we’ve needed someone to select the best match for a card from WorldCat search results. This responsibility currently lies with curators and cataloguers from the relevant collection area. With that audience in mind, I needed a way to present MARC data from WorldCat so curators could compare the MARC fields for different matches. The solution needed to let a cataloguer choose a card, show the card and a table with the MARC fields for each WorldCat result, and ideally provide filters so curators could use domain knowledge to filter out bad results. I put out a call on the cross-government data science network, and a colleague in the 10DS data science team suggested Streamlit.

Streamlit is a Python package that allows fast development of web apps without needing to be a web app developer (which is handy as I’m not one). Adding Streamlit commands to the script that processes WorldCat MARC records into a dataframe quickly turned it into a functioning web app. The app reads in a dataframe of the cards in one drawer and their potential worldcat matches, and presents it as a table of cards to choose from. You then see the image of the card you’re working on and a MARC field table for the relevant WorldCat matches. This side-by-side view makes it easy to scan across a particular MARC field, and exclude matches that have, for example, the wrong physical dimensions. There’s a filter for cataloguing language, sort options for things like number of subject access fields and total number of fields, and the ability to remove bad matches from view. Once the cataloguer has chosen a match they can save a match to the original dataframe, or note that there were no good matches, or only a partial match.

Screenshot from the Streamlit web app, with an image of a Chinese catalogue card above a table containing MARC data for different WorldCat matches relating to the card.
Screenshot from the Streamlit Convert-a-Card web app, showing the card and the MARC table curators use to choose between matches. As the cataloguers are familiar with MARC, providing the raw fields is the easiest way to choose between matches.

After some very positive initial feedback, we sat down with the Chinese curators and had them test the app out. That led to a fun, interactive, user experience focussed feedback session, and a whole host of GitHub issues on the repository for bugs and design suggestions. Behind the scenes discussion on where to host the app and data are ongoing and not straightforward, but this has been a deeply easy product to prototype, and I’m optimistic it will provide a light weight, gentle learning curve complement to full deriving software like Aleph (the Library’s main cataloguing system).

Next Steps

The project currently uses a range of technologies in  Transkribus, the OCLC APIs, and Streamlit, and tying these together has in itself been a success. Going forwards, we have the possibility of extracting non-English text from the cards to look forward to, and the richer list of entities this would make available. Working with the OCLC APIs has been a learning curve, and they’re not working perfectly yet, but they represent a relatively accessible option compared to Z39.50. And my hope for the Streamlit app is that it will be a useful tool beyond the project for wherever someone wants to use Worldcat to help derive records from minimal information. We still have challenges in terms of design, data storage, and hosting to overcome, but these discussions should have their own benefits in making future development easier. The goal for automation part of the project is a smooth flow of data from Transkribus, through OCLC and on to the curators, and while it’s not perfect, we’re definitely getting there.

12 September 2023

Convert-a-Card: Past, Present and Future of Catalogue Cards Retroconversion

This blog post is by Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator for Asian and African Collections, British Library. She's on Mastodon as @[email protected].

 

It’s been more than eight years, in June 2015, since the British Library launched its crowdsourcing platform, LibCrowds, with the aim of enhancing access to our collections. The first project series on LibCrowds was called Convert-a-Card, followed by the ever-so-popular In the Spotlight project. The aim of Convert-a-Card was to convert print card catalogues from the Library’s Asian and African Collections into electronic records, for inclusion in our online catalogue Explore.

A significant portion of the Library's extensive historical collections was acquired well before the advent of standard computer-based cataloguing. Consequently, even though the Library's online catalogue offers public access to tens of millions of records, numerous crucial research materials remain discoverable solely through searching the traditional physical card catalogues. The physical cards provide essential information for each book, such as title, author, physical description (dimensions, number of pages, images, etc.), subject and a “shelfmark” – a reference to the item’s location. This information still constitutes the basic set of data to produce e-records in libraries and archives.

Card Catalogue Cabinets in the British Library’s Asian & African Studies Reading Room © Jon Ellis
Card Catalogue Cabinets in the British Library’s Asian & African Studies Reading Room © Jon Ellis

 

The initial focus of Convert-a-Card was the Library’s card catalogues for Chinese, Indonesian and Urdu books – you can read more about this here and here. Scanned catalogue cards were uploaded to Flickr (and later to our Research Repository), grouped by the physical drawer in which they were originally located. Several of these digitised drawers became projects on LibCrowds.

 

Crowdsourcing Retroconversion

Convert-a-Card on LibCrowds included two tasks:

  1. Task 1 – Search for a WorldCat record match: contributors were asked to look at a digitised card and search the OCLC WorldCat database based on some of the metadata elements printed on it (e.g. title, author, publication date), to see if a record for the book already exists in some form online. If found, they select the matching record.
  2. Task 2 – Transcribe the shelfmark: if a match was found, contributors then transcribed the Library's unique shelfmark as printed on the card.

Online volunteers worked on Pinyin (Chinese), Indonesian and Urdu records, mainly between 2015 and 2019. Their valuable contributions resulted in lists of new records which were then ingested into the Library's Explore catalogue – making these items so much more discoverable to our users. For cards only partially matched with online records, curators and cataloguers had a special area on the LibCrowds platform through which they could address some of the discrepancies in partial matches and resolve them.

An example of an Urdu catalogue card
An example of an Urdu catalogue card

 

After much consideration, we have decided to sunset LibCrowds. However, you can see a good snapshot of it thanks to the UK Web Archive (with thanks to Mia Ridge and Filipe Bento for archiving it), or access its GitHub pages – originally set up and maintained by LibCrowds creator Alex Mendes. We have been using mainly Zooniverse for crowdsourcing projects (see for example Living with Machines projects), and you can see here some references to these and other crowdsourcing initiatives. Sunsetting LibCrowds provided us with the opportunity to rethink Convert-a-Card and consider alternative, innovative ways to automate or semi-automate the retroconversion of these valuable catalogue cards.

 

Text Recognition

As a first step, we were looking to automate the retrieval of text from the digitised cards using OCR/Machine Learning. As mentioned, this text includes shelfmark, title, author, place and date of publication, and other information. If extracted accurately enough, this text could be used for WorldCat lookup, as well as for enhancement of existing records. In most cases, the text was typewritten in English, often with additional information, or translation, handwritten in other languages. To start with, we’ve decided to focus only on the typewritten English – with the aspiration to address other scripts and languages in the future.

Last year, we ran some comparative testing with ABBYY FineReader Server (the software generally used for in-house OCR) and Transkribus, to see how accurately they perform this task. We trialled a set of cards with two different versions of ABBYY, and three different models for typewritten Latin scripts in Transkribus (Model IDs 29418, 36202, and 25849). Assessment was done by visually comparing the original text with the OCRed text, examining mainly the key areas of text which are important for this initiative, i.e. the shelfmark, author’s name and book title. For the purpose of automatically recognising the typewritten English on the catalogue cards, Transkribus Model 29418 performed better than the others – and more accurately than ABBYY’s recognition.

An example of a Pinyin card in Transkribus, showing segmentation and transcription
An example of a Pinyin card in Transkribus, showing segmentation and transcription

 

Using that as a base model, we incrementally trained a bespoke model to recognise the text on our Pinyin cards. We’ve also normalised the resulting text, for example removing spaces in the shelfmark, or excluding unnecessary bits of data. This model currently extracts the English text only, with a Character Error Rate (CER) of 1.8%. With more training data, we plan on extending this model to other types of catalogue cards – but for now we are testing this workflow with our Chinese cards.

 

Entities Extraction

Extracting meaningful entities from the OCRed text is our next step, and there are different ways to do that. One such method – if already using Transkribus for text extraction – is training and applying a bespoke P2PaLA layout analysis model. Such model could identify text regions, improve automated segmentation of the cards, and help retrieve specific regions for further tasks. Former colleague Giorgia Tolfo tested this with our Urdu cards, with good results. Trying to replicate this for our Chinese cards was not as successful – perhaps due to the fact that they are less consistent in structure.

Another possible method is by using regular expressions in a programming language. Research Software Engineer (RSE) Harry Lloyd created a Jupyter notebook with Python code to do just that: take the PAGE XML files produced by Transkribus, parse the XML, and extract the title, author and shelfmark from the text. This works exceptionally well, and in the future we’ll expand entity recognition and extraction to other types of data appearing on the cards. But for now, this information suffices to query OCLC WorldCat and see if a matching record exists.

One of the 26 drawers of Chinese (Pinyin) card catalogues © Jon Ellis
One of the 26 drawers of Chinese (Pinyin) card catalogues © Jon Ellis

 

Matching Cards to WorldCat Records

Entities extracted from the catalogue cards can now be used to search and retrieve potentially matching records from the OCLC WorldCat database. Pulling out WorldCat records matched with our card records would help us create new records to go into our cataloguing system Aleph, as well as enrich existing Aleph records with additional information. Previously done by volunteers, we aim to automate this process as much as possible.

Querying WorldCat was initially done using the z39.50 protocol – the same one originally used in LibCrowds. This is a client-server communications protocol designed to support the search and retrieval of information in a distributed network environment. With an excellent start by Victoria Morris and Giorgia Tolfo, who developed a prototype that uses PyZ3950 and PyMARC to query WorldCat, Harry built upon this, refined the code, and tested it successfully for data search and retrieval. Moving forward, we are likely to use the OCLC API for this – which should be a lot more straightforward!

 

Curator/Cataloguer Disambiguation

Getting potential matches from WorldCat is brilliant, but we would like to have an easy way for curators and cataloguers to make the final decision on the ideal match – which WorldCat record would be the best one as a basis to create a new catalogue record on our system. For this purpose, Harry is currently working on a web application based on Streamlit – an open source Python library that enables the building and sharing of web apps. Staff members will be able to use this app by viewing suggested matches, and selecting the most suitable ones.

I’ll leave it up to Harry to tell you about this work – so stay tuned for a follow-up blog post very soon!

 

14 March 2022

The Lotus Sutra Manuscripts Digitisation Project: the collaborative work between the Heritage Made Digital team and the International Dunhuang Project team

Digitisation has become one of the key tasks for the curatorial roles within the British Library. This is supported by two main pillars: the accessibility of the collection items to everybody around the world and the preservation of unique and sometimes, very fragile, items. Digitisation involves many different teams and workflow stages including retrieval, conservation, curatorial management, copyright assessment, imaging, workflow management, quality control, and the final publication to online platforms.

The Heritage Made Digital (HMD) team works across the Library to assist with digitisation projects. An excellent example of the collaborative nature of the relationship between the HMD and International Dunhuang Project (IDP) teams is the quality control (QC) of the Lotus Sutra Project’s digital files. It is crucial that images meet the quality standards of the digital process. As a Digitisation Officer in HMD, I am in charge of QC for the Lotus Sutra Manuscripts Digitisation Project, which is currently conserving and digitising nearly 800 Chinese Lotus Sutra manuscripts to make them freely available on the IDP website. The manuscripts were acquired by Sir Aurel Stein after they were discovered  in a hidden cave in Dunhuang, China in 1900. They are thought to have been sealed there at the beginning of the 11th century. They are now part of the Stein Collection at the British Library and, together with the international partners of the IDP, we are working to make them available digitally.

The majority of the Lotus Sutra manuscripts are scrolls and, after they have been treated by our dedicated Digitisation Conservators, our expert Senior Imaging Technician Isabelle does an outstanding job of imaging the fragile manuscripts. My job is then to prepare the images for publication online. This includes checking that they have the correct technical metadata such as image resolution and colour profile, are an accurate visual representation of the physical object and that the text can be clearly read and interpreted by researchers. After nearly 1000 years in a cave, it would be a shame to make the manuscripts accessible to the public for the first time only to be obscured by a blurry image or a wayward piece of fluff!

With the scrolls measuring up to 13 metres long, most are too long to be imaged in one go. They are instead shot in individual panels, which our Senior Imaging Technicians digitally “stitch” together to form one big image. This gives online viewers a sense of the physical scroll as a whole, in a way that would not be possible in real life for those scrolls that are more than two panels in length unless you have a really big table and a lot of specially trained people to help you roll it out. 

Photo showing the three individual panels of Or.8210S/1530R with breaks in between
Or.8210/S.1530: individual panels
Photo showing the three panels of Or.8210S/1530R as one continuous image
Or.8210/S.1530: stitched image

 

This post-processing can create issues, however. Sometimes an error in the stitching process can cause a scroll to appear warped or wonky. In the stitched image for Or.8210/S.6711, the ruled lines across the top of the scroll appeared wavy and misaligned. But when I compared this with the images of the individual panels, I could see that the lines on the scroll itself were straight and unbroken. It is important that the digital images faithfully represent the physical object as far as possible; we don’t want anyone thinking these flaws are in the physical item and writing a research paper about ‘Wonky lines on Buddhist Lotus Sutra scrolls in the British Library’. Therefore, I asked the Senior Imaging Technician to restitch the images together: no more wonky lines. However, we accept that the stitched images cannot be completely accurate digital surrogates, as they are created by the Imaging Technician to represent the item as it would be seen if it were to be unrolled fully.

 

Or.8210/S.6711: distortion from stitching. The ruled line across the top of the scroll is bowed and misaligned
Or.8210/S.6711: distortion from stitching. The ruled line across the top of the scroll is bowed and misaligned

 

Similarly, our Senior Imaging Technician applies ‘digital black’ to make the image background a uniform colour. This is to hide any dust or uneven background and ensure the object is clear. If this is accidentally overused, it can make it appear that a chunk has been cut out of the scroll. Luckily this is easy to spot and correct, since we retain the unedited TIFFs and RAW files to work from.

 

Or.8210/S.3661, panel 8: overuse of digital black when filling in tear in scroll. It appears to have a large black line down the centre of the image.
Or.8210/S.3661, panel 8: overuse of digital black when filling in tear in scroll

 

Sometimes the scrolls are wonky, or dirty or incomplete. They are hundreds of years old, and this is where it can become tricky to work out whether there is an issue with the images or the scroll itself. The stains, tears and dirt shown in the images below are part of the scrolls and their material history. They give clues to how the manuscripts were made, stored, and used. This is all of interest to researchers and we want to make sure to preserve and display these features in the digital versions. The best part of my job is finding interesting things like this. The fourth image below shows a fossilised insect covering the text of the scroll!

 

Black stains: Or.8210/S.2814, panel 9
Black stains: Or.8210/S.2814, panel 9
Torn and fragmentary panel: Or.8210/S.1669, panel 1
Torn and fragmentary panel: Or.8210/S.1669, panel 1
Insect droppings obscuring the text: Or.8210/S.2043, panel 1
Insect droppings obscuring the text: Or.8210/S.2043, panel 1
Fossilised insect covering text: Or.8210/S.6457, panel 5
Fossilised insect covering text: Or.8210/S.6457, panel 5

 

We want to minimise the handling of the scrolls as much as possible, so we will only reshoot an image if it is absolutely necessary. For example, I would ask a Senior Imaging Technician to reshoot an image if debris is covering the text and makes it unreadable - but only after inspecting the scroll to ensure it can be safely removed and is not stuck to the surface. However, if some debris such as a small piece of fluff, paper or hair, appears on the scroll’s surface but is not obscuring any text, then I would not ask for a reshoot. If it does not affect the readability of the text, or any potential future OCR (Optical Character Recognition) or handwriting analysis, it is not worth the risk of damage that could be caused by extra handling. 

Reshoot: Or.8210/S.6501: debris over text  /  No reshoot: Or.8210/S.4599: debris not covering text.
Reshoot: Or.8210/S.6501: debris over text  /  No reshoot: Or.8210/S.4599: debris not covering text.

 

These are a few examples of the things to which the HMD Digitisation Officers pay close attention during QC. Only through this careful process, can we ensure that the digital images accurately reflect the physicality of the scrolls and represent their original features. By developing a QC process that applies the best techniques and procedures, working to defined standards and guidelines, we succeed in making these incredible items accessible to the world.

Read more about Lotus Sutra Project here: IDP Blog

IDP website: IDP.BL.UK

And IDP twitter: @IDP_UK

Dr Francisco Perez-Garcia

Digitisation Officer, Heritage Made Digital: Asian and African Collections

Follow us @BL_MadeDigital

29 September 2021

Sailing Away To A Distant Land - Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs - final post

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, former Manager of British Library Labs or "BL Labs" for short

[estimated reading time of around 15 minutes]

This is is my last day working as manager of BL Labs, and also my final posting on the Digital Scholarship blog. I thought I would take this chance to reflect on my journey of almost 9 years in helping to set up, maintain and enabling BL Labs to become a permanent fixture at the British Library (BL).

BL Labs was the first digital Lab in a national library, anywhere in the world, that gets people to experiment with its cultural heritage digital collections and data. There are now several Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum Labs or 'GLAM Labs' for short around the world, with an active community which I helped build, from 2018.

I am really proud I was there from the beginning to implement the original proposal which was written by several colleagues, but especially Adam Farquhar, former head of Digital Scholarship at the British Library (BL). The project was at first generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation through four rounds of funding as well as support from the BL. In April 2021, the project became a permanently funded fixture, helped very much by my new manager Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education and Science.

The great news is that BL Labs is going to stay after I have left. The position of leading the Lab will soon be advertised. Hopefully, someone will get a chance to work with my helpful and supportive colleague Technical Lead of Labs, Dr Filipe Bento, bright, talented and very hard working Maja and other great colleagues in Digital Research and wider at the BL.

The beginnings, the BL and me!

I met Adam Farquhar and Aly Conteh (Former Head of Digital Research at the BL) in December 2012. They must have liked something about me because I started working on the project in January 2013, though I officially started in March 2013 to launch BL Labs.

I must admit, I had always felt a bit intimidated by the BL. My first visit was in the early 1980s before the St Pancras site was opened (in 1997) as a Psychology student. I remember coming up from Wolverhampton on the train to get a research paper about "Serotonin Pathways in Rats when sleeping" by Lidov, feeling nervous and excited at the same time. It felt like a place for 'really intelligent educated people' and for those who were one for the intellectual elites in society. It also felt for me a bit like it represented the British empire and its troubled history of colonialism, especially some of the collections which made me feel uncomfortable as to why they were there in the first place.

I remember thinking that the BL probably wasn't a place for some like me, a child of Indian Punjabi immigrants from humble beginnings who came to England in the 1960s. Actually, I felt like an imposter and not worthy of being there.

Nearly 9 years later, I can say I learned to respect and even cherish what was inside it, especially the incredible collections, though I also became more confident about expressing stronger views about the decolonisation of some of these.  I became very fond of some of the people who work or use it, there are some really good kind-hearted souls at the BL. However, I never completely lost that 'imposter and being an outsider' feeling.

What I remember at that time, going for my interview, was having this thought, what will happen if I got the position and 'What would be the one thing I would try and change?'. It came easily to me, namely that I would try and get more new people through the doors literally or virtually by connecting them to the BL's collections (especially the digital). New people like me, who may have never set foot, or had been motivated to step into the building before. This has been one of the most important reasons for me to get up in the morning and go to work at BL Labs.

So what have been my highlights? Let's have a very quick pass through!

BL Labs Launch and Advisory Board

I launched BL Labs in March 2013, one week after I had started. It was at the launch event organised by my wonderfully supportive and innovative colleague, Digital Curator Stella Wisdom. I distinctly remember in the afternoon session (which I did alone), I had to present my 'ideas' of how I might launch the first BL Labs competition where we would be trying to get pioneering researchers to work with the BL's digital collections.

God it was a tough crowd! They asked pretty difficult questions, questions I myself was asking too which I still didn't know the answer too either.

I remember Professors Tim Hitchcock (now at Sussex University and who eventually sat (and is still sitting) on the BL Labs Advisory Board) and Laurel Brake (now Professor Emerita of Literature and Print Culture, Birkbeck, University of London) being in the audience together with staff from the Royal Library of Netherlands, who 6 months later launched their own brilliant KB Lab. Subsequently, I became good colleagues with Lotte Wilms who led their Lab for many years and is now Head of Research support at Tilburg University.

My first gut feeling overall after the event was, this is going to be hard work. This feeling and reality remained a constant throughout my time at BL Labs.

In early May 2013, we launched the competition, which was a really quick and stressful turnaround as I had only officially started in mid March (one and a half months). I remember worrying as to whether anyone would even enter!  All the final entries were pretty much submitted a few minutes before the deadline. I remember being alone that evening on deadline day near to midnight waiting by my laptop, thinking what happens if no one enters, it's going to be disaster and I will lose my job. Luckily that didn't happen, in the end, we received 26 entries.

I am a firm believer that we can help make our own luck, but sometimes luck can be quite random! Perhaps BL Labs had a bit of both!

After that, I never really looked back! BL Labs developed its own kind of pattern and momentum each year:

  • hunting around the BL for digital collections to make into datasets and make available
  • helping to make more digital collections openly licensed
  • having hundreds of conversations with people interested in connecting with the BL's digital collections in the BL and outside
  • working with some people more intensively to carry out experiments
  • developing ideas further into prototype projects
  • telling the world of successes and failures in person, meetings, events and social media
  • launching a competition and awards in April or May
  • roadshows before and after with invitations to speak at events around the world
  • the summer working with competition winners
  • late October/November the international symposium showcased things from the year
  • working on special projects
  • repeat!

The winners were announced in July 2013, and then we worked with them on their entries showcasing them at our annual BL Labs Symposium in November, around 4 months later.

'Nothing interesting happens in the office' - Roadshows, Presentations, Workshops and Symposia!

One of the highlights of BL Labs was to go out to universities and other places to explain what the BL is and what BL Labs does.  This ended up with me pretty much seeing the world (North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and giving virtual talks in South America and Africa).

My greatest challenge in BL Labs was always to get people to truly and passionately 'connect' with the BL's digital collections and data in order to come up with cool ideas of what to actually do with them. What I learned from my very first trip was that telling people what you have is great, they definitely need to know what you have! However, once you do that, the hard work really begins as you often need to guide and inspire many of them, help and support them to use the collections creatively and meaningfully. It was also important to understand the back story of the digital collection and learn about the institutional culture of the BL if people also wanted to work with BL colleagues.  For me and the researchers involved, inspirational engagement with digital collections required a lot of intellectual effort and emotional intelligence. Often this means asking the uncomfortable questions about research such as 'Why are we doing this?', 'What is the benefit to society in doing this?', 'Who cares?', 'How can computation help?' and 'Why is it necessary to even use computation?'.

Making those connections between people and data does feel like magic when it really works. It's incredibly exciting, suddenly everyone has goose bumps and is energised. This feeling, I will take away with me, it's the essence of my work at BL Labs!

A full list of over 200 presentations, roadshows, events and 9 annual symposia can be found here.

Competitions, Awards and Projects

Another significant way BL Labs has tried to connect people with data has been through Competitions (tell us what you would like to do, and we will choose an idea and work collaboratively with you on it to make it a reality), Awards (show us what you have already done) and Projects (collaborative working).

At the last count, we have supported and / or highlighted over 450 projects in research, artistic, entrepreneurial, educational, community based, activist and public categories most through competitions, awards and project collaborations.

We also set up awards for British Library Staff which has been a wonderful way to highlight the fantastic work our staff do with digital collections and give them the recognition they deserve. I have noticed over the years that the number of staff who have been working on digital projects has increased significantly. Sometimes this was with the help of BL Labs but often because of the significant Digital Scholarship Training Programme, run by my Digital Curator colleagues in Digital Research for staff to understand that the BL isn't just about physical things but digital items too.

Browse through our project archive to get inspiration of the various projects BL Labs has been involved in or highlighted.

Putting the digital collections 'where the light is' - British Library platforms and others

When I started at BL Labs it was clear that we needed to make a fundamental decision about how we saw digital collections. Quite early on, we decided we should treat collections as data to harness the power of computational tools to work with each collection, especially for research purposes. Each collection should have a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI) so researchers can cite them in publications.  Any new datasets generated from them will also have DOIs, allowing us to understand the ecosystem through DOIs of what happens to data when you get it out there for people to use.

In 2014, https://data.bl.uk was born and today, all our 153 datasets (as of 29/09/2021) are available through the British Library's research repository.

However, BL Labs has not stopped there! We always believed that it's important to put our digital collections where others are likely to discover them (we can't assume that researchers will want to come to BL platforms), 'where the light is' so to speak.  We were very open and able to put them on other platforms such as Flickr and Wikimedia Commons, not forgetting that we still needed to do the hard work to connect data to people after they have discovered them, if they needed that support.

Our greatest success by far was placing 1 million largely undescribed images that were digitally snipped from 65,000 digitised public domain books from the 19th Century on Flickr Commons in 2013. The number of images on the platform have grown since then by another 50 to 60 thousand from collections elsewhere in the BL. There has been significant interaction from the public to generate crowdsourced tags to help to make it easier to find the specific images. The number of views we have had have reached over a staggering 2 billion over this time. There have also been an incredible array of projects which have used the images, from artistic use to using machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify them. It's my favourite collection, probably because there are no restrictions in using it.

Read the most popular blog post the BL has ever published by my former BL Labs colleague, the brilliant and inspirational Ben O'Steen, a million first steps and the 'Mechanical Curator' which describes how we told the world why and how we had put 1 million images online for anyone to use freely.

It is wonderful to know that George Oates, the founder of Flickr Commons and still a BL Labs Advisory Board member, has been involved in the creation of the Flickr Foundation which was announced a few days ago! Long live Flickr Commons! We loved it because it also offered a computational way to access the collections, critical for powerful and efficient computational experiments, through its Application Programming Interface (API).

More recently, we have experimented with browser based programming / computational environments - Jupyter Notebooks. We are huge fans of Tim Sherrat who was a pioneer and brilliant advocate of OPEN GLAM in using them, especially through his GLAM Workbench. He is a one person Lab in his own right, and it was an honour to recognise his monumental efforts by giving him the BL Labs Research Award 2020 last year. You can also explore the fantastic work of Gustavo Candela and colleagues on Jupyter Notebooks and the ones my colleageue Filipe Bento created.

Art Exhibitions, Creativity and Education

I am extremely proud to have been involved in enabling two major art exhibitions to happen at the BL, namely:

Crossroads of Curiosity by David Normal

Imaginary Cities by Michael Takeo Magruder

I loved working with artists, its my passion! They are so creative and often not restricted by academic thinking, see the work of Mario Klingemann for example! You can browse through our archives for various artistic projects that used the BL's digital collections, it's inspiring.

I was also involved in the first British Library Fashion Student Competition won by Alanna Hilton, held at the BL which used the BL's Flickr Commons collection as inspiration for the students to design new fashion ranges. It was organised by my colleague Maja Maricevic, the British Fashion Colleges Council and Teatum Jones who were great fun to work with. I am really pleased to say that Maja has gone on from strength to strength working with the fashion industry and continues to run the competition to this day.

We also had some interesting projects working with younger people, such as Vittoria's world of stories and the fantastic work of Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller at the Australian National University. This is something I am very much interested in exploring further in the future, especially around ideas of computational thinking and have been trying out a few things.

GLAM Labs community and Booksprint

I am really proud of helping to create the international GLAM Labs community with over 250 members, established in 2018 and still active today. I affectionately call them the GLAM Labbers, and I often ask people to explore their inner 'Labber' when I give presentations. What is a Labber? It's the experimental and playful part of us we all had as children and unfortunately many have lost when becoming an adult. It's the ability to be fearless, having the audacity and perhaps even naivety to try crazy things even if they are likely to fail! Unfortunately society values success more than it does failure. In my opinion, we need to recognise, respect and revere those that have the courage to try but failed. That courage to experiment should be honoured and embraced and should become the bedrock of our educational systems from the very outset.

Two years ago, many of us Labbers 'ate our own dog food' or 'practised what we preached' when me and 15 other colleagues came together for 5 days to produce a book through a booksprint, probably the most rewarding professional experience of my life. The book is about how to set up, maintain, sustain and even close a GLAM Lab and is called 'Open a GLAM Lab'. It is available as public domain content and I encourage you to read it.

Online drop-in goodbye - today!

I organised a 30 minute ‘online farewell drop-in’ on Wednesday 29 September 2021, 1330 BST (London), 1430 (Paris, Amsterdam), 2200 (Adelaide), 0830 (New York) on my very last day at the British Library. It was heart-warming that the session was 'maxed out' at one point with participants from all over the world. I honestly didn't expect over 100 colleagues to show up. I guess when you leave an organisation you get to find out who you actually made an impact on, who shows up, and who tells you, otherwise you may never know.

Those that know me well know that I would have much rather had a farewell do ‘in person’, over a pint and praying for the ‘chip god’ to deliver a huge portion of chips with salt/vinegar and tomato sauce’ magically and mysteriously to the table. The pub would have been Mc'Glynns (http://www.mcglynnsfreehouse.com/) near the British Library in London. I wonder who the chip god was?  I never found out ;)

The answer to who the chip god was is in text following this sentence on white on white text...you will be very shocked to know who it was!- s

Spoiler alert it was me after all, my alter ego

Farwell-bl-labs-290921Mahendra's online farewell to BL Labs, Wednesday 29 September, 1330 BST, 2021.
Left: Flowers and wine from the GLAM Labbers arrived in Tallinn, 20 mins before the meeting!
Right: Some of the participants of the online farewell

Leave a message of good will to see me off on my voyage!

It would be wonderful if you would like to leave me your good wishes, comments, memories, thoughts, scans of handwritten messages, pictures, photographs etc. on the following Google doc:

http://tiny.cc/mahendramahey

I will leave it open for a week or so after I have left. Reading positive sincere heartfelt messages from colleagues and collaborators over the years have already lifted my spirits. For me it provides evidence that you perhaps did actually make a difference to somone's life.  I will definitely be re-reading them during the cold dark Baltic nights in Tallinn.

I would love to hear from you and find out what you are doing, or if you prefer, you can email me, the details are at the end of this post.

BL Labs Sailor and Captain Signing Off!

It's been a blast and lots of fun! Of course there is a tinge of sadness in leaving! For me, it's also been intellectually and emotionally challenging as well as exhausting, with many ‘highs’ and a few ‘lows’ or choppy waters, some professional and others personal.

I have learned so much about myself and there are so many things I am really really proud of. There are other things of course I wish I had done better. Most of all, I learned to embrace failure, my best teacher!

I think I did meet my original wish of wanting to help to open up the BL to as many new people who perhaps would have never engaged in the Library before. That was either by using digital collections and data for cool projects and/or simply walking through the doors of the BL in London or Boston Spa and having a look around and being inspired to do something because of it.

I wish the person who takes over my position lots of success! My only piece of advice is if you care, you will be fine!

Anyhow, what a time this has been for us all on this planet? I have definitely struggled at times. I, like many others, have lost loved ones and thought deeply about life and it's true meaning. I have also managed to find the courage to know what’s important and act accordingly, even if that has been a bit terrifying and difficult at times. Leaving the BL for example was not an easy decision for me, and I wish perhaps things had turned out differently, but I know I am doing the right thing for me, my future and my loved ones. 

Though there have been a few dark times for me both professionally and personally, I hope you will be happy to know that I have also found peace and happiness too. I am in a really good place.

I would like to thank former alumni of BL Labs, Ben O'Steen - Technical Lead for BL Labs from 2013 to 2018, Hana Lewis (2016 - 2018) and Eleanor Cooper (2018-2019) both BL Labs Project Officers and many other people I worked through BL Labs and wider in the Library and outside it in my journey.

Where I am off to and what am I doing?

My professional plans are 'evolving', but one thing is certain, I will be moving country!

To Estonia to be precise!

I plan to live, settle down with my family and work there. I was never a fan of Brexit, and this way I get to stay a European.

I would like to finish with this final sweet video created by writer and filmaker Ling Low and her team in 2016, entitled 'Hey there Young Sailor' which they all made as volunteers for the Malaysian band, the 'Impatient Sisters'. It won the BL Labs Artistic Award in 2016. I had the pleasure and honour of meeting Ling over a lovely lunch in Kuala Lumpa, Malaysia, where I had also given a talk at the National Library about my work and looked for remanants of my grandfather who had settled there many years ago.

I wish all of you well, and if you are interested in keeping in touch with me, working with me or just saying hello, you can contact me via my personal email address: [email protected] or follow my progress on my personal website.

Happy journeys through this short life to all of you!

Mahendra Mahey, former BL Labs Manager / Captain / Sailor signing off!

24 June 2021

My placement: Using Transkribus to OCR Two Centuries of Indian Print

I began a work placement with the Two Centuries of Indian Print project from the British Library working with my supervisor (Digital Curator) Tom Derrick, to automatically transcribe the Library’s Bengali books digitised and catalogued as part of the project. The OCR application we use for transcription is Transkribus, a leading text recognition application for historical documents. We also use a Google Sheet to instantly update each book’s basic information and job status.

In the first two days, I accepted training in how to use the Transkribus application by a face-to-face (virtual) demonstration from my supervisor since I didn't know how to use OCR. He also provided a manual for me to refer to in my practice. There are three main steps to complete a book transcription: uploading books, running layout analysis, and running text detection. We upload books from the British Library’s IIIF image viewer to Transkribus. I needed to first confirm the name and digital system number of a book from our team’s shared Google Sheet so that I could find the digital content of this book within the BL online catalogue. I would record the number of pages the book has into the Google Sheet at the same time. Then I copied the URL of the IIIF manifest and import this book into the collection of our project in Transkribus. After that, I would run layout analysis in Transkribus. It usually takes several minutes to run, and the more pages there are the more time it will take. Perfect layout analysis is where there is one baseline for each line of text on a page.

Although Transkribus is trained on 100+ pages, it still makes mistakes due to multiple causes. Title or chapter headers whose font size differs significantly from other text sometimes would be missed; patterned dividers and borders in the title page will easily been incorrectly identified as text; sometimes the color of paper is too dark, making it difficult to recognize the text. In these cases, the user needs to manually revise the recognition result. After checking the quality of the text analysis, I could then run text recognition. The final step is to check the results of the text recognition and update the Google Sheet.

TranskribusAppplication

Above: A view of a book in the Transkribus application, showing the page images and transcription underneath

During the three weeks of the placement, I handled a total of twelve books. In addition to the regular progression patterns described earlier, I was fortunate to come across several books that required special handling and used them to learn how to handle various situations. For example, the image above shows the result of text recognition for a page of the first book I dealt with in Transkribus, Dhārāpāta: prathama bhāg. Pāṭhaśālastha śiśu digera śikshārtha/ Cintāmani Pāl. Every word in this book is very short and widely spaced, making it very difficult for Transkribus to identify the layout. Because the book is only 28 pages long, I manually labeled all the layouts.

In addition to my work, I have had the pleasure of interacting with many British Library curators and investigators who are engaged in digitization. I attended a regular meeting of our project and learnt the division of labor of the digital project members. Besides, my supervisor Tom contacted some colleagues who work related to the digitization of Chinese collections and provided me with the opportunity to meet them, which has benefited me a lot.

The Principal Investigator for our 2CIP project, Adi, who also has been involved with research and development of Chinese OCR/HTR at the British Library, shared with me the challenges of Chinese OCR/HTR and the progress of current research at the British Library.

Curator for the International Dunhuang Project, Melodie, and a project manager, Tan, presented the research content and outcomes of the project. This project has many partner institutions in different countries that have collections related to the Silk Road. It is a very meaningful digitization project and I admire the development of this project.

The lead Curator for the British Library’s Chinese collections, Sara, introduced different types of Chinese collections and some representative collections in the British Library to me. She also shared with me the objective problems they would encounter when digitizing collections.

Three weeks passed quickly and I gained a lot from my experience at the British Library. In addition to the specifics of how to use Transkribus for text recognition, I have learned about the achievements and problems faced in digitizing Chinese collections from a variety of perspectives.

This is a guest post by UCL Digital Humanities MSc student Xinran Gu.

15 March 2021

Competition to Proofread Bengali Books on Wikisource

Can you read and write in Bangla? Or should I say আপনি কি বাংলা পড়তে এবং লিখতে পারেন? If you were able to read that, congratulations, you are the perfect candidate!

You might be interested in a competition we have launched today asking for help to proofread text that has been automatically transcribed from our historical Bengali books. The competition, in partnership with the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group, and the Bengali Wikisource community, will run until 14th April and invites contributors to create perfect transcriptions of the books.  

More information is available on the Wikisource competition page, including how to get started and prizes on offer.

The books have been digitised through our Two Centuries of Indian Print project, with more than 25 uploaded to Wikisource, an online and free-content digital library where it is possible to view the digitised books and corresponding transcriptions side-by-side. We were inspired by a talk given by the National Library of Scotland who uploaded some of their collections to Wikisource, and thought it could be a useful platform to increase online access to the textual content in our books too.

 

2CIPBook_Wikisource

Above: A view of a Bengali book within the Wikisource platform showing digitised page [R] and transcription [L]

 

Luckily a lot of the transcription work has already been done through using Google’s Optical Character Recognition technology (OCR) to read the Bengali text. However, the results are not perfect, with words in the original books often misspelled in the OCR. That’s where we need human intervention to proofread the OCR and fix the mistakes.

We also want to export proofread transcriptions from Wikisource and make them available as a dataset that could prove interesting to researchers who want to mine thousands of pages of text.

The books we would like proofread cover a multitude of topics and include an adaptation of the Illiad, a book containing a collection of 19th century proverbs and sayings, and a work describing the Bratas fasting ceremonies observed by the Hindu women of what is now Bangladesh. So, if you are looking for a literary indulgence whilst at the same time helping to improve access for others to valuable historical material, this could be an ideal opportunity.

 

This post is by Digital Curator Tom Derrick (@TommyID83)

24 December 2020

BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020, Rewind, Reflections, Box-sets and Seasons Greetings

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

This action packed, detailed 'rewind' and festive bumper edition blog post about last week's largest ever BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020, contains some hidden seasonal gifts🎁(if you read very carefully) to bring you seasonal cheer. The post rounds off a difficult and challenging 2020 for the BL Labs team and I am sure for everyone else.

In the new year, we will release this post in a series of shorter parts, but for now you have the opportunity to read the whole account together.

BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020 - detailed report

MENU (Jump to different sections)

  1. About the BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020
  2. Rewind the BL Labs Symposium 2020
  3. Feedback on the Symposium
  4. Keynote by Ruth Ahnert
  5. End keynote by Anasuya Sengupta
  6. BL Labs update by Mahendra Mahey
  7. Digital Research Team update by Adi Keinan-Schoonbeart
  8. Research Services update by Rachael Kortarski
  9. BL Labs Public Awards 2020
  10. BL Labs People's Choice Public Award 2020
  11. BL Labs Staff Awards 2020
  12. BL Labs Box Sets
  13. Conclusion

The BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020 is an annual event and awards ceremony showcasing innovative projects that use, experiment with and have been inspired by the British Library's physical and digital collections and data through BL Labs and / or through collaborations with other people in and outside the Library.

The Labs symposium provides a platform for highlighting and engaging with the British Library’s and other  GalleriesLibrariesArchives and Museums or (GLAMs) through their Labs or similar facilities that enable, support and encourage access and experimentation with their digital collections and data for research, inspiration and enjoyment.

For those GLAMs and / or organisations that don't have similar digital Labs, would like one, support the concept of experimentation with their digital collections generally, or even for those that haven't engaged with GLAM Labs before, why not join our GLAM Labs mailing list or slack channel 🎁 to start a conversation with us. 

You can also download our 🎁 book 'Open a GLAM Lab' to read over this festive period to inspire you to start on your own personal journey into the world of GLAM Labs.

The BL Labs Awards this year recognised outstanding use of British Library's digital content in the categories of Research, Artistic, Educational, Community and British Library staff contributions. Through the BL Labs Public Awards 2020, we made a special request for project submissions about or developed during this century-defining COVID-19 pandemic and / or a request for work that focused on some of the current BL Labs priorities, namely anti-racism (especially in the context for racial equality globally) and the use of Jupyter Notebooks for computational research with data.

Our eighth annual symposium took place for the first time entirely online via the 'Zoom Webinar' platform and was broadcast live and simultaneously on YouTube between 1400-1700 GMT on Tuesday 15 December 2020. We have also had a suggestion from Sarah Cole to try out an alternative platform called 'Hopin'🎁, which we will definitely be looking at (Sarah was a previous BL Labs Awards Commercial Award runner-up with Poetic Places🎁and had two other submissions one for the Awards  - 'Badigical Kingdom: Repurposing Public Domain Images to Make Badges🎁and an idea submitted for the BL Labs competition called 'The Maniacal Curator: A Tabletop Game using the British Library Flickr Collection'🎁).

We had over 350 unique attendees who participated live in the Labs symposium. People came from all over the world, ranging from Europe, the USA and Australia and from different academic fields and professional sectors.  The total number of viewers who have now watched the symposium is steadily rising largely because of those who are watching it after the live broadcast, we really hope the event will reach a wider global audience over time. I feel the way we consume events such as the symposium as well as other types of 'conferences' will be more online and be the new 'normal' in the future. It's clear that what is currently happening to the events' industry happened to terrestrial broadcast TV a number of years ago, in that it has now largely  a mostly on-demand service. Having over 350 viewers for a live online broadcast may seem like a modest number, however for us, this was actually the most number of live attendees we have ever had for our symposium and an opportunity for many to attend who were never able to attend previously because of time zone clashes and not being able to be physically present in London. We were especially pleased with this number, considering that there were a host of other similar online events going on at exactly the same time. So in case you missed it, you can still watch it for the first time (see details below as to how) or watch it again in case you missed something specific.

Going completely online for our symposium this year was a new 'experiment' for us in the BL Labs team.  We really wanted to ensure that the online version should still try to capture the spirit of the awards symposium, i.e. keep the audience engaged right through to the end, inject some fun, make it a true celebration and enable people to connect with each other. We learned a lot from the experience, we knew that there would inevitably be some teething problems however we are pretty pleased with how things went and what we were able to achieve given the time and resources we had available.

Embracing and learning from our mistakes is something we constantly do in a 'Labs' context, fail fast and better. It's part of my own guiding professional principles and something I constantly say when I speak to people who want to engage with BL Labs, especially when we work on experimental projects. A superb example which exemplifies and illustrates this philosophy is in a book by Shawn Graham, in Failing Gloriously and other Essays 🎁in which he documents his personal, entertaining, humorous, insightful and honest journey through digital humanities and digital archaeology against the backdrop of the 21st-century university.

Dan van Strien's Tweet about the BL Labs Symposium 2020
Dan van Strien's tweet about the 'build up' video before the BL Labs Symposium 2020 started, describing a 'clubbing' vibe' with music and graphics.
My colleague Filipe Bento (Technical Lead for BL Labs) was responsible for this as well as other snazzy videos during transitions between breaks and presenters. We hope they injected a bit of fun and a taste and spirit of an MTV style awards show into the event.

The online version of the symposium has sparked some great ideas for me personally in how to run events like this and we hope to implement some new innovations and experiments in the future.

Did you miss attending the BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020 or want to watch a part or the whole thing again?

You can view the recorded live footage of the Symposium below via YouTube below:


🎁Recording of the YouTube live-stream of the 8th BL Labs Symposium, 15 December 2020, conducted on Zoom Webinar.

If you prefer, you may want to 'skip' to key moments in the programme detailed in the list of links below:

14:00 - 14:05  Welcome and introduction (skip to this section)
Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education and Science, British Library

14:05 - 14:45 Humanists Living with Machines: reflections on collaboration and computational history during a global pandemic (skip to this section)
Ruth Ahnert, Professor of Literary History and Digital Humanities at Queen Mary University of London  and Principal Investigator on 'Living With Machines' at The Alan Turing Institute.

14:45- 14:55  BL Labs update (skip to to this section)
Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs, British Library

15:10 - 15:15 Research Award (skip to this section) 
Naomi Billingsley, Research Development Manager, British Library

15:15 - 15:25  Digital Scholarship projects update (skip to this section) 
Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator, Asian and African Collections, the British Library.

15:25 – 15:30  The Artistic Award (skip to this section)
Jamie Andrews, Head of Culture and Learning, British Library

15:30 - 15:40  Research Services update (skip to this section)
Rachael Kotarski, Head of Research Infrastructure Services, British Library

15:40 - 15:45  The Teaching & Learning Award (skip to this section)
Ria Bartlett, Lead Producer: Onsite Learning at the British Library
(Please note that some of the videos shown in this section had poor audio and can be seen and heard again in our BL Labs Public Awards 2020 YouTube Playlist)

16:10 – 16:15  The Community Award (skip to this section)
Liz White, Head of Public Libraries and Community Engagement

16:15 - 16:25  The British Library Staff Award (skip to this section)
Jas Rai, Head of People, British Library
(Please note that some of the videos shown in this section had no audio and can be seen and heard again in our BL Labs Staff Awards YouTube playlist 2020.)

16:25 – 17:05  How to Decolonise the British Library in 3 (Un)Easy Step (skip to this section)
Anasuya Sengupta, Co-Director, Whose Knowledge?

17:05 – 17:15  'People's Favourite BL Labs Award' the RESULT and closing comments (skip to this section)
Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs, British Library

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Feedback on Symposium (during and after)

We have received some really positive comments about the event from live participants who rated it with an average of 8.9 out of 10 in terms of overall satisfaction by completing an event feedback survey at the time the event was live.

Comments included:

  • 'It was excellent, especially the opening and closing talks'
  • 'Getting a 'save the date' a bit earlier as there was a clash between many similar events online'
  • 'Having an event half way through the year would be great to give an update on BL Labs and other Digital Research projects as there are so many of them!!'

There were several other useful constructive comments which we are definitely going to think about and consider taking on board for future events and activities.

Calls to action

Participants on the day also logged 'calls to action' i.e. things they were going to do as a result of the event or things they wanted to encourage others to do:

  • 'Everyone must all watch the recordings and listen to the papers!'
  • 'Everyone who has done something relevant should enter the Awards, even if they're not sure that their work fits'
  • 'The event seemed quite academic, but it shed a light on how the digital archives are being used even if not all the terms are understood by the layman'
  • 'Several of the speakers highlighted extremely important topics that necessitate further engagement and research'
  • 'Machine learning based labelling and annotation and novel visualisation techniques to explore archives is something I am going to look into'
  • 'My personal research interest is identity (ethnic, cultural, religious, language, etc.) and how it is expressed both in literature and culture more generally by immigrants from other countries and cultures. I now have ideas of digital ways to pursue this within the BL collections as opposed to simply printed books'
  • 'Separate to the learning award, could there be a schools award? I'm thinking that maybe BL Labs could set a task and invite any school to take part'
  • The work on decolonaziation should be continued
  • 'Oral history archives - accessing transcripts, sound recordings and contextual information from a range of collections that could illuminate my current research based on published books of fiction and non-fiction in English'

Format for next year's event?

Interestingly, there was an overwhelming plea from participants that next year's event should be 'hybrid', online with an option to attend physically if possible. We will try our best (vaccines permitting) to consider this!

Feedback on watching as a pre-recorded event

If you do end up watching the recorded footage, it would really be incredibly helpful for us to receive your feedback about what you liked and what could be improved. This is in order to help us to continue justifying investing so much time and resources in organising such events. Please let us know what you thought about it, through our feedback page 🎁(your gift to us) or on social media / twitter using the @BL_Labs handle.

Behind the scenes team

The team 'behind the scenes' were:

8th BL Labs Symposium Organising Team8th BL Labs Symposium Organising Team
Top (Left to right) - Mahendra Mahey (BL Labs Manager), Filipe Bento (BL Labs Technical Lead), Robin Saklatvala (Event Manager)
Bottom (left to right) - Maja Maricevic (Head of Higher Education and Science), Ruth Hansford (Endangered Archives Programme Grants Portfolio Manager), Dan van Strien (Digital Curator with Living with Machines), Rossitza Atassanova (Digital Curator, Digitisation)
 
Mahendra Mahey, BL Labs Manager behind the screen
Mahendra Mahey, BL Labs Manager 'behind' the screen during the BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020

I would like to thank them all, especially Filipe and Robin who with me, did the heavy lifting.

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Welcome address from Maja Marcievic

Maja Maricevic, is the Head of Higher Education and Sciences at the British Library and manages me. She welcomed everyone who was attending the symposium and was 'master of ceremonies' for the first block of talks detailing some essential housekeeping duties. She then gave a summary of the direction that BL Labs will be moving into the future and detailed how the BL Labs team have been supporting and shining a light on research, artistic, educational as well as showcasing the incredibly important work which focuses on community activism over the year. Finally, she formally introduced the keynote speaker.

Keynote: Humanists Living with Machines: reflections on collaboration and computational history during a global pandemic

This year's keynote was delivered by Ruth Ahnert, Professor of Literary History and Digital Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on 'Living With Machines' project at The Alan Turing Institute.

Ruth spoke passionately and very engagingly about her impressive journey and rise as a literary historian. Ruth's academic work has increasingly involved using computational approaches. She highlighted some of the latest results from the Living With Machines project and included descriptions of some poignant and personal reflections on how the Digital Humanities community have been effected by recent developments such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and the push provided by the Black Lives Matter movement for memory organisations to provide greater transparency to their collections. Many of the attendees responded enthusiastically to Ruth's talk and there was a lot of buzz on social media about it. She was even able to answer 5 questions from the audience at the end of her talk.

We are also very excited to announce that Ruth has joined the BL Labs Advisory board and was part of this year's judging panel for our Public Awards 2020. We are delighted that her energy, warmth, humanity and enthusiasm will be helping shape the future of BL Labs moving forward.

You can download her full set of slides as a PDF from here 🎁.

You can follow Ruth on Twitter.

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End Keynote: How to Decolonise the British Library in 3 (Un)Easy Steps

Anasuya Sengupta, Co-Director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge? explored the notions of epistemic injustice and how different structures of power and privilege impact the ways we understand (digital) knowledge and scholarship. In particular, she offered some practices of decolonisation that might move us from metaphor to the ongoing (and never complete) transformation of our organisations and ourselves. Her talk was extremely well received by the audience with very positive comments and feedback such as 'Incredible presentation from Anasuya'. Thank you Anasuya for delivering a very powerful talk.

For me personally, Anasuya's presentation resonated deeply and emotionally. As someone who has a lived experience of racism, prejudice and castetism (as I am of Indian decent) I am very aware of the British Library's / Museum's colonial past and conversely I also try to be aware of my privilege and my awareness that changing things for the better starts with our own individual actions, no matter how small they may be. Her talk reminded me of my own efforts and motivations in trying to address some of these issues when I came to help set up the Lab nearly eight years ago. I saw that BL Labs could help facilitate opening up the Library's collections through digital experimentation. Subsequently, I have wanted it to connect with a new set of diverse audiences that previously would have never even known about the British Library, let alone engage with it. I really want to help people to create new, open, honest transparent narratives and initiate new dialogues about history and tell new inspirational 'time-travel' stories by remixing the past with the present and projecting into an imagined future. This was and still is one of my main motivations to get up in the morning and to continue to manage and lead BL Labs.

One of Anasuya's final slides brilliantly sums up what is needed:

Anasuya Sengupta's call to action
Anasuya Sengupta's call to action

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the British Library's BAME (Black and Minority Ethnic) staff group for all their hard work in especially addressing anti-racism at the British Library over many years, which I know can be exhausting and emotionally draining and is often not always visible. I would like to raise awareness that our new head of diversity, appointed in August 2019, Hugh Brown has been looking at implementing actions to combat anti-racism within the Library, largely articulated in a press release this summer about the Library's commitment in becoming an anti-racist organisation.

You can download her full set slides as a PDF from here 🎁.

You can also follow Anasuya on Twitter.

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Updates from BL Labs', Digital Research's and Research Services' Teams at the British Library Library

BL Labs

I gave an update on behalf of the BL Labs Team about our activities and I looked forward to new projects and developments some of which are already underway. There was a call to action for people to seek their inner 'Labber', to experiment, create magic, tell fantastic engaging, moving and meaningful stories and conduct valuable and impactful research with the British Library's and other GLAMs' digital collections and data.

Francis Owtram Tweet
Francis Owtram's Tweet

I gave an overview of some details with statistics of work we have done up to now.  There was a personal reflection of my own struggles through this ongoing pandemic period. One BL Labs project that is close to completion is to provide computational access via browser based Jupyter Notebooks for British Library registered readers for some onsite-only available digital collections and data. Another BL Labs project is about building on and getting more of our data used in Higher Education and in the Sciences, especially Data Science, hopefully you will hear more about this in the new year.

You can download my full set slides as a PDF from here🎁.

You can follow me (Mahendra) on Twitter, the @BL_Labs twitter channel which is getting near to 9,000 followers and @GLAM_labs which represents the global GLAM Labs community. All of which I am proud to say I helped set up and run with colleagues.

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Digital Research Team

Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator, Asian and African Collections, at the British Library, presented some highlights of the incredible range of innovative projects and work being done by her and our colleagues in the Digital Research team at the British Library over the last year, such as:

You can download the full set slides as a PDF from here🎁.

You can also follow Adi on Twitter and members of her team, Rossitza Atassanova, Mia Ridge, Tom Derrick, Stella Wisdom, Nora McGregor, Deirdre Sullivan , Dan van Strien, Olivia Vane, Giorgia Tolfo, Claire Austin, some of whom are managed by Neil Fitzgerald.

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Research Services Update

Rachael Kotarski, Head of Research Infrastructure Services at the British Library, gave some highlights of current projects and services in the Research Services team. Their role is to improve the services the Library offers to researchers and research organisations - onsite and online, BL Labs has been collaborating with them for many years. A particular focus of her team is to make it easier to find and use items from our collections and relevant content globally such as license, acquire and process content, understand our users, what is our content strategy, digital preservation and tools and infrastructure. Highlights from Rachael's presentation include:

You can download the full set slides as a PDF from here 🎁.

You can follow Rachael on Twitter.

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BL Labs Public Awards 2020

The BL Labs Public Awards 2020 winners in Research, Artistic, Educational and Community categories were decided by BL Labs, the BL Labs Advisory Board and some of the British Library's Digital Research team:

From the BL Labs Advisory Board it included:

  • David De Roure, Professor of e-research, Oxford e-research Centre, University of Oxford and Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute
  • Tim Hitchcock, Professor of Digital History, University of Sussex
  • Bill Thompson, Principal Research Engineer, BBC
  • Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh‘s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
  • Ruth Ahnert, Professor of Literary History and Digital Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on 'Living With Machines' at The Alan Turing Institute (joined in December 2020)
  • Kelly Foster, open knowledge advocate and public historian, London Blue Badge Guide, chapter lead for Creative Commons UK and founding organiser of AfroCROWD UK, an initiative to encourage more people of African heritage to contribute to Wikipedia and it’s sister projects and founding member of TRANSMISSION, a collective of archivists and historians of African descent (joined in December 2020)

Unfortunately, Andrew Prescott, Professor of Digital Humanities (English Language), University of Glasgow was unable to participate due to a clash with a PhD viva. However, he was able to participate on the day as a delegate at the symposium.

On a sad note, our colleague George Oates, Director of Good, Form & Spectacle Ltd has had to step down from the BL Labs Advisory Board after 4 years of excellent service for personal reasons, so we would like to wish George and thank her for all her help over the years.

From the British Library, the judging panel was made up of:

We had a wide range of fantastic and diverse range of entries from around the world this year, all of which can be downloaded as a .zip file. If you are curious about previous years Awards entries, you can also download all our Award entries since its inception🎁. We also strongly recommend you browse the huge BL Labs Digital Projects Archive 🎁where information about this year's entries together with over 300 projects and many BL Labs collaborations, competitions and projects over the nearly last 8 years BL Labs has been involved in or showcased can found. We keep this archive as a historic record to provide evidence of the impact of BL Labs and what it does as well as other initiatives in the Library. The archive could also provide inspiration and insights for you if you are contemplating starting your own projects or collaborations using the Library's and other GLAMs' digital collections and data.

Brief information about which entries were shortlisted this year (2020) can be viewed in just five minutes via a YouTube play list of 10 shortlisted entries for the Public Awards 2020:

BL Labs Public Awards 2020 - Playlist
BL Labs Public Awards 2020 - YouTube playlist of ten 30-second videos

So now onto the BL Labs Awards for 2020 by category.

Research Award

The BL Labs Research Award recognises a project or activity which demonstrates the development of new knowledge, research methods, or tools using the Library’s digital collections or data.

The winners were announced by my colleague Naomi Billingsley, Research Development Manager, at the British Library, her slide deck is available to download here 🎁.

Shortlisted

  • Afrobits
    An interactive installation of African music and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade .

    By Javier Pereda (Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design and Illustration and Researcher in the Experimental Technologies Lab, Liverpool John Moores University), Patricia Murrieta Flores (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Hub at Lancaster University), Nicholas Radburn (Lecturer in the History of the Atlantic World 1500 – 1800, Co-Editor of the Slave Voyages Research Project, Lancaster University), Lois South (History Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University) and Christian Monaghan, Graphic Design and Illustration Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University.


    Links: Short videolonger videofull BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Runner-up

  • Unlocking our Sound Heritage - Artist in Residence 2019-2020: The Unearthed Odyssey
    Research project culminating in two performances, a genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album using 19 samples from the Sound Archive, three comprehensive blogs and work with three youth groups to unpack the themes and content.

    By AWATE (Awate Suleiman - rapper and multimedia artist, England)


    Links: Short videofull BL Labs awards' entry and further details

Panel comments

The judging panel we were simply 'blown away' by Awate's work.

Winner

  • Asking questions with web archives – introductory notebooks for historians
    16 Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate how specific historical research questions can be explored by analysing data from web archives.

    By Tim Sherratt (Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra and founder and creator of the GLAM workbench), Andrew Jackson (Technical Lead - UK Web Archive, British Library), Alex Osborne (Technical Lead Australian Web Archive - National Library of Australia),  Ben O’Brien (Technical Lead New Zealand Web Archive - National Library of New Zealand) and Olga Holownia (International Internet Preservation Coalition (IIPC) Programmes & Communications Officer)

    Links: Short videofull BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Panel comments

Congratulations Tim Sherratt, Andrew Jackson; Alex Osborne, Ben O’Brien and Olga Holownia. The panel were impressed with the quality of documentation and thought that went into how to work computationally through Jupyter Notebooks with web archives, which are challenging to work with because of their. These tools are some of the first of their kind for Web Archives.

The BL Labs advisory board wanted to acknowledge and reward the incredible work of Tim Sherratt in particular.

"Tim, you have been a pioneer as ‘a one person Lab’ over many years, and these 16 notebooks are a fine addition to your already extensive suite in your GLAM work-bench. Your work has inspired so many in GLAMs, the Humanities community and BL Labs to develop their own notebooks".

We strongly recommend that you look at the GLAM work-bench if you are interested in doing computational experiments with many institutions’ data sources, we genuinely think Tim's work has been at the forefront of computational hacking work in GLAMs.

Artistic Award

This Award recognises an artistic or creative endeavour that has used the Library’s digital content to inspire, amaze and provoke. This year's Awards were announced for the fourth time by Jamie Andrews, Head of Culture and Learning, British Library, his slide deck is available here🎁.

Special commendation

  • Afrobits
    An interactive installation of African music and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade .

    By Javier Pereda (Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design and Illustration and Researcher in the Experimental Technologies Lab, Liverpool John Moores University), Patricia Murrieta Flores (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Hub at Lancaster University), Nicholas Radburn (Lecturer in the History of the Atlantic World 1500 – 1800, Co-Editor of the Slave Voyages Research Project, Lancaster University), Lois South (History Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University) and Christian Monaghan, Graphic Design and Illustration Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University.


    Links: Short videolonger videofull BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Panel comments

This is an interactive installation of influence of African music on culture and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. It's a piece that is absolutely vital for our times.

Panel comments

Rosyln's work is a celebration of black heritage through black afro hair developed in the context of doing something positive given negative images of police brutality against black people around the world. She used images of Bantu, Balondo and Akan men and women from British Library’s Flickr Commons collection, using them to make patterns for fabrics and wallpapers, t-shirts and mugs and intend to use the fabrics to make other products. The panel loved how Rosyln created some positive out of the tremendous negativity that has been directed towards black people around the world. The team liked the designs, they were vibrant, fresh and cool.

Runner-up

Panel comments

This entry was very well received by everyone. The panel felt Faint Signals was wonderfully inventive use of the environmental sounds collection, clever imaginative use of Unity 3D technology, perfect impact over the COVID period. It's a piece that draws you in, that is relaxing and rather beguiling and certainly in these challenging times when travelling is impossible, and perhaps travelling into nature is difficult, this gives you a sense of the glories and the vastness of the sounds of nature.

Winner

  • Unlocking our Sound Heritage - Artist in Residence 2019-2020: The Unearthed Odyssey
    Research project culminating in two performances, a genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album using 19 samples from the Sound Archive, three comprehensive blogs and work with three youth groups to unpack the themes and content.

    By AWATE (Awate Suleiman - rapper and multimedia artist, England)


    Links: Short videofull BL Labs awards' entry and further details

Panel comments

The panel were incredibly moved by the performance of Awate. They were impressed by the quality of story telling and research needed to stitch together such powerful archive footage such as Grace Nichols’ poem ‘I have crossed an ocean’ (see below):

A reading's of Grace's work is available to listen to onsite at the British Library, together with other recordings of extraordinary people.

Congratulations to Awate, for creating this captivating performance, and I think, gave all of us who experienced it, goose bumps! We strongly urge you to please listen to his work, it’s very moving and inspiring.

Learning and Teaching (Educational) Award

This Award celebrates quality learning experiences created for learners of any age and ability that use the Library's digital content. This year's awards were announced for the third time by Ria Bartlett, Lead Producer: Onsite Learning at the British Library, her slide deck is available here.

Special Commendation

Panel comments

The panel were particularly impressed by the quality of the tool produced by a student in their own time and his generosity and kindness to share the tool for the benefit of all. Also, this is the first time an Endangered Archives Programme's (EAP) digitised collections have been recognised with a BL Labs award. We hope many more projects will be submitted in the future that use EAP’s incredible range of digital collections.

  • Unlocking our Sound Heritage - Artist in Residence 2019-2020: The Unearthed Odyssey
    Research project culminating in two performances, a genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album using 19 samples from the Sound Archive, three comprehensive blogs and work with three youth groups to unpack the themes and content.

    by AWATE (Awate Suleiman - rapper and multimedia artist, England)


    Links: Short videofull BL Labs awards' entry and further details

Panel comments

We were particularly impressed how Awate worked with young people to unpack his journey of research in the British Library to make his piece, teaching at The Roundhouse in Camden and Fairbeats in Lewisham and recording voices from children from London to be included in some of his pieces, which was a geat honour for them. We particularly liked the narrative you created. The story takes place on a generation ship, during the one day a year a group of children are awake for a lesson taught to them by an artificial intelligence tutor. The tutor uses an algorithm to sample from the British Library archive from the years 1896-2019 in order to tell them stories of human migration using clips from Oral History recordings. As they are travelling to a different planet, the AI places them in the greater context of migration, exploring themes such as war, corruption, famine and drought.

Well done Awate! We urge you all to listen to his ‘The Unearthed Odyssey’ performance, it’s brilliant.

Runner-up

  • Inspiring computationally-driven research with the BL’s collections: a GLAM Notebooks approach
    Enabling cultural heritage institutions and (digital) humanities researchers to experiment with Collections as Data and GLAM notebooks by showcasing practical implementations from a wide range of GLAM institutions and digital collections. 

    By Gustavo CandelaPilar EscobarMaría Dolores Sáez and Manuel Marco-Such  from the Research Libraries Team, Department of Software and Computing Systems, the University of Alicante, Spain

    Links: Short videofull BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Panel comments

We were impressed that the notebooks the team have developed are being used in the team's own teaching on university courses. We also liked how the team have very generously created Jupyter Notebooks for other GLAMs' data, where many do not have the capacity to do so. That’s 15 notebooks for 12 GLAMs.

Winner

  • Beyond the Rubric: Collaborating with the Cultural Heritage Sector in Higher Education Teaching and Research
    A project-based, research-led collaboration between the British Library and students of the Centre for Digital Humanities Research at the Australian National University.

    By Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia)


    Links: Short videofull BL Labs awards' entry and further details

Panel comments

Well done Terhi and especially her students who produced such outstanding work in only 12 weeks through their group projects. The panel felt this was an exemplary use of the British Library’s digital collections and data in a Digital Scholarship context and an excellent template for further collaboration with BL Labs and other GLAM Labs working with educational institutions especially in area of Digital Humanities. We were particularly impressed with Terhi’s grading criteria that recognised ambition in projects and Terhi’s decision to have interdisciplinary, gender-balanced, multi-lingual project groups.

Community

This Award celebrates an activity / work / project that has been created by an individual or group in a community inspired by or using our digital collections and data. This year's awards were announced for first time by Liz White, Head of Public Libraries and Community Engagement, her slide deck is available here.

Special Commendation

  • Inspiring computationally-driven research with the BL’s collections: a GLAM Notebooks approach
    Enabling cultural heritage institutions and (digital) humanities researchers to experiment with Collections as Data and GLAM notebooks by showcasing practical implementations from a wide range of GLAM institutions and digital collections. 

    By Gustavo CandelaPilar EscobarMaría Dolores Sáez and Manuel Marco-Such  from the Research Libraries Team, Department of Software and Computing Systems, the University of Alicante, Spain

    Links: Short videofull BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Panel comments

This entry was in fact the most nominated across 3 of the 4 BL Labs public Awards categories. The panel particularly loved the generosity of the group in developing computational access to 12 Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum’s (GLAMs) data through 15 Jupyter Notebooks, including the British Library. Many of these institutions do not have the capacity or expertise to do this, so this was some really kind and fantastic work moving these organisations forward computationally. A great contribution to the GLAM Labs community, initiated of course by Mahendra at BL Labs. Find out more about GLAM Labs at glamlabs.io.

Special Commendation

  • Unlocking our Sound Heritage - Artist in Residence 2019-2020: The Unearthed Odyssey
    Research project culminating in two performances, a genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album using 19 samples from the Sound Archive, three comprehensive blogs and work with three youth groups to unpack the themes and content.

    By AWATE (Awate Suleiman - rapper and multimedia artist, England)


    Links: Short videofull BL Labs awards' entry and further details

Panel comments

We were particularly impressed how Awate worked with British Library staff before and during lockdown, with school children from South London to unpack his journey of research in the British Library to make his piece. He also taught at the Roundhouse in Camden and Fairbeats in Lewisham and recorded voices from local children to be included in some of his pieces, a great honour for them.  Well done Awate, great work!

Winner

  • Flickr Georeferencing completed by volunteers
    Volunteer georeferencers have added coordinates to all the images of over 50,000 maps from the British Library's Flickr Commons site.

    By 'Volunteer geo-referencers' nominated by Gethen Rees, Digital Mapping Curator, British Library


    Links: Short videoFull BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Panel comments

Volunteer Geo-referencers with over 50,00 Maps geo-referenced was nominated on behalf of the volunteers by Gethen Rees, Digital Mapping Curator. It took them nearly 6 years to geo-reference over 50,000 maps, incredible and epic work that deserves a tremendous amount of recognition. Previously James Heald (2105) and Maurice Nicholson (2016)  from the volunteer mapping community have been recognised for their excellent work.

BL Labs will be donating the prize money to a Humanitarian Mapping charity.

  • In the Spotlight volunteers
    Since 2017, thousands of volunteers have helped bring the British Library's historic playbills collection to life through the In the Spotlight crowdsourcing project.

    By 'In the Spotlight volunteers' nominated by Mia Ridge, Digital Curator, Western Heritage Collections, British Library


    Links: Short videofull BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Panel comments

In the Spotlight volunteers was nominated by Mia Ridge, digital curator at the British Library on behalf of thousands of volunteers adding information to digitised historic playbills of plays and performances, with nearly a quarter of a million tasks”.

BL Labs will be donating the prize money to a charity that supports out-of-work actors who have especially been effected by the pandemic.

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BL Labs People's Choice Public Award 2020

Between 1100 (GMT) Monday 14 December 2020 to 1615 ( GMT) Tuesday 15 December 2020 an international public vote took place using Menti to decide on the overall favourite entry of all the shortlisted entrants to the BL Labs Public Awards 2020.

The results were as follows:

BL Labs People's Favourite Public Award 2020
BL Labs People's Favourite Public Award 2020 Results of Public Vote (1230 votes cast) Numbers on image correspond to the those in the table below:
Number Name of entry

Number of Public Votes

Ranking
1 Asking questions with web archives – introductory notebooks for historians 56 4
2 Mapping the Reparto de Tierras in Michoacán, Mexico (1868 - 1929) 37 5
3 Inspiring computationally-driven research with the BL’s collections:
a GLAM Notebooks approach
582 1
4 Afrobits 312 2
5 Faint Signals 18 8
6 Afro Hair and its Heritage 153 3
7 In the Spotlight volunteers 32 6
8 Flickr Geo-referencing Volunteers 4 10
8 Beyond the Rubric 32 6
10 Unlocking our Sound Heritage: The Unearthed Odessey - AWATE 14 9
  Total number of votes cast 1230  

The overall ranked list (by number of votes) was:

Rank Name of BL Labs Public Awards 2020 Entry
1 Inspiring computationally-driven research with the BL’s collections: a GLAM Notebooks approach
2 Afrobits
3 Afro Hair and its Heritage
4 Asking questions with web archives – introductory notebooks for historians
5 Mapping the Reparto de Tierras in Michoacán, Mexico (1868 - 1929)
6 In the Spotlight volunteers
6 Beyond the Rubric
8 Faint Signals
9 Unlocking our Sound Heritage: The Unearthed Odyssey - AWATE
10 Flickr Geo-referencing Volunteers

CONGRATULATIONS TO...

They are the FIRST WINNERS of the BL Labs People's Choice Public Award 2020!

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BL Labs Staff Awards 2020

The BL Labs Staff Awards were established in 2016 to highlight the exceptional work British Library staff have done with its data and / or digital collections and technology.

The 2020 British Library Labs Staff Award, now in its fifth year, gives recognition to current British Library staff who have created something brilliant using the Library's data and / or digital collections to answer and address the following questions and statements:

  • Perhaps you know of a project that developed new forms of knowledge, or an activity that delivered commercial value to the library.
  • Did the person or team create an artistic work that inspired, stimulated, amazed and provoked?
  • Do you know of a project developed by the Library where quality learning experiences were generated using the Library's digital content?
  • Have you worked on a project that used the Library's digital collections in the local community?

A panel comprised of the BL Labs Team and other British Library staff:

We received 13 entries, the most we have ever received for the Staff Awards and they are listed below:

  1. British Library / Qatar Foundation Partnership watermarks project
    Digitally capturing watermarks from old manuscripts and books.

    Nominated by Sotirios Alpanis (Head of Digital Operations, BL Qatar Project) on behalf of Heather Murphy (Conservation Team Leader, BL Qatar Project), Camillie Dekeyser-Thuet (Conservator Gulf History and Arabic Science, BL Qatar Project), Matt Lee (Senior Imaging Support Technician, BL Qatar Project) and Jordi Clopes-Masjuan (Senior Imaging Technician, BL Qatar Project).


    Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

  2. British Library Simulator on Bitsy
    The British Library simulator allows you to walk around the public spaces of the Library, visit a Reading Room, and see the basement (almost).

    Nominated by Ian Cooke (Head of Contemporary British Published Collections) on behalf of Giulia Carla Rossi (Curator, Digital Publications)


    Links: Short videofull BL Labs awards' entry and further details, bitsy available here and the simulator is available here.

  3. Making Data into Sound
    Inspired by an article about sonification on the programming historian website, Anne Courtney enabled a new way of experiencing catalogue records through sound.

    Nominated by Laura Parsons (Digitisation Workflow Administrator, BL Qatar Project) on behalf of Anne Courtney (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project)

    Links: Short videofull BL Labs awards' entry and further details 

  4. Leeds Exhibition Staff Doing Digital events and projects
    In response to the pandemic British Library exhibition staff had to deliver a range of activities online, some of which were originally conceived as physical events. They also worked on commercial project commissions such as Faint Signals.

    Nominated by Elvie Thompson (Lead Learning Producer, BL North - Leeds) and Conrad Bodman (Head of Culture Programmes, BL Culture and Learning) on behalf of Kenn Taylor (Lead Culture Producer, BL North - Leeds).

    Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

  5. How to make art when we're working apart
    A guide developed during lock-down to enable people to create collages using the British Library's Flickr Commons collection.

    By Hannah Nagle (Senior Imaging Support Technician, BL Qatar Project)

    Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

  6. A title-level list of British, Irish, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies newspapers held by the BL
    Though the library has functions for searching the print newspaper collection, metadata was created for the newspaper titles for those who would like to get an overview of the collection or use it for statistical analysis. The data is being used by the designer of a 'history of newspapers' infographic, for the upcoming infographics exhibition to be held next year at the Library and a number of visualisations. 

    Nominated by Yann Ryan (Digital Newspaper Curator) on behalf of himself, Luke McKernan (Lead Curator News & Moving Image Collections), Stephen Lester (Curator Newspaper Collections) and Alan Danskin (Collection Metadata Standards Manager)

    Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details, dataset, and press picker developed by Living with Machines is based on this work.

  7. Extracting text from Maps
    The creation and release of a dataset containing the text extracted from almost 2,000 colonial-era maps and documents, using the Google Vision API, which was enabled during the completion of a pilot course in Computing for Cultural Heritage at Birkbeck University.

    Nominated by Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator, Asian and African Collections, the British Library on behalf of Nick Dykes (Curator for Modern Maps Collections)

    Links: Longer video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details, online map, spreadsheet, included in a paper delivered at the Royal Anthropological Institute Conference 14 - 18 September 2020, ‘Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future’ – ‘From conservation to computer vision - curating the ‘War Office Archive’ of colonial-era maps held at the British Library’

  8. The Unlocking Our Sound Heritage (UOSH) Artist-in-Residence at the British Library
    Staff supporting Unlocking our Sound Heritage - Artist in Residence 2019-2020: The Unearthed Odyssey research project culminating in two performances, a genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album using 19 samples from the Sound Archive, three comprehensive blogs and work with three youth groups to unpack the themes and content bAWATE (Awate Suleiman - rapper and multimedia artist, England).

    Nominated by Sue Davies on behalf of Chandan Mahal (Learning Projects Manager), Andrea Zarza (Curator World & Traditional Music Collections) and Amanda House (Lead Intellectual Property Manager, Unlocking Our Sound Heritage).

    Links: Short videofull BL Labs awards' entry and further details

  9. Languid: Language Identification Project
    The addition of the language codes to 3,196,285 catalogue records using a combination of machine learning and human methods to enhance the records of items from the British Museum collection covering the period from the beginning of printing to the 1970s.

    Nominated by Alan Danskin (Collection Metadata Standards Manager) on behalf of Victoria Morris (Online Metadata Analyst, BL Collection Metadata)

    Links: Short video, longer video, full BL Labs awards' entry and Morris, Victoria  Automated Language Identification of Bibliographic Resources: Cataloging & Classification Quarterly: Vol 58, No 1 (tandfonline.com) , also available on the British Library's institutional repository

  10. Improving the cataloguing process and quality of EAP metadata through Open Refine and writing own software
    Work that enhances the catalogue process for the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) digital archive, to improve the quality of the metadata and to make the cataloguing process more efficient.

    By Graham Jevon (Endangered Archives Programme Cataloguer, BL Endangered Archives Programme)

    Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details, GitHub and a second blog post

  11. Hidden world of Qatar National Library - Bitsy simulator
    Game developed using BITSY, based on the Qatar National Library in Doha. Users in the gamey have to undertake tasks such as to find a manuscript in the basement and an astrolabe with other aspects of game play to create a more immersive experience which has more intimate ties to, and features many more objects and items in the collection of the Library.

    Nominated by Ellis Meade (Senior Imaging Technician, BL Qatar Project) on behalf himself, Serim Abboushi (Arabic & English Web Content Editor, BL Qatar Project), Heather Murphy (Conservation Team Leader, BL Qatar Project), Naomi Ortega-Raventos (Content Specialist, Archivist, BL Qatar Project) and Julia Ihnatowicz (Translation Specialist, BL Qatar Project)

    Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

  12. Addressing Problematic Terms in our Catalogues
    Started by colleagues on the Qatar Foundation Partnership Project, the idea was inspired by a talk by Melissa Bennett about decolonising archives and how terms used in catalogue records can be problematic. This project has analysed the terms used in cataloguing including those used when translating our catalogue records into Arabic so that they can be added to our bilingual Qatar Digital Library.

    Nominated by Laura Parsons (Digitisation Workflow Administrator, BL Qatar Project)  and Francisca Fuentes Rettig (Curator North American Publication Collections, British Library American) on behalf of British Library Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) network. The team are: Serim Abboushi (Arabic & English Web Content Editor, BL Qatar Project), Mariam Aboelezz (Translation Support Officer, BL Qatar Project), Louis Allday (Gulf History Cataloguing Manager, BL Qatar Project), Sotirios Alpanis (Head of Digital Operations, BL Qatar Project) , John Casey (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), David Fitzpatrick (Content Specialist Archivist, BL Qatar Project), Susannah Gillard (Content Specialist, Archivist, BL Qatar Project), John Hayhurst (Content Specialist, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), Julia Ihnatowicz (Translation Specialist, BL Qatar Project), William Monk (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), Hannah Nagle (Senior Imaging Support Technician, BL Qatar Project), Noemi Ortega-Raventos (Content Specialist, Archivist, BL Qatar Project), Francis Owtram (Content Specialist, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), Curstaidh Reid (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), George Samaan (Translation Support Officer, BL Qatar Project), Tahani Shaban (Translation Specialist, BL Qatar Project), David Woodbridge (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project) and Nariman Youssef (Arabic Translation Manager, BL Qatar Project)

    Links: Short video and full BL Labs awards' entry.

  13. COVID-19 materials supplied by British Library
    From the start of the pandemic and during lockdown, teams have worked hard to provide key materials for Covid-19 from the British Library On Demand collection to researches working on treatments, preventative measures and vaccines for the virus. Visit www.bl.uk/on-demand

    Nominated by Peter Chymera on behalf of Customer Services, Document Supply Managers and Retrieval Staff at the British Library

    Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

 

The winners were announced by my colleague Jas Rai, Head of People, British Library, her slide deck is available here.

Special Commendation

  • Improving the cataloguing process and quality of EAP metadata through Open Refine and writing own software
    Work that enhances the catalogue process for the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) digital archive, to improve the quality of the metadata and to make the cataloguing process more efficient.

    By Graham Jevon (Endangered Archives Programme Cataloguer, BL Endangered Archives Programme)

    Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details, github and a second blog post

Panel comments

We received a number of entries which describe journeys of staff learning more about technology and then using what they learned to enable innovation in their work. We would like to give a special commendation to Nick and Graham, two members of staff who the panel felt were worthy exemplars of this.

Runners-up

Panel comments

Anne Courtney, Cataloguer of Gulf History at the British Library’s Qatar Project created a musical piece from the India Office records catalogue records. She did this by using the place names to connect with different instruments, dates in records connected to timing of the music and the how the data is related effected the interaction with the instruments.

The panel were really impressed with this very thoughtful and innovative way of discovering our collections, it was almost like leaving an acoustic memory of the people’s that these records are about.

Panel comments

Victoria Morris is an online metadata analyst in the British Library’s collection metadata team. She did some pioneering computational work using machine learning to detect missing information about the language of catalogue records.

The panel were really impressed with the innovation and the incredible impact of the work, identifying 471 languages in the records, 141 of which were not previously represented, with the addition of language codes to 3,196,285 records.

Winners

Panel comments

The simulator was created by Giulia in May 2020 using ‘Bitsy'. It has been viewed more than 5,000 times (with most use during the period when the Library was closed to the public). It has attracted press attention in the UK and in Europe. Subsequent attention has come from another national library in Europe, and also a student and librarian in the US, who is preparing a Fulbright application to study interactive storytelling and games in the UK.

Giulia followed up the Simulator by leading a 'Hack n Yack' session organised by the Digital Scholarship team on Bitsy for Library colleagues. A BL colleague has produced a similar simulator for the Qatar Digital Library inspired by Giulia's work.

This was a unanimous favourite with the judging panel. Thank you Giulia for such a fun project.

  • Addressing Problematic Terms in our Catalogues
    Started by colleagues on the Qatar Foundation Partnership Project the idea to start the work that was inspired by a talk by Melissa Bennett about decolonising the archive and how terms used in catalogue records can be problematic. This project has analysed the terms used in cataloguing including the terms used when translating our catalogue records into Arabic so that they can be added to our bilingual Qatar Digital Library.

    Nominated by Laura Parsons (Digitisation Workflow Administrator, BL Qatar Project)  and Francisca Fuentes Rettig (Curator North American Publication Collections, British Library American) on behalf of British Library Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) network. Names are: Serim Abboushi (Arabic & English Web Content Editor, BL Qatar Project), Mariam Aboelezz (Translation Support Officer, BL Qatar Project), Louis Allday (Gulf History Cataloguing Manager, BL Qatar Project), Sotirios Alpanis (Head of Digital Operations, BL Qatar Project) , John Casey (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), David Fitzpatrick (Content Specialist Archivist, BL Qatar Project), Susannah Gillard (Content Specialist, Archivist, BL Qatar Project), John Hayhurst (Content Specialist, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), Julia Ihnatowicz (Translation Specialist, BL Qatar Project), William Monk (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), Hannah Nagle (Senior Imaging Support Technician, BL Qatar Project), Noemi Ortega-Raventos (Content Specialist, Archivist, BL Qatar Project), Francis Owtram (Content Specialist, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), Curstaidh Reid (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), George Samaan (Translation Support Officer, BL Qatar Project), Tahani Shaban (Translation Specialist, BL Qatar Project), David Woodbridge (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project) and Nariman Youssef (Arabic Translation Manager, BL Qatar Project)

    Links: Short video and full BL Labs awards' entry.

Panel comments

The second winner is from the British Library’s Qatar Foundation team. Congratulations go to: Serim Abboushi, Mariam Aboelezz, Louis Allday, Sotirios Alpanis, John Casey, David Fitzpatrick, Susannah Gillard, John Hayhurst, Julia Ihnatowicz, William Monk, Hannah Nagle, Noemi Ortega-Raventos, Francis Owtram, Curstaidh Reid, George Samaan, Tahani Shaban, David Woodbridge and Nariman Youssef  and special thanks to the BAME Staff Network.

This is incredibly important work as it is something that continues to require attention. Perhaps it’s fair to say it is now getting even more focus because of world events such as ‘Black Lives Matter’.

Congratulations to everyone, we know this work isn’t easy but it is MOST definitely needed!

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Binge-watch BL Labs 'box-sets' (YouTube Playlists)

This seasonal time in the UK often involves may of us binge watching online box sets online or on TV. If this is you, and you really want to learn more about the world of GLAM Labs, digital scholarship and the creative potential of working with our and other's digital collections and data we have organised and prepared footage from previous years' events. There are some fantastic, thought provoking and incredibly wise keynote speeches, some excellent presentations which highlight projects that are still relevant and inspiring for all of us today. You can even watch the launch of the BL Labs project almost eight years ago. 

BL_Labs_Symposium_2019Symposium
YouTube

Playlist 2019
BL_Labs_Symposium_2018Symposium
YouTube

Playlist 2018
BL_Labs_Symposium_2017Symposium
YouTube

Playlist 2017
BL_Labs_Symposium_2016Symposium
YouTube

Playlist 2016
BL_Labs_Symposium_2015Symposium
YouTube

Playlist 2015
BL Labs Symposium 2014 YouTube Playlist
Symposium
YouTube

Playlist 2014
BL_Labs_LaunchEvent2013BL Labs Launch
YouTube

Playlist 2013
Buildinglibrarylabs.jpegBuilding Library Labs
YouTube
Playlist 2018
Text-dataminingText& Data Mining
YouTube
Playlist 2015
CuriousimagesCurious Images
YouTube
Playlist 2014
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Conclusion and Season's Greetings

Winter_sceneBritish Library digitised image from page 161 of "Poetry of the year. Passages from the poets descriptive of the seasons. With twenty-two coloured illustrations from drawings by eminent artists [Edited by Joseph Cundall.]
Taken from the British Library's Flickr Commons collection.

That's a wrap from the BL Labs team for 2020, what a challenging year it has been!

We hope you find something in this post of interest that inspires you to start or continue your journey in using the British Library's (as well as other GLAM Labs and organisations) digital collections and data for an innovative project.

Looking back at nearly 8 years of working at BL Labs I am really proud of what we have achieved, let's hope 2021 will be a great year.

Seasons greetings and a Happy New Year to all, please stay safe and have a lovely and relaxing festive period with friends and family involved if possible.

Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

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14 December 2020

Shortlist and voting for BL Labs People's Choice: Public Awards 2020 announced! Last chance: Book BL Labs Symposium!

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

British Library Labs Shortlisted Entries for the Public Awards 2020
Screenshots from the 10 BL Labs shortlisted entries for the Public Awards 2020

After much deliberation and intense discussion with key people from the BL Labs Advisory board and British Library we have come up with a fantastic shortlist for the BL Labs Public Awards 2020.

The official announcement of who has been awarded prizes for the Awards in each category (Research, Artistic, Educational and Community) will take place tomorrow between 1400-1700 (GMT), Tuesday 15 December 2020 at the online BL Labs Symposium 2020. We will also announce our Staff Awards there too.

There are still a few places available - so hurry and BOOK NOW to find out if the project you voted for won! Also, learn more about some of the amazing projects that were submitted this year and listen and be inspired by our fantastic range of speakers in our packed programme.

In this strange, difficult and remarkable pandemic year, we decided to do something really special.

We we want you, the public, to choose which shortlisted entry will be crowned overall the 'BL Labs People's Choice for the Public Awards 2020'. It's going to be difficult as the projects this year are so diverse and difficult to compare. Also, you only have today and tomorrow to decide (voting will close around 1615 GMT tomorrow, Tuesday 15 December 2020).

The winner will be announced near the end of the BL Labs Symposium 2020 tomorrow, Tuesday 15 December 2020, just before 1700 GMT.

How to vote for the BL Labs People's Choice for the Public Awards 2020?

It's really simple:

  1. Read the descriptions below and follow the links to learn more about each entry.
  2. Vote for your favourite (you can only chose one!) using our VOTING FORM which is now live.
  3. You will be asked if you wish to have the results emailed to you after you have voted. If you choose this option, all you will be able to see are the number of people who have voted.
  4. The form will remain open from 1100 GMT Monday 14 December to 1615 GMT Tuesday 15 December 2020 (that's just over 30 hours).
  5. The winner will be announced around 1655 GMT tomorrow on 15 December 2020 near the end this year's online BL Labs Symposium 2020.

Only have 5 minutes to look through the entries and vote?

No problem! We have created a BL Labs Public Awards YouTube shortlist 2020 which contains ten 30-second promotional videos for each shortlisted entry to give you their 'essence'. It's just over 5 minutes and then you can VOTE!

You can also ownload a .zip file with all the submissions for this year's BL Labs Public Awards 2020 (all entries) if you prefer.

The shortlisted entries for the BL Labs Public Awards 2020 this year are (in alphabetical title order):

  1. Afrobits
    An interactive installation of African music and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade .
    by Javier Pereda (Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design and Illustration and Researcher in the Experimental Technologies Lab, Liverpool John Moores University), Patricia Murrieta Flores (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Hub at Lancaster University), Nicholas Radburn (Lecturer in the History of the Atlantic World 1500 – 1800, Co-Editor of the Slave Voyages Research Project, Lancaster University), Lois South (History Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University) and Christian Monaghan, Graphic Design and Illustration Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University.

    Links: Short video, longer video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

  2. Afro Hair And Its Heritage
    A celebration of Black Heritage through Black Afro Hair.
    by Roslyn Henry (self-taught surface pattern designer, from Les Belles Bêtes, France)

    Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details(1) and (2)

  3. Asking questions with web archives – introductory notebooks for historians
    16 Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate how specific historical research questions can be explored by analysing data from web archives.
    by Tim Sherratt (Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra and founder and creator of the GLAM workbench), Andrew Jackson (Technical Lead - UK Web Archive, British Library), Alex Osborne (Technical Lead Australian Web Archive - National Library of Australia) and Ben O’Brien (Technical Lead New Zealand Web Archive - National Library of New Zealand)

    Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

  4. Beyond the Rubric: Collaborating with the Cultural Heritage Sector in Higher Education Teaching and Research
    A project-based, research-led collaboration between the British Library and students of the Centre for Digital Humanities Research at the Australian National University.
    by Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia)

    Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details

  5. Faint Signals
    Interactive artwork that generates an imagined Yorkshire forest, densely populated with sounds of nature from the British Library's archive.
    by the Invisible Flock team who are Ben Eaton (Technical Director), Victoria Pratt (Creative Director),  Klavs Kurpnieks (Studio Manager), Catherine Baxendale (Executive Producer), Amy Balderston (General Manager) and Simon Fletcher (Interactions Engineer).

    Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

  6. Flickr Georeferencing completed
    Volunteer georeferencers have added coordinates to all the images of over 50,000 maps from the British Library's Flickr Commons site.
    by 'Volunteer geo-referencers' nominated by Gethen Rees, Digital Mapping Curator, British Library

    Links: Short video, Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

  7. Inspiring computationally-driven research with the BL’s collections: a GLAM Notebooks approach
    Enabling cultural heritage institutions and (digital) humanities researchers to experiment with Collections as Data and GLAM notebooks by showcasing practical implementations from a wide range of GLAM institutions and digital collections. 
    by Gustavo Candela, Pilar Escobar, María Dolores Sáez and Manuel Marco-Such  from the Research Libraries Team, Department of Software and Computing Systems, the University of Alicante, Spain

    Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

  8. In the Spotlight volunteers
    Since 2017, thousands of volunteers have helped bring the British Library's historic playbills collection to life through the In the Spotlight crowdsourcing project.
    by 'In the Spotlight volunteers' nominated by Mia Ridge, Digital Curator, Western Heritage Collections, British Library

    Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

  9. Mapping the Reparto de Tierras in Michoacán, Mexico (1868 - 1929)
    Research in 19th-century Mexican sources and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based approaches underpinning the creation of an interactive web map that enables users to spatially explore the British Library's recently digitized Libros de Hijuelas collection.
    by John Erard (Undergraduate researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, USA).

    Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

  10. Unlocking our Sound Heritage - Artist in Residence 2019-2020: The Unearthed Odyssey
    Research project culminating in two performances, a genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album using 19 samples from the Sound Archive, three comprehensive blogs and work with three youth groups to unpack the themes and content.
    by AWATE (Awate Suleiman - rapper and multimedia artist, England)

    Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details

What happens to the projects not shortlisted?

Though we have criteria to decide which projects should be shortlisted it was still incredibly difficult to choose which ones should be. Judging can be so subjective! Remember it's a point in time with a specific group of people in a particular mood and set of lenses. At a different time, with another group of people I am sure they would probably come up with another selection.

So if you were not chosen this year, please do not be disheartened. The whole point of the BL Labs Awards is to shine a light and showcase uses of our digital collections through innovative projects and activities. These projects have often gone on to be developed further such as someone happened to have come across it and connected with individuals involved and ended up collaborating with them. Many projects have also inspired others to develop their own using the British Library's as well as other institution's cultural heritage digitised and born digital collections.

Details of all the projects entered this year are contained in the BL Labs Digital Projects Archive.

BL Labs can promote your work through our various communication channels (if we haven't already!). Who knows where that might lead? For some of these entrants, I would definitely recommend that they re-submit next year when the projects have been developed further and have had a chance to have further impact.

So for now, a quick thank you to the following people who took the time enter (we have also provided links for those who would like to read further about these entries), we really, really appreciate it:

  1. Drawings inspired by the British Library's Sound Archive of Wildlife Recordings by Viv Youell (England)
  2. Curatr: A Data Interface for the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus by University College Dublin's Insight team and Centre for Cultural Analytics, Ireland
  3. Reconstructing Early Circus: Entertainments at Astley’s Amphitheatre, 1768-1833 by Leith Davis, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
  4. Surfacing the impact of doctoral research: working with the EThOS collection by Catherine Montgomery, Craig Stewart, Tom Roberts, Sharon Riddle and Jinjie Huang from Durham University, England
  5. Baking in Better Catalogue Data by Sara Wingate Gray, University College London, England
  6. The Samtla (Search And Mining Tools for Labelling Archives) holographic search and browsing interface for cultural heritage photogrammetry models by Martyn Harris (Birkbeck) and Mark Levene (University College London), England
  7. Visualizing Space by Tara McDarby, United Kingdom
  8. The Interpreter and You Are Not An Island by Noriko Okaku, England (2 entries)
  9. Librorum: the British Library Edition by Janet Luk (Australian National University (ANU), Man-Ting Hsu (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Canberra, Australia), Billy Nam Cheng (ANU), Jingyi Lai (Haiwan Middle School (Shenzhen, China), Mengfei Liu (Access Canberra (Canberra, Australia) and Xiaohan Jiang (China Maritime Museum (Shanghai, China))
  10. BL Illuminated Glyphs CAPS: Typographic System of Illuminated Manuscript Letterings by Michelle Devlin , England

I look forward to seeing some of you tomorrow at the BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020 and seasons greetings to you all, Mahendra.

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