Digital scholarship blog

It is wonderful to be collaborating with Leeds Libraries on their online Games Jam this month, which is encouraging people to create playful interactive adaptations of books in the BBC’s Novels that Shaped Our World list.

Eye-catching artwork for the Games Jam created by Amy Evans (@tiger_tea) https://www.tiger-tea.co.uk/

In my experience game jams are a brilliant way of bringing historic and literary digital library and archive collections to life in a completely new way. I’ve ran a few at the British Library and I’m always keen to share what I’ve learned with other libraries, including contributing to Living Knowledge Network skills sharing events, such as one we held on the topic of games and playfulness in libraries, in November 2017 at Leeds Central Library, you can read more about this here.

@_jerryjenkins @ggnewed & @ella_snell doing a puzzle escape game in a box by @lizcable at a #LivingKnowledgeNetwork skills day (image © Stella Wisdom)

There are endless possibilities for adapting works of literature into games and interactive experiences. Earlier this year I attended an Oxford/London IF meetup group online event, where Emily Short gave a fascinating talk about the storylet game design process for creating Orwell’s Animal Farm an indie adventure game, which is based on George Orwell’s novel, where all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. There is a review of this game here.

Leeds Libraries have programmed a range of online events to inspire creativity, as part of their games jam. Last week I attended a thought provoking workshop led by Liz Cable on how to create literary escape rooms. It made me think of a very atmospheric Dracula inspired escape room called Carfax, situated in a sandstone cave system, which I had visited in Nottingham a few years ago. During the covid-19 pandemic Cave Escape have reworked this game into an online escape experience called Carfax - The Hunter, so anyone can play a version of this game from home.

Liz has a wealth of knowledge about all types of game making tools, apps and platforms, which she generously shares. I first met her at the MIX conference at Bath Spa University back in 2015, where she took me and a few other conference delegates to an escape room in Bath. This was the first time I had been to one; so it was Liz who opened my eyes to a new world of escape game experiences! 

There are still more excellent Leeds Libraries Games Jam online events coming up this week:

• On Wednesday 21^st April Rhian Isaac and Josh Flint from Leeds Libraries will discuss the real life histories behind some of the well-known books from the BBC Novels That Shaped Our World list, register here for the Behind the Books event.
• On Thursday 22^nd April Ann Jones from Cards or Die board gaming will be running a workshop on Rule Breakers - Creating a world with components. Ann has ran three previous workshops on 1. Adventure: Co-operative Games, 2. Life, Death and other worlds - solo games and voting, and 3. Crime and Conflict - programming, asymmetry and silence.
• On Friday 23^rd April there is a Game Creation event with Leeds Libraries and Leeds Museums.
• On Saturday 24^th April, I’ll be in conversation on a panel with Liz Cable and Ann Jones, which will be followed by an event where VR artist Rosie Summers will create an interpretation of Narnia using Tilt Brush.

1 WEEK! Till my live #VR performance with @leedslibraries ✨

Travel with me through the virtual wardrobe and into the fantastical Narnia! Join me live as I paint this magical Lion The Witch & The Wardrobe tribute, in VR. 💫❄️https://t.co/qaJUeI2xh6

See you there! #tiltbrush pic.twitter.com/ZcqROpQZqX

— Rosie Summers 🥽✨ (@VR_Rosie) April 17, 2021

All these events can be booked from Leeds Libraries Eventbrite page and if you want to watch recordings of previous events, check out their Novels That Shaped Our World YouTube playlist.

The Novels that Shaped Our World jam itself is taking place over Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th April. Thanks to Libraries Connected and Arts Council England there is a £150 prize for the winner and two £50 prizes for the runners up. More information can be found here.

If you are considering taking part, but are unsure where to start, then you may also be interested in reading this Writing Tools for Interactive Fiction blog post by my colleague Giulia Carla Rossi, which describes a number of free online tools that don’t require any previous programming knowledge. I also recommend joining the jam's Facebook group, where participants can talk to each other and ask questions. Good luck if you make and submit a game, I’m looking forward to reading and playing the entries.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom)

Since starting at the Library at the beginning of March, one of the highlights of my working week has been meeting with the IFLA Wikidata and Wikibase Working Group. IFLA is the International Federation of Library Associations, a global body representing the interests of libraries worldwide.

This working group ‘aims to coordinate actions, events and preparation of documents to leverage Wikidata and Wikibase in support of documenting collections and support capacity building in linked data, structured data, and cataloguing work’. For the last six weeks, myself and Digital Curator Stella Wisdom, have been working alongside collaborators from such disparate locations as Jerusalem, New York and Toronto, amongst others, to prepare materials, events and opportunities for the upcoming #1lib1ref campaign.

The next #1Lib1Ref runs from 15th May to 5th June 2021. This campaign, run by the Wikimedia Foundation, invites library staff and patrons to improve the reliability of sources in Wikipedia. Using the philosophy of ‘1 librarian, 1 reference’ the campaign focusses on filling in the gaps of missing references – if just one person adds just one reference, think of what we could do collectively! Full information can be found at the #1Lib1Ref Wikimedia page.

Ahead of this upcoming #1Lib1Ref, IFLA’s Wikidata and Wikibase Working Group are offering a Train-The-Trainers workshop, for up to 50 participants, on Wednesday 21st April at 16:00 CET. This training session, run by Meg Wacha of City University, New York, will show participants how to set up an event to contribute to Wikidata during the #1Lib1Ref campaign period. More details and registration for this online event on Wednesday 21st April can be found on the IFLA website here.

The group will provide resources that can help you learn how to edit Wikidata, and demonstrate the advantages that Wikidata provides for library collections. They will also be holding online weekly informal open office hours throughout May and early June, in which participants can seek advice and guidance from experienced Wikimedians. The British Library will be hosting one of these virtual office hour sessions on Wednesday 5^th of May at 3pm BST, details about these and how to book can be found here.

We hope to see you there!

This post is by Wikimedian in Residence Lucy Hinnie (@BL_Wikimedian)

The British Library and the British Fashion Council held a Virtual Awards Ceremony on 22^nd March to celebrate the results of the 2021 research inspired fashion design competition, part of an innovative collaboration between the British Library and the British Fashion Council. The event showcased examples of what has inspired a new generation of fashion designers who have explored the richness and potential of the Library’s extensive digital collections for a design project based on themes of ‘Identity’ or ‘Disruption’.

Earlier in the day a winner was selected by a panel of judges comprised of respected industry individuals including Anna Orsini, Strategic Consultant, British Fashion Council; Dal Chodha, Editor of non-seasonal publication Archivist, Writer & Consultant; Halina Edwards, Researcher, Lead Designer at The Black Curriculum and by the Library’s Daniel Lowe - Curator Arabic Collections. Nabil El Nayal, Designer and Course Leader MA Fashion Design Technology Womenswear, London College of Fashion undertook an advisory role for the judging day and the panel was chaired by Judith Rosser-Davies, Head of Government Relations & Education, Chair Colleges Council, British Fashion Council.  

In addition to the Judges' Award, an additional award - the Public Award was voted for by the online audience at the Awards event.

The Judges' Award

The winner of the Judges Award was Adela Babinska, MA Womenswear Student at the London College of Fashion. Her submission ‘NOT’ reflected on the absence of knowledge and on the need for persisting curiosity in our challenging times.

Winning entry by Adela Babinska

Adela arrived in London during lockdown from Slovakia as an international student and found herself in a strange new reality of being a London student in Covid times – studying online, meeting her colleagues and tutors online, and responding to our fashion competition without ever visiting the Library. Just as many other students, she discovered that the access to online resources, including at the British Library, is limited and, also, that she cannot complete the Library’s registration process during the lockdown. Normally in her research Adela would search for the answers, but in the absence of being able to visit the Library and with only limited access to online content, she found herself in a disruptive position, so she decided to explore how she could benefit from this.

In her submission, Adela referenced the same emotion that she felt after reading Waiting for Godot – which prompts many questions, but does not provide the answers. Rather than search for the answers she reflected that she needed to search for the questions and decided to generate as many queries as possible about the Library and to use these to guide her designs, including the intangibility of the Library during lockdown. Her research for this project led her to see that the mere act of not knowing can also be powerful.

Her thinking and questioning included a conceptualisation of the icon image on the Customer Services section of the BL website in relation to impersonality and distance. She also reflected on what accessing the BL Sound archives could bring to her research and referenced a recording of the foyer of the Library in which she could hear voices which made the Library seem more real to her.

As well as producing a fantastic fashion presentation, Adela’s experience and search for the Library amidst the current disruptions provides both a challenging and inspirational view of the Library from a student perspective.

The Public Award

The winner of the Public Award is Chiara Lamon, Fashion and Textile Student from Gray’s School of Art, based at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, with her submission ‘Morphe’.

Designs from the public award winner Chiara Lamon

Chiara analysed the idea of a malleable and dynamic identity through a study of body movement.  Her research approach focused on disrupting common ideas of the stillness and singularity of our identity. Using the Library’s online collections, she explored visual imagery, blogs, thematic pages books and ideas which she considered had a high impact on the quality and depth of her research. This experience helped Chiara reflect on how she now conducts research - researching opposites, making mistakes and looking for the unexpected, letting the research lead her rather than trying to control it.

Chiara’s research involved exploring the catalogues on futurism and cubism and discovering connection and metaphors in unexpected ways, such as from images of geological strata from the Library’s Flickr collection to represent layers of the self, building on the concept of the body multiple.

Engaging with practice led research Chiara was able to explore ideas from a digital and physical development for a more sustainable practice. Images that Chiara used from the Library’s digital collections included the work of photographer Ethienne Jules, images from geology and dance and a comparison of a multiple collar garment from Viktor and Rolf’s Autumn /Winter 2003 collection paired with an early portrait of a man in a collared shirt.

Chiara turned images from BL collections and abstracted forms into shapes to apply to the body as an experience for a multifaceted and morphing representation of the self and our dynamic nature.

The Finalists

Eight finalists were shortlisted from a strong field of 111 submissions for this year’s competition.

The six other finalists were:

Jordan Fergusson, Manchester Metropolitan University

Jordan's submission ‘The Tearlachs’, is based on a theme of disrupting the codes of highland dress and exploring gender. Jordan reflected on Jacobite poetry and song using multiple images, manuscripts and letters from the BL Collection and extracts from a Jacobite Songbook from 1863. The depictions in this book gave Jordan a strong sense of the character of a Tearlach (instigator).  Jordan presents the Tearlachs as gender non-conforming trailblazers of the highlands, embodying the Jacobite cause and romanticism of Scottish History. In designing his collection, Jordan used himself as a blank canvas to build up inspiration transferring it to 2D then back to 3D. His research led to Jordan to design a ‘warped tartan’ as his own interpretation of a’Tearlach Tartan’, inspired by graph-like images of the Aurora Borealis from the BL Collection.

Maria Fernanda Nava Melgar, Royal College of Art

Maria’s submission ‘The Invisibles’ explored identity through fundamental questions such as to what are we made of, how we are perceived and how are we are listened to. Her work took inspiration from chiaroscuro scientific paintings from the 18^th Century, medical journals and distorted sound recordings (Touch Radio) from the BL Collection.  Images of decay and cells were used to inform the design of her collection. Maria reflected on the relationship between light, space and sound and the human body and how the body is information made out of layers that are constantly being pressed and crushed against each other whist working together inside a system.

Emma Fraser, Gray’s School of Art, (Robert Gordon University Aberdeen)

Emma’s submission ‘Repair Yourself’ was based on a following a powerful, moving journey as a survivor of sexual assault and her message to other survivors that they are not alone. Emma used visual metaphors to explore the idea of trauma and recovery initially starting with the concept of damage and repair, reflected through her textile work and then through ideas of comfort and exposure. Another aspect of her work was exploring the over-sexualising of women and the idea of femininity by researching the BL archives.  Her submission included images from the Library’s s Flickr Collection -Women of the World. Emma intended her work as a representation of the courage and strength that it takes to go on such a journey of recovery, confirming that it was ‘not about the attackers, but about the survivors’.

Kelsey Ann Kasom, Royal College of Art        

Kelsey’s submission ‘Identity’ is based on the concept of the left side of her brain being her inner child the ‘past’ and right side of her brain being her creative genius – the ‘present’. Using research and images form the BL Collection her work focused on what can be created from harmonising these two aspects. Kelsey explored abstract feelings and surreal thought working to make sense of them three dimensionally ‘as an extension of the soul outside the body’. Kelsey experimented with the technical aspects of working with organza creating shapes for the body

Louise Korner, London College of Fashion

Louise’s submission ‘The Becoming’ focused on the theme of disruption as a design approach using a destructive force such as fire, (by watching objects burning), to lead to a greater understanding of fire as a transformative process and also to highlight current issues surrounding the fashion industry.  Using images and art work from the 18^th century from BL Collections, including an image of a forest fire, Louise reflected on what is left after the disruption of the landscape and what is regenerated after the fire. Louise used a disruptive approach to her research of the BL catalogues by mis - spelling words and entering words backwards in order ‘to stumble across an interesting recording or sound or art work.’ Her research led to her designing a ‘hidden garment withing a garment’ that the wearer decides when to reveal and garments that are sustainable that can be returned to the designer for repurposing.

Cameron Lyall, Gray’s School of Art, (Robert Gordon University Aberdeen)

Cameron’s submission ‘No Place’ is inspired by a theme of identity. It tells a story of the ‘pilgrim of no place’ and their journey, both physically and mentally to understand their own identity. This journey involves the pilgrim reflecting on history and what they have learnt and applying this to ‘a future forward-thinking attitude.’ Cameron’s concept was in response to his own journey in 2020.  His work included images from ancient philosophies, celestial esoterica and astrology from the BL Collection. For his designs, Cameron dissembled and reconstructed garments, some of which took on ‘symbiotic shapes reminiscent of beetles’ purposing and rebranding these garments into new concepts.

For any further information, email [email protected].

The works and worlds created by Shakespeare have an enduring appeal, his writing emotionally resonates with audiences today, despite being written over four hundred year's ago. This week is Shakespeare Week, and today is also the first day of the London Games Festival, so a perfect time to reflect on some interactive digital adaptations of the bard's plays. 

Back in 2016 here in the British Library we ran a Shakespeare themed Off the Map competition, which set students a task of creating video games and virtual interactive environments using digitised British Library items, including maps, views, texts, book illustrations and recorded sounds as creative inspiration. The first place winning entry by Team Quattro from De Montfort University in Leicester, created an adaptation of The Tempest, you can see a flythrough video clip of their stunning work here.

In this competition, Tom Battey who was then a student at the London College of Communication was awarded second place with a game called Midsummer based on the characters in the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream and which used digitised engravings from John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. This is a clever work, set in a magical woodland, where trees and bushes generate as the player wanders through the game. The player has the power to enchant and disenchant characters they meet to fall in love with each other, or not! The dialogue between these characters then changes depending on whether they are lovestruck, you can watch a demo of this game here.

Cake from MissionMaker Macbeth launch event at the British Library in 2019

Another digital Shakespeare project, which the Library has been involved in, is MissionMaker Macbeth, a game-authoring tool, developed by the MAGiCAL team, from D.A.R.E. enterprise at the UCL Knowledge Lab, which was launched at the British Library for the London Games Festival in 2019. Built using Unity, this software incorporates characters, landscapes, objects and even cauldron ingredients for children to make digital games based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. For anyone wanting to read more about this project, Andrew Burn has written a book Literature, Videogames and Learning, which is due to be published on 20th July 2021.

If virtual woodland walks are your thing, although not Shakespeare related, you may want to explore Faint Signals, by Invisible Flock, this is an interactive website, where you can wander through the woodland as it changes through all four seasons, and evolves from day to night. Also, if you are reading this in time, you may be able to catch a live online performance of Dream, by the Royal Shakespeare Company. This Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired 50-minute online event is set in a virtual midsummer forest, which offers participants a unique opportunity to directly influence the live performance, read more about this here.

For literature loving games makers, you may want to take part in Leeds Libraries upcoming online Novels That Shaped Our World Games Jam, which is running on Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th April 2021. This jam invites people to create games inspired by the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. They have planned an inspiring programme of online events connected to this jam, tickets will be available from Monday 22nd March 2021 from their Eventbrite page: leeds-libraries.eventbrite.com.

Leeds Libraries games jam events programme

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom)

Keen followers of this blog may remember a post from last December, which shared details of a virtual workshop about AI and Archives: Current Challenges and Prospects of Digital and Born-digital archives. This topic was one of three workshop themes identified by the Archives in the UK/Republic of Ireland & AI (AURA) network, which is a forum promoting discussions on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be applied to cultural heritage archives, and to explore issues with providing access to born digital and hybrid digital/physical collections.

The first AURA workshop on Open Data versus Privacy organised by Annalina Caputo from Dublin City University, took place on 16-17 November 2020. Rachel MacGregor provides a great write-up of this event here.

Here at the British Library, we teamed up with our friends at The National Archives to curate the second AURA workshop exploring the current challenges and prospects of born-digital archives, this took place online on 28-29 January 2021. The first day of the workshop held on 28 January was organised by The National Archives, you can read more about this day here, and the following day, 29 January, was organised by the BL, videos and slides for this can be found on the AURA blog and I've included them in this post.

The format for both days of the second AURA workshop comprised of four short presentations, two interactive breakout room sessions and a wider round-table discussion. The aim being that the event would generate dialogue around key challenges that professionals across all sectors are grappling with, with a view to identifying possible solutions.

The first day covered issues of access both from infrastructural and user’s perspectives, plus the ethical implications of the use of AI and advanced computational approaches to archival practices and research. The second day discussed challenges of access to email archives, and also issues relating to web archives and emerging format collections, including web-based interactive narratives. A round-up of  the second day is below, including recorded videos of the presentations for anyone unable to attend on the day.

Kicking off day two, a warm welcome to the workshop attendees was given by Rachel Foss, Head of Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts at the British Library, Larry Stapleton, Senior academic and international consultant from the Waterford Institute of Technology and Mathieu d’ Aquin, Professor of Informatics at the National University of Ireland Galway.

The morning session on Email Archives: challenges of access and collaborative initiatives was chaired by David Kirsch, Associate Professor, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. This featured two presentations:

The first of these was  about Working with ePADD: processes, challenges and collaborative solutions in working with email archives, by Callum McKean, Curator for Contemporary Literary and Creative Archives, British Library and Jessica Smith, Creative Arts Archivist, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. Their slides can be viewed here and here. Apologies that the recording of Callum's talk is clipped, this was due to connectivity issues on the day.

The second presentation was Finding Light in Dark Archives: Using AI to connect context and content in email collections by Stephanie Decker, Professor of History and Strategy, University of Bristol and Santhilata Venkata, Digital Preservation Specialist & Researcher at The National Archives in the UK.

After their talks, the speakers proposed questions and challenges that attendees could discuss in smaller break-out rooms. Questions given by speakers of the morning session were:

1. Are there any other appraisal or collaborative considerations that might improve our practices and offer ways forward?
2. What do we lose by emphasizing usability for researchers?
3. Should we start with how researchers want to use email archives now and in the future, rather than just on preservation?
4. Potentialities of email archives as organizational, not just individual?

These questions led to discussions about, file formats, collection sizes, metadata standards and ways to interpret large data sets. There was interest in how email archives might allow researchers to reconstruct corporate archives, e.g. understand social dynamics of the office and understand decision making processes. It was felt that there is a need to understand the extent to which email represents organisation-level context. More questions were raised including:

• To what extent is it part of the organisational records and how should it be treated?
• How do you manage the relationship between constant organisational functions and structure (a CEO) and changing individuals?
• Who will be looking at organisational email in the future and how?

It was mentioned that there is a need to distinguish between email as data and email as an artifact, as the use-cases and preservation needs may be markedly different.

Duties of care that exist between depositors, tool designers, archivists and researchers was discussed and a question was asked about how we balance these?

• Managing human burden
• Differing levels of embargo
• Institutional frameworks

There was discussion of the research potential for comparing email and social media collections, e.g. tweet archives and also the difficulties researchers face in getting access to data sets. The monetary value of email archives was also raised and it was mentioned that perceived value, hasn’t been translated into monetary value.

Researcher needs and metadata was another topic brought up by attendees, it was suggested that the information about collections in online catalogues needs to be descriptive enough for researchers to decide if they wish to visit an institution, to view digital collections on a dedicated terminal. It was also suggested that archives and libraries need to make access restrictions, and the reasoning for these, very clear to users. This would help to manage expectations, so that researchers will know when to visit on-site because remote access is not possible. It was mentioned that it is challenging to identify use cases, but it was noted that without deeper understanding of researcher needs, it can be hard to make decisions about access provision.

It was acknowledged that the demands on human-processing are still high for born digital archives, and the relationship between tools and professionals still emergent. So there was a question about whether researchers could be involved in collaborations more, and to what extent will there be an onus on their responsibilities and liabilities in relation to usage of born digital archives?

Lots of food for thought before the break for lunch!

The afternoon session chaired by Nicole Basaraba, Postdoctoral Researcher, Studio Europa, Maastricht University, discussed Emerging Formats, Interactive Narratives and Socio-Cultural Questions in AI.

The first afternoon presentation Collecting Emerging Formats: Capturing Interactive Narratives in the UK Web Archive was given by Lynda Clark, Post-doctoral research fellow in Narrative and Play at InGAME: Innovation for Games and Media Enterprise, University of Dundee, and Giulia Carla Rossi, Curator for Digital Publications, British Library. Their slides can be viewed here.  

The second afternoon session was Women Reclaiming AI: a collectively designed AI Voice Assistant by Coral Manton, Lecturer in Creative Computing, Bath Spa University, her slides can be seen here.

Following the same format as in the morning, after these presentations, the speakers proposed questions and challenges that attendees could discuss in smaller break-out rooms. Questions given by speakers of the afternoon session were:

1. Should we be collecting examples of AIs, as well as using AI to preserve collections? What are the Implications of this
2. How do we get more people to feel that they can ask questions about AI?
3. How do we use AI to think about the complexity of what identity is and how do we engineer it so that technologies work for the benefit of everyone?

There was a general consensus, which acknowledged that AI is becoming a significant and pervasive part of our life. However it was felt that there are many aspects we don't fully understand. In the breakout groups workshop participants raised more questions, including:

• Where would AI-based items sit in collections?
• Why do we want it?
• How to collect?
• What do we want to collect? User interactions? The underlying technology? Many are patented technologies owned by corporations, so this makes it challenging. 
• What would make AI more accessible?
• Some research outputs may be AI-based - do we need to collect all the code, or just the end experience produced? If the latter, could this be similar to documenting evidence e.g. video/sound recordings or transcripts.
• Could or should we use AI to collect? Who’s behind the AI? Who gets to decide what to archive and how? Who’s responsible for mistakes/misrepresentations made by the AI?

There was debate about how to define AI in terms of a publication/collection item, it was felt that an understanding of this would help to decide what archives and libraries should be collecting, and understand what is not being collected currently. It was mentioned that a need for user input is a critical factor in answering questions like this. A number of challenges of collecting using AI were raised in the group discussions, including:

• Lack of standardisation in formats and metadata
• Questions of authorship and copyright
• Ethical considerations
• Engagement with creators/developers

It was suggested that full scale automation is not completely desirable and some kind of human element is required for specialist collections. However, AI might be useful for speeding up manual human work.

There was discussion of problems of bias in data, that existing prejudices are baked into datasets and algorithms. This led to more questions about:

• Is there is a role for curators in defining and designing unbiased and more representative data sets to more fairly reflect society?
• Should archives collect training data, to understand underlying biases?
• Who is the author of AI created text and dialogue? Who is the legally responsible person/orgnisation?
• What opportunities are there for libraries and archives to teach people about digital safety through understanding datasets and how they are used?

Participants also questioned:

• Why do we humanise AI?
• Why do we give AI a gender?
• Is society ready for a genderless AI?
• Could the next progress in AI be a combination of human/AI? A biological advancement? Human with AI “components” - would that make us think of AIs as fallible?

With so many questions and a lack of answers, it was felt that fiction may also help us to better understand some of these issues, and Rachel Foss ended the roundtable discussion by saying that she is looking forward to reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel Klara and the Sun, about an artificial being called Klara who longs to find a human owner, which is due to be published next month by Faber.

Thanks to everyone who spoke at and participated in this AURA workshop, to make it a lively and productive event. Extra special thanks to Deirdre Sullivan for helping to run the online event smoothly. Looking ahead, the third workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Archives: What comes next? is being organised by the University of Edinburgh in partnership with the AURA project team, and is scheduled to take place on Tuesday 16 March 2021. Please do join the AURA mailing list and follow #AURA_network on social media to be part of the network's ongoing discussions.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom)

For the past four years, the British Library has been researching, collecting and documenting complex digital publications produced in the UK. Born in response to the 2013 UK Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations, the Emerging Formats project looked at different examples of digital writing, analysed how these can be best preserved and given access to within the specific requirements of a library environment. As part of this work, we hosted a Postdoctoral Innovation Placement researcher, Lynda Clark, who helped us build an Interactive Narratives collection hosted in the UK Web Archive.

Building on from what we learned from Lynda’s work, we created a new collection of emerging media: The New Media Writing Prize collection. The New Media Writing Prize was founded in 2010 and over the past decade has attracted a diverse and innovative range of works from all over the world. Its aim is to showcase and celebrate new and often experimental forms of digital storytelling, crossing formats and genres.

The New Media Writing Prize logo

The collection features shortlisted and winning entries for different categories awarded through the years (main prize, student prize, journalism prize and DOT award), from 2010 to the present. There are over 100 works in the collection, written in a variety of formats: from web-based interactive fiction, to apps and augmented reality table top installations. This exciting variety is also a preservation challenge: some of the online works have already disappeared, or can only be captured partially with our web archiving tools, as they include live data or physical elements. For instances when archiving the work itself wasn’t possible, we tried capturing the documentation around the publication instead, archiving press reviews, blog posts and author’s websites.

While the collection is available online, most of its entries are only accessible on Library premises because of copyright restrictions. A few, however, can also be accessed remotely: for example, Serge Bouchardon’s Loss of Grasp, J.R. Carpenter’s City Fish, Alan Bigelow’s Life of Fly and Amira Hanafi’s What I Am Wearing.

The 2020 New Media Writing Prize shortlist

The work on the collection is far from over: next steps include investigating how to best preserve and present Flash works, accurately describing and linking works in the catalogue and keeping the collection up-to-date. The 2020 shortlist has just been announced for both the main prize and the digital journalism award, so these new entries will soon be added to the collection. You can read the latest news about the New Media Writing Prize on their Twitter or Facebook channels – keep your eyes peeled for the 2020 winners announcement on the 20th January!

This post is by Giulia Carla Rossi, Curator of Digital Publications on twitter as @giugimonogatari.

Today Wikipedia, the world’s collaborative, online, free encyclopedia is marking it's twentieth birthday. Many celebrations are underway for this, including a #WikiLovesCakes online bake off competition organised by Wikimedia UK, which will be judged by Sandi Toksvig and Nick Poole.

Alas I am lacking in baking skills (though I am excellent at cake eating!), so I’m marking #Wikipedia20 with a reflection on how the British Library has collaborated with Wikimedia and contributed to Wikipedia over the last few years.

I am also delighted to announce that a memorandum of understanding has been signed this month between the British Library and Wikimedia UK for a new Wikimedian-in-Residence. My colleague Richard Davies who signed this agreement on behalf of the Library said:

“The Library has learnt a great deal both from and since our first Wikipedian-in-Residence in 2012-2013, Andrew Gray. Through this new residency we will be able to build on this hugely successful work with Wikipedia, across all our collection areas. It will also enable the Library to contribute more to the GLAM-Wiki Community in a coordinated and sustainable way, with particular emphasis on increasing the visibility of our digital collections, data and research materials from underrepresented people and marginalised communities through the development of innovative partnership projects.”

We are really looking forward to hosting this new residency, so watch this blog for future updates on this project. Fortunately this residency will be building upon existing experience, as British Library colleagues from many departments have actively engaged with Wikipedia and the Wikimedia family of platforms over several years. I will do my best to give summaries of some of these below:

BL Labs has collaborated with Wikimedia Commons in a number of ways, including:

• Working with volunteers to identify 50,000 maps as part of the 1 million images released on Flickr Commons, this included a Halloween Map Tagathon event. James Heald was recognised for co-ordinating this map work in the Wikimedia Community, through a Jury’s special mention prize in the BL Labs Awards 2015 and Maurice Nicholson  was recognised in 2016 for his work leading the geo-referencing of these maps. Recently the wider volunteer community was rewarded with a Community Award for completing the georeferencing of these Maps in 2020. 
• Ben O’Steen, who was responsible for the Library’s 1 million images released on Flickr Commons, received an Honourable Mention for his work in the UK Wikimedian of the Year 2014 awards. 
• BL Labs assisted Erasmus undergraduate student Dimi Charalampidou from the Library Science and Information Systems department at the Alexander Technological Education Institution of Thessaloniki, in 2015 in her dissertation, which was about uploading a collection of over 7000 digitised bookbindings images onto Wikimedia Commons using bulk upload tools.
• BL Labs were interviewed about the long term impact of Wikimedians in residence in 2018, you can read this here. 

BL Labs have also supported the excellent Wikipedia project Wiki-Food and (mostly) Women, this is an ongoing partnership with the Oxford Symposium of Food & Cookery (OSFC), which was initiated in 2015 by experienced Wikipedia editor and trainer Roberta Wedge, former OSFC Trustee Bee Wilson, OSFC Director Ursula Heinzelmann and the British Library’s Polly Russell. This project has held regular Wikipedia edit-a-thons at the British Library and in Oxford, providing training and support for Wikipedia editing with the aim of increasing and improving the articles about food, especially ones about women’s contributions to food and cooking culture. When this project started 90% of Wikipedia editors were men and this gender bias was reflected in Wikipedia coverage. There is still a bias, but thanks to the efforts of Wikipedia and many wonderful projects worldwide this gender balance is being addressed. Their plans for edit-a-thon events in 2020 were curtailed by Covid-19, but they did run some online training sessions and surgeries with Roberta Wedge at the OSFC virtual conference in 2020.

Another collaboration addressing gender balance issues was a recent Wikithon: Women in Leeds event, which took place on 22nd November 2020, to create and improve Wikipedia articles about some of the amazing women of Leeds, past and present. This was part of the British Library's cultural programme in Yorkshire, working with other GLAM organisations in the region. It was co-organised by Kenn Taylor from the British Library, in partnership with Rhian Isaac of Leeds Libraries and Lucy Moore of Leeds Museums & Galleries, for the season of events accompanying the British Library’s exhibition, "Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women’s Rights".

Hope Miyoba, Wikimedian in Residence for the Science Museum Group, who is based at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, gave an excellent training session on how to edit Wikipedia and the event produced new articles for Catherine Mary Buckton, the first woman elected to public office in Leeds, sharpshooter and circus performer Florence Shufflebottom, and philanthropist Marjorie Ziff who is notable for her contributions to the Jewish community in Leeds, whose article was further improved by the Women in Red editing community. This event also inspired me to create a new Wikipedia article for writer Rosie Garland, who is also a singer in Leeds goth band The March Violets.

Positive feedback was received from participants at this event, with comments such as ‘my 9 year old daughter says she wants to do this forever’, ‘just finished Uni and missing researching things, so this is definitely a good lockdown activity to get into!’ and ‘I’m thinking about how to incorporate women and Wikipedia entries into my teaching!’.

Wikidata page for the Society of Authors

In addition to editing Wikipedia and adding images to Wikimedia Commons, a number of British Library staff have been editing Wikidata. In 2020 Eleanor Casson from the Contemporary Literary and Creative Archives team updated seventy Wikipedia articles and seventy two Wikidata entries with information about their collections, see the entry for the Society of Authors example in the image above, and Graham Jevon from the Endangered Archives Project has been using the Wikidata reconciliation service to validate and create authority records. This work enabled him to create more than three hundred authority records for people identified in a digitised collection of photographs from South America, which will be published online soon. Graham says:

"Wikidata has proved particularly helpful for continued productivity and collaboration while working from home during lockdown. It has enabled a colleague without access to internal cataloguing systems to create and edit authority records in Wikidata, which I can then extract to update the BL’s systems. This is a win-win. It helps us update our own catalogue records while simultaneously enhancing the shared Wikidata resource."

Before I end this post, I also want to flag up the excellent work done by the global GLAM–Wiki community (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, also including botanic gardens and zoos), which advises and supports cultural institutions to share their resources with the world through collaborative projects with experienced Wikipedia editors.

Also the awesome #1Lib1Ref campaign (abbreviation for one librarian, one reference), which invites librarians around the world, and anyone who has a passion for free knowledge, to add missing references to articles on Wikipedia, with the aim to reduce Wikipedia's backlog of citation needed notices.

Please do add some references and eat some cake to celebrate Wikipedia's 20th birthday this year, I know I will be. You may also like to listen to BBC Radio 4’s The World At One programme from earlier today (15/01/2021), where David Gerard and myself discuss Wikipedia and libraries, you can hear this section from 37 minutes 55 seconds into the recording.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom)

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

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  Galleries,  Libraries,  Archives 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 '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 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 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.

Press Picker by Living with Machines Project

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

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'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:

• Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship
• Living with Machines
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) /Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR)
• Digital Comics Collaborative Doctoral Students (see other blog post too)
• Computing for Cultural Heritage PGCert
• Digital Scholarship Training Programme Online
• World of Wikimedia and Wikimedia Wednesdays Talks and Training Sessions for BL Staff (hiring a Wikimedian in residence)

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:

• The British Library's Content strategy
• Supporting research, such as webinars on a range of services and highlighting the 'Open and Engaged 2020' conference
• Highlight content available off site such as EThOS 
• Making our research and data available through our institutional repository to enable search within and across partner content
• Make content citable and have links to ORCID, thanks to the FREYA project
• Refreshing of the British Library's data service strategy
• Unified discovery of content across the BL and also across wider open cultural content
• Towards a National Collection and the hope to build on Heritage Persistent Identifiers  (PIDs)
• Single Digital Presence

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:

• Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs
• Filipe Bento, Technical Lead BL Labs
• Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education and Science
• Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator, Contemporary British Collections
• Deidre Sullivan, Business Support Officer
• Nora McGregor, Digital Curator, European and Americas Collections
• Neil Fitzgerald, Head of Digital Research

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 - 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 video, longer video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

• Inspiring computationally-driven research with the BL’s collections: a GLAM Notebooks approach
  Enabling cultural heritage institutions and 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.

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 video, full 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 video, full 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 video, longer video, full 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.

• 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)

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

• 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.

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 video, full 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

• 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.

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 video, full 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 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.

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 video, full 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 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.

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 video, full 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 video, Full 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 video, full 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 Results of Public Vote (1230 votes cast) Numbers on image correspond to the those in the table below:

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

CONGRATULATIONS TO...

• 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.

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:

• Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs
• Filipe Bento, Technical Lead BL Labs
• Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education and Science
• Richard Davies, Head of Collection Programmes
• Paul Clements, Head of Architecture and Design
• Harriet Darcel, Head of Marketing

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 video, full 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 video, full 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 by AWATE (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 video, full 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

• 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’.

• 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

• 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 video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details and the simulator is available here.

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.

• 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

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

• 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 nominated by Ian Cooke (Head of Contemporary British Published Collections) on behalf of Giulia Carla Rossi (Curator, Digital Publications)
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details, bitsy available here.

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. 

Symposium YouTube Playlist 2019	Symposium YouTube Playlist 2018	Symposium YouTube Playlist 2017	Symposium YouTube Playlist 2016	Symposium YouTube Playlist 2015
Symposium YouTube Playlist 2014	BL Labs Launch YouTube Playlist 2013	Building Library Labs YouTube Playlist 2018	Text& Data Mining YouTube Playlist 2015	Curious Images YouTube Playlist 2014

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Conclusion and Season's Greetings

British 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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