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

Introduction to the British Library

Day 1

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

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

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

British Library interior

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

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

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

The George the IV British Library book collection

Day 2

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

British Library Labs leaflet

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

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

An example of a Victorian meme

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

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

Day 3

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

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

SherlockNet web interface

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

British Library Alice in Wonderland Poster

Day 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 5

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

Digitised Hebrew Manuscript available through the British Library

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Mahendra Mahey (Manager of BL Labs) on behalf of Michael Takeo Magruder (BL Labs Artist/Researcher in Residence).

Michael Takeo Marguder's Gazell.io works

Earlier this year I was invited by Gazelli Art House to be a digital artist-in-residence on their online platform Gazell.io. After a series of conversations with Gazelli’s director, Mila Askarova, we decided it would be a perfect opportunity to broker a partnership with British Library Labs and use the occasion to publish some of the work-in-progress ideas from my Imaginary Cities project at the British Library.

Given Gazelli’s growing interest in and reputation for exhibiting virtual reality (VR) art, we chose to launch my March showcase with A New Jerusalem since it was in many ways the inspiration for the Imaginary Cities concept.

A New Jerusalem by Michael Takeo Magruder

During the second half of my Gazell.io residency I began publishing various aesthetic-code studies that had been created for the Imaginary Cities project. I was also invited by Gazelli to hold a private sharing event at their London gallery in Mayfair to showcase some of the project’s physical experiments and outcomes. The evening was organised by Gazelli’s Artist Liaison, Victoria Al-Din, and brought together colleagues from the British Library, art curators from leading cultural institutions and academics connected to media art practice. It was a wonderful event, and it was incredibly useful to be able to present my ideas and the resulting artistic-technical prototypes to a group with such a deep and broad range of expertise. 

Sharing works in progress for the Imaginary Cities project at Gazelli Art House, London. 30th March 2017

Posted by Mahendra Mahey on behalf of Melodee Beals, Lecturer in History, Department of Politics, History and International Relations, School of Social, Political and Geographical Sciences, Loughborough University

Image courtesy of David Brewer CC-BY.

Two hundred years ago, the British public was abuzz with news of revolution, mass migration and an uncertain economic future. And into this excited and worried noise stepped an army of young and adventurous newspapers, working hard to give their readers the world at their fingers. From Calcutta to Peru, Sydney to Istanbul, Paris to New York, they overflowed with news of peoples, places and political scandals from all over the world.

But, before satellites, radio or the telegraph, they relied on people – friends, family, and fellow newspaper men and women – to send in letters and clippings from around the world to provide the most up-to-date and wide-ranging news to their readers. This scissors-and-paste journalism was the very backbone of many British newspapers up through the 1850s but we still don’t know enough about how it worked in practice.

You can help!

On 27 April 2017, British Library Labs and Loughborough University will be hosting a free, public workshop at the British Library in the Foyle Suite, Centre for Conservation, London, introducing “Georgian Pingbacks”, a new crowdsourcing website to allow the public (you!) to help uncover how news—the good, the fake and the poorly punctuated—spread across the country. With just a few clicks on your smartphone, tablet or home computer on your daily commute or queuing for the till, you can contribute to the growing debate on what makes news “real” and what makes it “viral”.

After a talk on scissors-and-paste journalism by Dr M. H. Beals (Loughborough University), exploring the history of this much loved system of “theft”, we will take you through our brand new website, where you can help contribute to our collective understanding of historical journalism, one clip and one click at a time.

This event is free, open to the public and a complimentary lunch will be provided.

To register, please visit our Eventbrite website.

If you have any questions about the event, please contact Dr Beals at [email protected]. Please note, to fully take part in the event, you will need to bring a laptop or other internet-ready device, such as a tablet or large-screen smartphone, but this is not a requirement for attendance.

Calling all transcription enthusiasts! We’ve launched a competition to find an accurate and automated transcription solution for our rare Indian books and printed catalogue records, currently being digitised through the Two Centuries of Indian Print project. 

The competition, in partnership with the University of Salford’s PRIMA Research Lab, is part of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, taking place in Kyoto, Japan this November. The winners will be announced at a special event during the conference.

Digitised images of the books will be made openly available through the library’s website and we hope this competition will produce transcriptions that enable full text search and discovery of this rich material. Sharing XML transcriptions will also give researchers the foundation to apply computational tools and methods such as text mining that may lead to new insights into book and publishing history in India.   

Split into two challenges, those wishing to participate in the competition can enter either or both.

The first challenge is to find an automated transcription for the 19^th century printed books written in Bengali script. Optical Character Recognition of many non-Latin scripts is a developing area, but still presents a considerable barrier for libraries and other cultural institutions hoping to open up their material for scholarly research.

Above: A page from 'Animal Biography', one of the Bengali books being digitised as part of Two Centuries of Indian Print (VT 1712)

Challenge number two involves our printed catalogue records, known as ‘Quarterly Lists’. These describe books published in India between 1867 and 1967. The lists are arranged in tables and therefore accurately representing the layout of the data is important if researchers are able to use computational methods to identify chunks of information such as the place of publication and cost of the book.    

 Above: A typical double page from the Quarterly Lists (SV 412/8)

With the competition now open, we’ve already gone some way to helping participants by manually transcribing a few pages to create ‘ground truth’ using PRIMA's editing tool, Aletheia.  You can watch a video introducing the competition. So if you or anyone you know would like to enter, do please register and you could be contributing to this landmark project, and picking up an award for your troubles!   

Guest post by James Baker, Lecturer in Digital History and Archives, University of Sussex.

Librarians play a crucial role in cultivating world-class research and in most disciplinary areas today world-class research relies on the use of software. Established non-profit organisations such as Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry offer introductory software skills training with a focus on the needs and requirements of research scientists. Library Carpentry is a comparable introductory software skills training programme with a focus on the needs and requirements of library professionals: and by software skills, I mean coding and data manipulation that go beyond the use of familiar office suites. As librarians have substantial expertise working with data, we believe that adding software skills to their armoury is an effective and important use of professional development resource that benefits both library professionals and their colleagues and collaborators across higher education and beyond.

In November 2015 the first Library Carpentry workshop programme took place at City University London Centre for Information, generously supported by the Software Sustainability Institute as part of my 2015 Fellowship. Since then 21 workshops have run in 7 countries across 4 continents and the Library Carpentry training materials have been developed by an international team of librarians, information scientists, and information technologists. Our half-day lessons, which double up as self-guided learning materials, now cover the basics of data and computing, using a command line prompt to manipulate data, version control in Git, normalising data in OpenRefine, working with databases in SQL, and programming with Python.

What distinguishes these lessons from other learning materials are that the exercises and use cases that frame Library Carpentry are drawn from library practice and are based on data familiar to librarians: in most cases, open datasets of publication metadata released under an open licence by the British Library. Library Carpentry then is as much about daily practice as it is about novelty, about dealing with what is front of us today as much as about preparing us for what is coming.

These lessons and everything we do is in the commons, for the commons, and are not tied to any institution or person. We are a community effort built and maintained by the community. For more on Library Carpentry and our future plans, see our recent article in LIBER Quarterly (Baker et al. Library Carpentry: software skills training for library professionals. 2016. DOI: http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10176) and our website librarycarpentry.github.io.

James Baker, receiving the BL Labs Award for Teaching and Learning 2016 on behalf of the Library Carpentry community 

The BL Labs Learning and Teaching Award given to Library Carpentry at the 2016 British Library Labs Awards has enabled us to extend this community. In November we launched a call for Library Carpentry workshops seeking financial support. We were humbled by the volume and diversity of the responses received and are delighted to be able to fund two very different workshops that will reach very different communities of librarians. The first is a collaboration between Somerset Libraries Glass Box Project, {Libraries:Hacked}, and Plymouth Libraries for a Library Carpentry workshop that will target public, academic, and specialist librarians. The second workshop will take place at University of Sheffield and will be coordinated by the White Rose Consortium for the benefit of university librarians across the region. Details of these events will be advertised at librarycarpentry.github.io in due course, along with four or five Library Carpentry workshops that were unable to fund but that will still enjoy logistical support from members of the Library Carpentry community.

Library Carpentry has taken great strides in a short period of time. We continue to maintain and update our lesson materials to ensure that they fit with library practice and we are working closely with Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry to map out a future direction for Library Carpentry that meets the needs of this valuable community. We are always looking for people to bring their expertise and perspective to this work. So if you want to get involved in any capacity, please post something in our Gitter discussion forum, raise a issue on or suggest an edit to one of our lessons, contact us via Twitter, or request support with a workshop. We'd love to hear from you.

In this guest post, Thomas Evans discusses his work with Digital Curator Dr Mia Ridge to re-imagine the interface to the British Library's popular Online Catalogue of Illuminated manuscripts.

The original Catalogue was built using an Access 2003 database, and allows users to create detailed searches from amongst 20 fields (such as date, title, origin, and decoration) or follow 'virtual exhibitions' to view manuscripts. Search-based interfaces can be ideal for specialists who already know what they're looking for, but the need to think of a search term likely to yield interesting results can be an issue for people unfamiliar with a catalogue. 'Generous interfaces' are designed as rich, browsable experiences that highlight the scope and composition of a particular collection by loading the page with images linked to specific items or further categories. Mia asked Thomas to apply faceted browsing and 'generous' styles to help first-time visitors discover digitised illuminated manuscripts. In this post Thomas explains the steps he took to turn the catalogue data supplied into a more 'generous' browsing interface. An archived version of his interface is available on the Internet Archive.

With over 4,300 manuscripts, written in a variety of languages and created in countries across Europe over a period of about a thousand years, the British Library's collection of illuminated manuscripts contains a diverse treasure trove of information and imagery for both the keen enthusiast and the total novice.

As the final project for my Masters in Computer Science at UCL, I worked with the British Library to design and start to implement alternative ways of exploring the collection. This project had some constraints in time, knowledge and resources. The final deadline for submission was only four months after receiving the project outline and the success of the project rested on the knowledge, experience and research of a fresh-faced rookie (me) using whatever tools I had the wherewithal to cobble together (open source software running on a virtual machine server hosted by UCL).

Rather than showing visitors an empty search box when they first arrive, a generous interface will show them everything available. However, taken literally, displaying 'everything' means details for over 4,300 manuscripts and around 40,000 images would have to be displayed on one page. While this approach would offer visitors a way to explore the entire catalogue, it could be quite unwieldy.

One way to reduce the number of manuscripts loaded onto the screen is to allow visitors to filter out some items, for example limiting the 'date' field to between 519 and 927 or the 'region' field to England. This is 'faceted' browsing, and it makes exploration more manageable. Presenting the list of available values for region or language, etc., also gives you a sense of the collection's diversity. It also means that 'quirky' members of the collection are less likely to be overlooked.

An example of 'date' facets providing an instant overview of the temporal range of the Catalogue

For example, if you were to examine 30 random manuscripts from the British Library's collection, you might find 20 written in Latin, three each in French and English, and perhaps one each in Greek, Hebrew or Italian. You would almost certainly miss that the Catalogue contains a manuscript written in Cornish, another in Portuguese and another in Icelandic. These languages might be of interest precisely because they are hard to come by in the British Library's catalogue. Listing all the available languages (as well as their frequencies) exposes the exceptional parts of the collection where an unfaceted generous interface would hide them in plain sight.

Once I understood the project's goals and completed some high-level planning and design sketches, it was time to get to grips with implementation. Being fairly inexperienced, I found some tasks took much longer than expected. A few examples which stick in the mind are properly configuring the web server, debugging errant server-side scripts (which have a habit of failing either silently or with an unhelpful error message) and transforming Library's database into a form which I could use.

Being the work of many hands over the years, the database inevitably contained some tiny differences in the way entries were recorded, which Mia informs me is not uncommon for a long-standing database in a collecting institution. These small inconsistencies - for example, the use of an en-dash in some cases and a hyphen in others - look fine to us, but confuse a computer. I worked around these where I could, 'cleaning' the records only when I was certain of my correction.

Being new to web design, I built the interface iteratively, component by component, consulting periodically with Mia for feedback. Thankfully, frameworks exist for responsive web design and page templating. Nevertheless, there was a small learning curve and some thought was required to properly separate application logic from presentation logic.

There were some ambitions for the project which were ultimately not pursued due to time (and knowledge!) constraints, but this iterative process made other improvements possible over the course of my project. To make exploration of the catalogue easier, the page listing a manuscript's details also contained links to related manuscripts. For instance, Ioannes Rhosos is attributed as the scribe of Harley 5699, so, on that manuscript's page, users could click on his name to see a list of all manuscripts by him. They could then apply further filters if desired. This made links between manuscripts much more clear than the old interface, but it is limited to direct links which were explicitly recorded in the database.

An example of a relevant feature not explicitly recorded in the database is genre - only by reading manuscript descriptions can you determine whether it is religious, historical, medical etc. in its subject matter. Two possible techniques for revealing such features were considered: applying natural language processing to manuscript descriptions in order to classify them, or analysing data about which manuscripts were viewed by which users to build a recommendation system. Both of these turned out to require more in-depth knowledge than I was able to acquire within the time limit of the project.

I enjoyed working out how to transform all the possible inputs to the webpage into queries which could be run against the database, dealing with missing/invalid inputs by providing appropriate defaults etc. There was a quiet satisfaction to be had when tests of the interface went well - seeing something work and thinking 'I made that!'. It was also a pleasure to work with data about such an engaging topic.

Hopefully, this project will have proved that exploration of British Library's Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts has the potential to become a richer experience. Relationships between manuscripts which are currently not widely known could be revealed to more visitors and, if the machine learning techniques were to be implemented, perhaps new relationships would be revealed and related manuscripts could be recommended. My project showed the potential for applying new computational methods to better reveal the character of collections and connections between their elements. Although the interface I delivered has some way to go before it can achieve this goal, I earnestly hope that it is a first step in that direction.

Thomas' Catalogue interface

The 4th annual British Library Labs Symposium was held on 7th November 2016, and the event was a great success in celebrating and showcasing Digital Scholarship and highlighting the work of BL Labs and their collaborators. The exciting day included the announcement of the winners of the BL Labs Competition and BL Labs Awards, as well as of the runners up who are presented in this blog post. Posts written by all of the winners and runners up about their work are also scheduled for the next few weeks - watch this space!

BL Labs Competition finalist for 2016
Roly Keating, Chief Executive of the British Library announced that the runner up of the two finalists of the BL Labs Competition for 2016 was...

Black Abolitionist Performances and their Presence in Britain
By Hannah-Rose Murray (PhD student at the University of Nottingham)

Roly Keating, Chief Executive of the British Library, welcoming Hannah-Rose Murray on to the stage.

The project focuses on African American lives, experiences and lectures in Britain between 1830–1895. By assessing black abolitionist speeches in the British Library’s nineteenth-century newspaper collection and using the British Library’s Flickr Commons 1 million collection. to illustrate, the project has illuminated their performances and how their lectures reached nearly every corner of Britain. For the first time, the location of these meetings has been mapped and the number and scale of the lectures given by black abolitionists in Britain has been evaluated, allowing their hidden voices to be heard and building a more complete picture of Victorian London for us. Hannah-Rose has recently posted an update about her work and the project findings can also be found on her website: www.frederickdouglassinbritain.com.

Hannah-Rose Murray is a second year PhD student with the Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham. Her AHRC/M3C-funded PhD focuses on the legacy of formerly enslaved African Americans on British society and the different ways they fought British racism. Hannah-Rose received a first class Masters degree in Public History from Royal Holloway University and has a BA History degree from University College London (UCL). In Nottingham, Hannah-Rose works closely with the Centre for Research in Race and Rights and is one of the postgraduate directors of the Rights and Justice Research Priority Area, which includes the largest number of scholars (700) in the world working on rights and justice.

BL Labs Awards runners up for 2016

Research Award runner up
Allan Sudlow, Head of Research Development at the British Library announced that the runner up of the Research Award was...

Nineteenth-century Newspaper Analytics
By Paul Fyfe (Associate Professor of English, North Carolina State University) and Qian Ge (PhD Candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Carolina State University)

Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Analytics

The project represents an innovative partnership between researchers in English literature, Electrical & Computer Engineering, and data analytics in pursuit of a seemingly simple research question: How can computer vision and image processing techniques be adapted for large-scale interpretation of historical illustrations? The project is developing methods in image analytics to study a corpus of illustrated nineteenth-century British newspapers from the British Library’s collection, including The Graphic, The Illustrated Police News, and the Penny Illustrated Paper. 

Paul Fyfe and Qian Ge gave a recorded acceptance speech at the Symposium as they were unable to attend in person.

It aims to suggest ways of adapting image processing techniques to other historical media while also pursuing scholarship on nineteenth-century visual culture and the illustrated press. The project also exposes the formidable technical challenges presented by historical illustrations and suggests ways to refine computer vision algorithms and analytics workflows for such difficult data. The website includes sample workflows as well as speculations about how large-scale image analytics might yield insights into the cultural past, plus much more: http://ncna.dh.chass.ncsu.edu/imageanalytics 

Commercial Award runner up
Isabel Oswell, Head of Business Audiences at the British Library announced that the runner up of the Commercial Award was...

Poetic Places
By Sarah Cole (TIME/IMAGE organisation and Creative Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the British Library)

Sarah Cole, presenting Poetic Places Poetic Places

Poetic Places is a free app for iOS and Android devices which was launched in March 2016. It brings poetic depictions of places into the everyday world, helping users to encounter poems in the locations described by the literature, accompanied by contextualising historical narratives and relevant audiovisual materials. These materials are primarily drawn from open archive collections, including the British Library Flickr collection. Utilising geolocation services and push notifications, Poetic Places can (whilst running in the background on the device) let users know when they stumble across a place depicted in verse and art, encouraging serendipitous discovery. Alternatively, they can browse the poems and places via map and list interfaces as a source of inspiration without travelling. Poetic Places aspires to give a renewed sense of place, to bring together writings and paintings and sounds to mean more than they do alone, and to bring literature into people’s everyday life in unexpected moments.

Artistic Award runner up
Jamie Andrews, Head of Culture and Learning at the British Library announced that the runner up of the Artistic Award was... 

Kristina Hofmann and Claudia Rosa Lukas

Fashion Utopia
By Kris Hofmann (Animation Director) and Claudia Rosa Lukas (Curator)

 
Fashion Utopia

The project involved the creation of an 80 second animation and five vines which accompanied the Austrian contribution to the International Fashion Showcase London, organised annually by the British Council and the British Fashion Council. Fashion Utopia garnered creative inspiration from the treasure trove of images from the British Library Flickr Commons collection and more than 500 images were used to create a moving collage that was, in a second step, juxtaposed with stop-frame animated items of fashion and accessories.

Teaching / Learning Award runner up
Ria Bartlett, Lead Producer: Onsite Learning at the British Library announced that the runner up of the Teaching / Learning Award was...

The PhD Abstracts Collections in FLAX: Academic English with the Open Access Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) at the British Library

By Shaoqun Wu (FLAX Research & Development and Lecturer in Computer Science), Alannah Fitzgerald (FLAX Open Education Research and PhD Candidate), Ian H. Witten (FLAX Project Lead and Professor of Computer Science) and Chris Mansfield (English Language and Academic Writing Tutor)

The PhD Abstracts Collections in FLAX

The project presents an educational research study into the development and evaluation of domain-specific language corpora derived from PhD abstracts with the Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) at the British Library. The collections, which are openly available from this study, were built using the interactive FLAX (Flexible Language Acquisition flax.nzdl.org) open-source software for uptake in English for Specific Academic Purposes programmes (ESAP) at Queen Mary University of London. The project involved the harvesting of metadata, including the abstracts of 400,000 doctoral theses from UK universities, from the EThOS Toolkit at the British Library. These digital PhD abstract text collections were then automatically analysed, enriched, and transformed into a resource that second-language and novice research writers can browse and query in order to extend their ability to understand the language used in specific domains, and to help them develop their abstract writing. It is anticipated that the practical contribution of the FLAX tools and the EThOS PhD Abstract collections will benefit second-language and novice research writers in understanding the language used to achieve the persuasive and promotional aspects of the written research abstract genre. It is also anticipated that users of the collections will be able to develop their arguments more fluently and precisely through the practice of research abstract writing to project a persuasive voice as is used in specific research disciplines.

Alannah Fitzgerald and Chris Mansfield receiving the Runner Up Teaching and Learning Award on behalf of the FLAX team.

British Library Labs Staff Award runner up
Phil Spence, Chief Operating Officer at the British Library announced that the runner up of the British Library Labs Staff Award as...

SHINE 2.0 - A Historical Search Engine

Led by Andy Jackson (Web Archiving Technical Lead at the British Library) and Gil Hoggarth (Senior Web Archiving Engineer at the British Library)

SHINE

SHINE is a state-of-the-art demonstrator for the potential of Web Archives to transform research. The current implementation of SHINE exposes metadata from the Internet Archive's UK domain web archives for the years 1996- 2013. This data was licensed for use by the British Library by agreement with JISC. SHINE represents a high level of innovation in access and analysis of web archives, allowing sophisticated searching of a very large and loosely-structured dataset and showing many of the characteristics of "Big Social Data". Users can fine-tune results to look for file-types, results from specific domains, languages used and geo-location data (post-code look-up). The interface was developed by Web Archive technical development alongside the AHRC-funded Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities project. An important concept in its design and development was that it would be researcher-led and SHINE was developed iteratively with research case studies relating to use of UK web archives.

Andy Jackson, Receiving the Runner up Staff Award on behalf of the SHINE team

The lead institution for SHINE was the University of London, with Professor Jane Winters as principle investigator, and former British Library staff members Peter Webster and Helen Hockx were also instrumental in developing the project and maintaining researcher engagement through the project. 

The 4th annual British Library Labs Symposium took place on 7th November 2016 and was a resounding success! 

More than 220 people attended and the event was a fantastic experience, showcasing and celebrating the Digital Scholarship field and highlighting the work of BL Labs and their collaborators. The Symposium included a number of exciting announcements about the winners of the BL Labs Competition and BL Labs Awards, who are presented in this blog post. Separate posts will be published about the runners up of the Competition and Awards and posts written by all of the winners and runners up about their work are also scheduled for the next few weeks - watch this space!

BL Labs Competition winner for 2016

Roly Keating, Chief Executive of the British Library announced that the overall winner of the BL Labs Competition for 2016 was...

SherlockNet: Using Convolutional Neural Networks to automatically tag and caption the British Library Flickr collection
By Karen Wang and Luda Zhao, Masters students at Stanford University, and Brian Do, Harvard Medicine MD student

Machine learning can extract information and insights from data on a massive scale. The project developed and optimised Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), inspired by biological neural networks in the brain, in order to tag and caption the British Library’s Flickr Commons 1 million collection. In the first step of the project, images were classified with general categorical tags (e.g. “people”, “maps”). This served as the basis for the development of new ways to facilitate rapid online tagging with user-defined sets of tags. In the second stage, automatically generate descriptive natural-language captions were provided for images (e.g. “A man in a meadow on a horse”). This computationally guided approach has produced automatic pattern recognition which provides a more intuitive way for researchers to discover and use images. The tags and captions will be made accessible and searchable by the public through the web-based interface and text annotations will be used to globally analyse trends in the Flickr collection over time.

SherlockNet team presenting at the Symposium

Karen Wang is currently a senior studying Computer Science at Stanford University, California. She also has an Art Practice minor. Karen is very interested in the intersection of computer science and humanities research, so this project is near and dear to her heart! She will be continuing her studies next year at Stanford in CS, Artificial Intelligence track.

Luda Zhao is currently a Masters student studying Computer Science at Stanford University, living in Palo Alto, California. He is interested in using machine learning and data mining to tackle tough problems in a variety of real-life contexts, and he's excited to work with the British Library to make art more discoverable for people everywhere.

Brian Do grew up in sunny California and is a first-year MD/PhD student at Harvard Medical School. Previously he studied Computer Science and biology at Stanford. Brian loves using data visualisation and cutting edge tools to reveal unexpected things about sports, finance and even his own text message history.

SherlockNet recently posted an update of their work and you can try out their SherlockNet interface and tell us what you think.

BL Labs Awards winners for 2016

Research Award winner

Allan Sudlow, Head of Research Development at the British Library announced that the winner of the Research Award was...

Scissors and Paste

By Melodee Beals, Lecturer in Digital History at Loughborough University and historian of migration and media

Melodee Beals presenting Scissors & Paste

Scissors and Paste utilises the 1800-1900 digitised British Library Newspapers, collection to explore the possibilities of mining large-scale newspaper databases for reprinted and repurposed news content. The project has involved the development of a suite of tools and methodologies, created using both out-of-the-box and custom-made project-specific software, to efficiently identify reprint families of journalistic texts and then suggest both directionality and branching within these subsets. From these case-studies, detailed analyses of additions, omissions and wholesale changes offer insights into the mechanics of reprinting that left behind few if any other traces in the historical record.

Melodee Beals joined the Department of Politics, History and International Relations at Loughborough University in September 2015. Previously, Melodee has worked as a pedagogical researcher for the History Subject Centre, a teaching fellow for the School of Comparative American Studies at the University of Warwick and a Principal Lecturer for Sheffield Hallam University, where she acted as Subject Group Leader for History. Melodee completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow.

Commercial Award winner

Isabel Oswell, Head of Business Audiences at the British Library announced that the winner of the Commercial Award was...

Curating Digital Collections to Go Mobile

By Mitchel Davis, publishing and media entrepreneur

Mitchell Davis presenting Curating Digital Collections to Go Mobile

As a direct result of its collaborative work with the British Library, BiblioLabs has developed BiblioBoard, an award-winning e-Content delivery platform, and online curatorial and multimedia publishing tools to support it. These tools make it simple for subject area experts to create visually stunning multi-media exhibits for the web and mobile devices without any technical expertise. The curatorial output is almost instantly available via a fully responsive web site as well as through native apps for mobile devices. This unified digital library interface incorporates viewers for PDF, ePub, images, documents, video and audio files allowing users to immerse themselves in the content without having to link out to other sites to view disparate media formats.

Mitchell Davis founded BookSurge in 2000, the world’s first integrated global print-on-demand and publishing services company (sold to Amazon.com in 2005 and re-branded as CreateSpace). Since 2008, he has been founder and chief business officer of BiblioLabs- the creators of BiblioBoard. Mitchell is also an indie producer and publisher who has created several award winning indie books and documentary films over the past decade through Organic Process Productions, a small philanthropic media company he founded with his wife Farrah Hoffmire in 2005.

Artistic Award winner

Jamie Andrews, Head of Culture and Learning at the British Library announced that the winner of the Artistic Award was... 

Here there, Young Sailor

Written and directed by writer and filmmaker Ling Low and visual art by Lyn Ong

Hey There, Young Sailor combines live action with animation, hand-drawn artwork and found archive images to tell a love story set at sea. Inspired by the works of early cinema pioneer Georges Méliès, the video draws on late 19^th century and early 20^th century images from the British Library's Flickr collection for its collages and tableaux. The video was commissioned by Malaysian indie folk band The Impatient Sisters and independently produced by a Malaysian and Indonesian team.

Ling Low receives her Award from Jamie Andrews

Ling Low is based between Malaysia and the UK and she has written and directed various short films and music videos. In her fiction and films, Ling is drawn to the complexities of human relationships and missed connections. By day, she works as a journalist and media consultant. Ling has edited a non-fiction anthology of human interest journalism, entitled Stories From The City: Rediscovering Kuala Lumpur, published in 2016. Her journalism has also been published widely, including in the Guardian, the Telegraph and Esquire Malaysia.

Teaching / Learning Award winner

Ria Bartlett, Lead Producer: Onsite Learning at the British Library announced that the winner of the Teaching / Learning Award was...

Library Carpentry

Founded by James Baker, Lecturer at the Sussex Humanities Lab, who represented the global Library Carpentry Team (see below) at the Symposium

James Baker presenting Library Carpentry

Library Carpentry is software skills training aimed at the needs and requirements of library professionals. It takes the form of a series of modules that are available online for self-directed study or for adaption and reuse by library professionals in face-to-face workshops. Library Carpentry is in the commons and for the commons: it is not tied to any institution or person. For more information on Library Carpentry see http://librarycarpentry.github.io/

James Baker is a Lecturer in Digital History and Archives at the School of History, Art History and Philosophy and at the Sussex Humanities Lab. He is a historian of the long eighteenth century and contemporary Britain. James is a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow and holds degrees from the University of Southampton and latterly the University of Kent. Prior to joining Sussex, James has held positions of Digital Curator at the British Library and Postdoctoral Fellow with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies of British Art. James is a convenor of the Institute of Historical Research Digital History seminar and a member of the History Lab Plus Advisory Board.

 The Library Carpentry Team is regularly accepting new members and currently also includes: 

The Library Carpentry Team

British Library Labs Staff Award winner

Phil Spence, Chief Operating Officer at the British Library announced that the winner of the British Library Labs Staff Award was...

Libcrowds

Led by Alex Mendes, Software Developer at the British Library

LibCrowds is a crowdsourcing platform built by Alexander Mendes. It aims to create searchable catalogue records for some of the hundreds of thousands of items that can currently only be found in printed and card catalogues. By participating in the crowdsourcing projects, users will help researchers everywhere to access the British Library’s collections more easily in the future.

Nora McGregor presenting LibCrowds on behalf of Alex Mendes

The first project series, Convert-a-Card, experimented with a new method for transforming printed card catalogues into electronic records for inclusion in our online catalogue Explore, by asking volunteers to link scanned images of the cards with records retrieved from the WorldCat database. Additional projects have recently been launched that invite volunteers to transcribe cards that may require more specific language skills, such as the South Asian minor languages. Records matched, located, transcribed or translated as part of the crowdsourcing projects were uploaded to the British Library's Explore catalogue for anyone to search online. By participating users can have a direct impact on the availability of research material to anyone interested in the diverse collections available at the British Library.

Alex Mendes has worked at the British Library for several years and recently completed a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science with the Open University. Alex enjoys the consistent challenges encountered when attempting to find innovative new solutions to unusual problems in software development.

Alex Mendes

If you would like to find out more about BL Labs, our Competition or Awards please contact us at [email protected]