Digital scholarship blog

This is a guest post by Giulia Carla Rossi, Curator of Digital Publications at the British Library. You can find her @giugimonogatari.

In June 2020 the Office for Students announced a campaign to fill 2,500 new places on artificial intelligence and data science conversion courses in universities across the UK. While I’m not planning to retrain in cyber, I was lucky enough to be in the cohort for the trial run of one of these courses: Birkbeck’s Postgraduate Certificate in Applied Data Science. The course started as a collaborative project between The British Library, The National Archives and Birkbeck University to develop a computing course aimed at professionals working in the cultural heritage sector. The trial run has now ended and the course is set to start in full from January 2021.

The course is designed for graduates who are new to computer science – which was perfect for me, as I had no previous coding knowledge besides some very basic HTML and CSS. It was a very steep learning curve, starting from scratch and ending with developing my own piece of software, but it was great to see how code could be applied to everyday issues to facilitate and automate parts of our workload. The fact that it was targeted at information professionals and that we could use existing datasets to learn from real life examples made it easier to integrate study with work. After a while, I started to look at the everyday tasks in my to-do list and wonder “Can this be solved with Python?”

After a taught module (Demystifying Computing with Python), students had to work on an individual project module and develop a software based on their work (to solve an issue, facilitate a task, re-use and analyse existing resources). I had an idea of the themes I wanted to explore – as Curator of Digital Publications, I’m interested in new media and platforms used to deliver content, and how text and stories are shaped by these tools. When I read about French company Short Édition and the short story vending machine in Canary Wharf I knew I had found my project.

My project is to build a stand-alone printer that prints random poems from a dataset of out-of-copyright texts. A little portable Bot-ish (sic!) Library to showcase the British Library collections and fill the world with more poetry.

A Short Story Station in Canary Wharf, London and my own sketch of a printing machine. (photo by the author)

Finding poetry

For my project, I decided to use the British Library’s “Digitised printed books (18th-19th century)” collection. This comprises over 60,000 volumes of 18^th and 19^th century texts, digitised in partnership with Microsoft and made available under Public Domain Mark. My work focused on the metadata dataset and the dataset of OCR derived text (shout out to the Digital Research team for kindly providing me with this dataset, as its size far exceeded what my computer is able to download).

The British Library actively encourages researchers to use its “digital collection and data in exciting and innovative ways” and projects with similar goals to mine had been undertaken before. In 2017, Dr Jennifer Batt worked with staff at the British Library on a data mining project: her goal was to identify poetry within a dataset of 18^th Century digitised newspapers from the British Library’s Burney Collection. In her research, Batt argued that employing a set of recurring words didn’t help her finding poetry within the dataset, as only very few of the poems included key terms like ‘stanza’ and ‘line’ – and none included the word ‘poem’. In my case, I chose to work with the metadata dataset first, as a way of filtering books based on their title, and while, as Batt proved, it’s unlikely that a poem itself includes a term defining its poetry style I was quite confident that such terms might appear in the title of a poetry collection.

My first step then was to identify books containing poetry, by searching through the metadata dataset using key words associated with poetry. My goal was not to find all the poetry in the dataset, but to identify books containing some form of poetry, that could be reused to create my printer dataset. I used the Poetry Foundation’s online “Glossary of Poetic Terms - Forms & Types of Poems” to identify key terms to use, eliminating the anachronisms (no poetry slam in the 19th century, I'm afraid) and ambiguous terms (“romance” returned too many results that weren’t relevant to my research). The result was 4580 book titles containing one or more poetry-related words.

My list of poetry terms used to search through the dataset

Creating verses: when coding meets grammar

I then wanted to extract individual poems from my dataset. The variety of book structures and poetry styles made it impossible to find a blanket rule that could be applied to all books. I chose to test my code out on books that I knew had one poem per page, so that I could extract pages and easily get my poems. Because of its relatively simple structure - and possibly because of some nostalgia for my secondary school Italian class - I started my experiments with Giacomo Pincherle’s 1865 translation of Dante’s sonnets, “In Omaggio a Dante. Dante's Memorial. [Containing five sonnets from Dante, Petrarch and Metastasio, with English versions by G. Pincherle, and five original sonnets in English by G. Pincherle.]”

Once I solved the problem of extracting single poems, the issue was ‘reshaping’ the text to match the print edition. Line breaks are essential to the meaning of a poem and the OCR text was just one continuous string of text that completely disregarded the metric and rhythm of the original work. The rationale behind my choice of book was also that sonnets present a fairly regular structure, which I was hoping could be of use when reshaping the text. The idea of using the poem’s metre as a tool to determine line length seemed the most effective choice: by knowing the type of metre used (iambic pentameter, terza rima, etc.) it’s possible to anticipate the number of syllables for each line and where line breaks should occur.

So I created a function to count how many syllables a word has following English grammar rules. As it’s often the case with coding, someone has likely already encountered the same problem as you and, if you’re lucky, they have found a solution: I used a function found online as my base (thank you, StackOverflow), building on it in order to cover as many grammar rules (and exceptions) as I was aware of. I used the same model and adapted it to Italian grammar rules, in order to account for the Italian sonnets in the book as well. I then decided to combine the syllable count with the use of capitalisation at the beginning of a line. This increased the chances of a successful result in case the syllable count would return a wrong result (which might happen whenever typos appear in the OCR text).

The same sonnet restructured so that each line is a new string (above), and matches the line breaks in the print edition (below)

It was very helpful that all books in the datasets were digitised and are available to access remotely (you can search for them on the British Library catalogue by using the search term “blmsd”), so I could check and compare my results to the print editions from home even during lockdown. I also tested my functions on sonnets from Henry Thomas Mackenzie Bell’s “Old Year Leaves Being old verses revived. [With the addition of two sonnets.]” and Welbore Saint Clair Baddeley’s “Legend of the Death of Antar, an eastern romance. Also lyrical poems, songs, and sonnets.”

Example of sonnet from Legend of the Death of Antar, an eastern romance. The function that divides the poems into lines could be adapted to accommodate breaks between stanzas as well.

Main challenges and gaps in research

• Typos in the OCR text: Errors and typos were introduced when the books in the collection were first digitised, which translated into exceptions to the rules I devised for identifying and restructuring poems. In order to ensure the text of every poem has been correctly captured and that typos have been fixed, some degree of manual intervention might be required.
• Scalability: The variety of poetry styles and book structures, paired with the lack of tagging around verse text, make it impossible to find a single formula that can be applied to all cases. What I created is quite dependent on a book having one poem per page, and using capitalisation in a certain way.
• Time constraint: the time limit we had to deliver the project - and my very-recently-acquired-and-still-very-much-developing skill set - meant I had to focus on a limited number of books and had to prioritise writing the software over building the printer itself.

Next steps

One of the outputs of this project is a JSON file containing a dictionary of poetry books. After searching for poetry terms, I paired the poetry titles and relative metadata with their pages from the OCR dataset, so the resulting file combines useful data from the two original datasets (book IDs, titles, authors’ names and the OCR text of each book). It’s also slightly easier to navigate compared to the OCR dataset as books can be retrieved by ID, and each page is an item in a list that can be easily called. One of the next steps will be to upload this onto the British Library data repository, in the hope that people might be encouraged to use it and conduct further research around this data collection.

Another, very obvious, next step is: building the printer! The individual components have already been purchased (Adafruit IoT Pi Printer Project Pack and Raspberry Pi 3). I will then have to build the thermal printer with Raspberry Pi and connect it to my poetry dataset. It’s interesting to note that other higher education institutions and libraries have been experimenting with similar ideas - like the University of Idaho Library’s Vandal Poem of the Day Bot and the University of British Columbia’s randomised book recommendations printer for libraries.

Component parts of the Adafruit IoT Pi Printer Project Pack. (photo by the author)

My aim when working on this project was for the printer to be used to showcase British Library collections; the idea was for it to be located in a public area in the Library, to reach new audiences that might not necessarily be there for research purposes. The printer could also be reprogrammed to print different genres and be customised for different occasions (e.g. exhibitions, anniversary celebrations, etc.) All of this was planned before Covid-19 happened, so it might be necessary to slightly adapt things now - and any suggestions in merit are very welcome! :)

Finally, none of this would have been possible without Nora McGregor, Stelios Sotiriadis, Peter Wood, the Digital Scholarship and BL Labs teams, and the support of my line manager and my team.

Looking for entries now!

Nominate an existing British Library staff member or a team that has done something exciting, innovative and cool with the British Library’s digital collections or data.

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 digital collections or data.

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? 

You may nominate a current member of British Library staff, a team, or yourself (if you are a member of staff), for the Staff Award using this form.

The deadline for submission is NOON (GMT), Monday 30 November 2020.

Nominees will be highlighted on Tuesday 15 December 2020 at the online British Library Labs Annual Symposium where some (winners and runners-up) will also be asked to talk about their projects (everyone is welcome to attend, you just need to register).

You can see the projects submitted by members of staff and public for the awards in our online archive.

In 2019, last year's winner focused on the brilliant work of the Imaging Team for the 'Qatar Foundation Partnership Project Hack Days', which were sessions organised for the team to experiment with the Library's digital collections. 

The runner-up for the BL Labs Staff Award in 2019 was the Heritage Made Digital team and their social media campaign to promote the British Library's digital collections one language a week from letters 'A' to 'U' #AToUnknown).

In the public Awards, last year's winners (2019) drew attention to artistic, research, teaching & learning, and community activities that used our data and / or digital collections.

British Library Labs is a project within the Digital Scholarship department at the British Library that supports and inspires the use of the Library's digital collections and data in exciting and innovative ways. It was previously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is now solely funded by the British Library.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].

This a guest post is by British Library collaborative doctoral student Carol Butler, you can follow her on twitter as @fantomascarol.

Update: Due to a phenomenal response, Carol has recruited enough interviewees for the study, so the link to the application form has been removed (13/10/2020).

In 2016 I started a PhD project in partnership with the British Library and the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design (CHCID) at City, University of London. My research has focused on the phenomena of fiction authors interacting with readers through online media, such as websites, forums and social media, to promote and discuss their work. My aim is to identify potential avenues for redesigning or introducing new technology to better support authors and readers. I am now in my fourth and final year, aiming to complete my research this winter.

The internet has impacted how society interacts with almost everything, and literature has been no exception. It’s often thought that if a person or a business is not online, they are effectively invisible, and over the last ten years or so it has become increasingly common – expected, even - for authors to have an online presence allowing readers, globally, to connect with them.

Opportunities for authors and readers to interact together existed long before the internet, through events such as readings, signings, and festivals. The internet does not replace these – indeed, festivals have grown in popularity in recent years, and many have embraced technology to broaden their engagement outside of the event itself. However, unlike organised events, readers and authors can potentially interact online far more directly, outside of formal mediation. Perceived benefits from this disintermediation are commonly hailed – i.e. that it can break down access barriers for readers (e.g. geography and time, so they can more easily learn about the books they enjoy and the person behind the story), and help authors to better understand their market and the reception to their books. However, being a relatively new phenomenon, we don’t know much yet about how interacting with each other online may differ to doing so at a festival or event, and what complications the new environment may introduce to the experience, or even exacerbate. It is this research gap that my work has been addressing.

Early in my research, I conducted interviews with fiction authors and readers who use different online technologies (e.g. social media such as Twitter and Facebook, forums such as Reddit, or literary-specific sites such as GoodReads) to interact with other readers and authors. All participants generously shared their honest, open accounts about what they do, where and why, and where they encounter problems. It became clear that, although the benefits to being online are widely accepted and everyone had good experiences to report, in reality, people’s reasons for being online were riddled with contradictions, and, in some cases, it was debatable whether the positives outweighed the negatives, or whether the practice served a meaningful purpose at all. Ultimately – it’s complex, and not everything we thought we knew is necessarily as clear cut as it’s often perceived. 

This led me to make a U-turn in my research. Before working out how to improve technology to better support interactions as they currently stand, I needed to find out more about people’s motivations to be online, and to question whether we were focused on the right problem in the first place. From this I’ve been working to reframe how we, in the research field of Human-Computer Interaction, may understand the dynamics between authors and readers, by building a broader picture of context and influences in the literary field.

I’m going to write another blog post in the coming months to talk about what I’ve found, and what I think we need to focus on in the near future. In particular, I think it is important to improve support for authors, as many find themselves in a tricky position because of the expectation that they are available and public-facing, effectively 24/7. However, before I expand on that, I am about to embark on one final study to address some outstanding questions I have about the needs of their market – fiction readers. 

Over the next few weeks, I will be recruiting people who read fiction – whether they interact online about reading or not - to join me for what I am informally referring to as ‘an interview with props’. This study is happening a few months later than I’d originally intended, as restrictions in relation to Covid-19 required me to change my original plans (e.g. to meet people face-to-face). My study has ‘gone digital’, changing how I can facilitate the sessions, and what I can realistically expect from them.

I will be asking people to join me to chat online, using Zoom, to reflect on a series of sketched interface design ideas I have created, and to discuss their current thoughts about authors being available online. The design sketches represent deviations from the technology currently in common use - some significant, and some subtle. The designs are not being tested on behalf of any affiliated company, and neither do I necessarily anticipate any of them to be developed into working technology in the future. Ultimately, they are probes to get us talking about broader issues surrounding author and reader interactions, and I’m hoping that by getting peoples perspectives about them, I’ll learn more about why the designs *don’t* work, moreover why they do, to help inform future research and design work.

I’ve been ‘umming and ahhing’ about how best to share these designs with participants through a digital platform. Sitting together in the same room, as I’d originally planned, we could all move them around, pick them up, take a red pen to them, make notes on post-its, and sketch alternative ideas on paper. There are fantastic online technologies available these days, which have proved invaluable during this pandemic. But they can’t provide the same experience that being physically present together can (a predicament which, perhaps ironically, is fitting with the research problem itself!).

A sneaky peek at a sketch in the making, on Miro

I have decided to use a website called Miro.com to facilitate the study – an interactive whiteboard tool that allows participants to add digital post-it notes, doodles, and more. I’ve never used it before now, and to my knowledge there is no published research out there (yet) by others in my research field who have used it with participants, for me to learn from their experience. I think I must prepare myself for a few technical glitches! But I am hopeful that participants will enjoy the experience, which will be informal, encouraging, and in no way a judgement of their abilities with the technology. I am confident that their contribution will greatly help my work – and future work which will help authors and readers in the real world.

If anyone who is reading this is interested in participating, please do get in touch. Information about the study and how to contact me can be found here or please email [email protected].

Update: Due to a phenomenal response, Carol has recruited enough interviewees for the study, so the link to the application form has been removed (13/10/2020). Thanks to everyone who has applied.

The New Media Writing Prize (NMWP) is in an annual international award, which encourages and promotes the best in new media writing; showcasing innovative digital fiction, poetry and journalism. The types of interactive writing that we have been examining, researching and tentatively collecting in our emerging formats work at the Library.

Last year we celebrated ten years of the prize, looking back over previous winning entries, with a Digital Conversation event at the British Library. Now we are looking forward to seeing what types of work will be entered into this year's prize.

If you are a writer of interactive works, then you may be interested to know that the 2020 New Media Writing prize is currently open for entries. You can nominate works via the online entry form at https://newmediawritingprize.co.uk/enter/. This year, there is only one category, the if:book UK New Media Writing prize. However, you can enter fiction, poetry, journalism, games, anything as long as it is interactive and makes use of digital media. The deadline is Friday 27th November 2020, 12 noon GMT, or for student entries, these must be entered by Friday 18th December 2020, 12 noon GMT. The organisers are especially encouraging entries from students and will give special consideration to entries from students at undergraduate or postgraduate level. 

There is one award of £1000 for the winner, and there will be commendations for shortlisted works, which the judges feel are deserving of a special mention. All the rules are here, and please do read the FAQs section of the NMWP website, which has more details about what the judges are looking for in entries. If you have a question that is not covered by the FAQ, then you can email the organisers at [email protected]. You may also want to check out the winners and shortlisted entries from the 2019 prize, which I blogged about here, for inspiration. If you do enter, then good luck!

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

Visualising the journey of a manuscript’s creation

Working for the Qatar Digital Library (QDL), I recently catalogued British Library oriental manuscript 2361, a musical compendium copied in Mughal India during the reign of Aurangzeb (1618-1707; ruled from 1658). The QDL is a British Library-Qatar Foundation collaborative project to digitise and share Gulf-related archival records, maps and audio recordings as well as Arabic scientific manuscripts.

Figure 1: Equestrian portrait of Aurangzeb. Mughal, c. 1660-70. British Library, Johnson Album, 3.4. Public domain.

The colophons to Or. 2361 fourteen texts contain an unusually large – but jumbled-up – quantity of information about the places and dates it was copied and checked, revealing that it was largely created during a journey taken by the imperial court in 1663.

Figure 2: Colophon to the copy of Kitāb al-madkhal fī al-mūsīqī by al-Fārābī, transcribed in Delhi, 3 Jumādá I, 1073 hijrī/14 December 1662 CE, and checked in Lahore, 22 Rajab 1073/2 March 1663. Or. 2361, f. 240r.

Seeking to make sense of the mass of bibliographic information and unpick the narrative of the manuscript’s creation, I recorded all this data in a spreadsheet. This helped to clarify some patterns- but wasn’t fun to look at! To accompany an Asian and African Studies blog post, I wanted to find an interactive digital tool to develop the visual and spatial aspects of the story and convey the landscapes and distances experienced by the manuscript’s scribes and patron during its mobile production.

Figure 3: Dull but useful spreadsheet of copy data for Or. 2361.

Many fascinating digital tools can present large datasets, including map co-ordinates. However, I needed to retell a linear, progressive narrative with fewer data points. Inspired by a QNF-BL colleague’s work on Geoffrey Prior’s trip to Muscat, I settled on StoryMap, one of an expanding suite of open-source reporting, data management, research, and storytelling tools developed by Knight Lab at Northwestern University, USA.

StoryMap: Easy but fiddly

Requiring no coding ability, the back-end of this free, easy-to-use tool resembles PowerPoint. The user creates a series of slides to which text, images, captions and copyright information can be added. Links to further online media, such as the millions of images published on the QDL, can easily be added.

Figure 4: Back-end view of StoryMap's authoring tool.

The basic incarnation of StoryMap is accessed via an author interface which is intuitive and clear, but has its quirks. Slide layouts can’t be varied, and image manipulation must be completed pre-upload, which can get fiddly. Text was faint unless entirely in bold, especially against a backdrop image. A bug randomly rendered bits of uploaded text as hyperlinks, whereas intentional hyperlinks are not obvious.

The mapping function

StoryMap’s most interesting feature is an interactive map that uses OpenStreetMap data. Locations are inputted as co-ordinates, or manually by searching for a place-name or dropping a pin. This geographical data links together to produce an overview map summarised on the opening slide, with subsequent views zooming to successive locations in the journey.

Figure 5: StoryMap summary preview showing all location points plotted.

I had to add location data manually as the co-ordinates input function didn’t work. Only one of the various map styles suited the historical subject-matter; however its modern street layout felt contradictory. The ‘ideal’ map – structured with global co-ordinates but correct for a specific historical moment – probably doesn’t exist (one for the next project?).

Figure 6: StoryMap's modern street layout implies New Delhi existed in 1663...

With clearly signposted advanced guidance, support forum, and a link to a GitHub repository, more technically-minded users could take StoryMap to the next level, not least in importing custom maps via Mapbox. Alternative platforms such as Esri’s Classic Story Maps can of course also be explored.

However, for many users, Knight Lab StoryMap’s appeal will lie in its ease of usage and accessibility; it produces polished, engaging outputs quickly with a bare minimum of technical input and is easy to embed in web-text or social media. Thanks to Knight Lab for producing this free tool!

See the finished StoryMap, A Mughal musical miscellany: The journey of Or. 2361.

This is a guest post by Jenny Norton-Wright, Arabic Scientific Manuscripts Curator from the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership. You can follow the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership on Twitter at @BLQatar.

The sixth BL Labs Public Awards 2020 formally recognises outstanding and innovative work that has been carried out using the British Library’s data and / or digital collections by researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators, students and the general public.

The closing date for entering the Public Awards is NOON GMT on Monday 30 November 2020 and you can submit your entry any time up to then.

Please help us spread the word! We want to encourage any one interested to submit over the next few months, who knows, you could even win fame and glory, priceless! We really hope to have another year of fantastic projects to showcase at our annual online awards symposium on the 15 December 2020 (which is open for registration too), inspired by our digital collections and data!

This year, BL Labs is commending work in four key areas that have used or been inspired by our digital collections and data:

• Research - A project or activity that shows the development of new knowledge, research methods, or tools.
• Artistic - An artistic or creative endeavour that inspires, stimulates, amazes and provokes.
• Educational - Quality learning experiences created for learners of any age and ability that use the Library's digital content.
• Community - Work that has been created by an individual or group in a community.

What kind of projects are we looking for this year?

Whilst we are really happy for you to submit your work on any subject that uses our digital collections, in this significant year, we are particularly interested in entries that may have a focus on anti-racist work or projects about lock down / global pandemic. We are also curious and keen to have submissions that have used Jupyter Notebooks to carry out computational work on our digital collections and data.

After the submission deadline has passed, entries will be shortlisted and selected entrants will be notified via email by midnight on Friday 4th December 2020. 

A prize of £150 in British Library online vouchers will be awarded to the winner and £50 in the same format to the runner up in each Awards category at the Symposium. Of course if you enter, it will be at least a chance to showcase your work to a wide audience and in the past this has often resulted in major collaborations.

The talent of the BL Labs Awards winners and runners up over the last five years has led to the production of remarkable and varied collection of innovative projects described in our 'Digital Projects Archive'. In 2019, the Awards commended work in four main categories – Research, Artistic, Community and Educational:

BL  Labs Award Winners for 2019

• Research (2019) Winner: Full-Text search of Early Music Prints Online (F-TEMPO) by Tim Crawford, Goldsmiths, University of London
• Artistic (2019) Winner: Emerging Formats: Discovering and Collecting Contemporary British Interactive Fiction by Lynda Clark
• Community Commendation (2019): John Faucit Saville and the theatres of the East Midlands Circuit - by Lesley Phillips
• Teaching and Learning / Educational (2019) Winner: The Other Voice - RCA - Innovations in sound and art by Masters' students from the Royal College of Art, submitted by Dr Matt Lewis, Tutor of Digital Direction and Dr Eleanor Dare, Reader of Digital Media both at the School of Communication, at the Royal College of Art and Mary Stewart Curator, Oral History and Deputy Director of National Library

For further detailed information, please visit BL Labs Public Awards 2020, or contact us at [email protected] if you have a specific query.

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs.

Who doesn’t love owls? Here at the British Library we certainly do.

Often used as a symbol of knowledge, they are the perfect library bird. A little owl is associated and frequently depicted with the Greek goddess of wisdom Athena. The University of Bath even awarded Professor Yoda the European eagle owl a library card in recognition of his valuable service deterring seagulls from nesting on their campus.

The British Library may not have issued a reader pass to an owl (as far as I am aware!), but we do have a wealth of owl sound recordings in our wildlife and environmental sounds collection, you can read about and listen to some of these here.

British Library digitised image from page 45 of "Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa."

Little Owl calls recorded by Nigel Tucker in Somerset, England (BL ref 124857)

Owls can also be discovered in our UK Web Archive. Our UK Web Archivists recently examined the Shine dataset to explore which UK owl species is the most popular on the archived .uk domain. Read here to find out which owl is the winner.

They also curate an Online Enthusiast Communities in the UK collection, which features bird watching and some owl related websites in the Animal related hobbies subsection. If you know of websites that you think should be included in this collection, then please fill in their online nomination form.

British Library Flickr owl album

Here in Digital Scholarship I recently found many fabulous illustrations of owls in our Mechanical Curator Flickr image collection of over a million Public Domain images. So to honour owls on International Owl Awareness Day, I put together an owl album.

These owl illustrations are freely available, without copyright restrictions, for all types of creative projects, including digital collages. My colleague Hannah Nagle blogged about making collages recently and provided this handy guide. For finding more general images of nature for your collages, you may find it useful to browse other Mechanical Curator themed albums, such as Flora & Fauna, as these are rich resources for finding illustrations of trees, plants, animals and birds.

British Library digitised image from page 136 of "A Final Reckoning, a tale of Bush Life in Australia. With illustrations by W. B. Wollen"

If you creatively use our Mechanical Curator Flickr images, please do share them with us on twitter, using the hashtag #BLdigital, we always love to see what people have done with them. Plus if you use any of our owls today, remember to include the #InternationalOwlAwarenessDay hashtag too!

We also urge you to be eagle-eyed (sorry wrong bird!) and look out for some special animated owls during the 4th August, like this one below, which uses both sounds and images taken from our collections. These have been created by Carlos Rarugal, our arty Assistant Web Archivist and will shared from the Wildlife, Web Archive and Digital Scholarship Twitter accounts. 

Video created by Carlos Rarugal,  using Tawny Owl hoots recorded by Richard Margoschis in Gloucestershire, England (BL ref 09647) and British Library digitised image from page 79 of "Woodland Wild: a selection of descriptive poetry. From various authors. With ... illustrations on steel and wood, after R. Bonheur, J. Bonheur, C. Jacque, Veyrassat, Yan Dargent, and other artists"

One of the benefits of making digital art, is that there is no risks of spilling paint or glue on your furniture! As noted in this tweet from Damyanti Patel "Thanks for the instructions, my kids were entertained & I had no mess to clean up after their art so a clear win win, they really enjoyed looking through the albums". I honestly did not ask them to do this, but it is really cool that her children included this fantastic owl in the centre of one of their digital collages:

Showed the kids this collage guide from the BL & they created some fab images https://t.co/VqJDZ0mYqu pic.twitter.com/IC9b9vJtIS

— Damyanti Patel (@damyantipatel) May 22, 2020

I quite enjoy it when my library life and goth life connect! During the covid-19 lockdown I have attended several online club nights. A few months ago I was delighted to see that one of these; How Did I Get Here? Alternative 80s Night! regularly uses the British Library Flickr images to create their event flyers, using illustrations of people in strange predicaments to complement the name of their club; like this sad lady sitting inside a bird cage, in the flyer below.

Their next online event is Saturday 22nd August and you can tune in here. If you are a night owl, you could even make some digital collages, while listening to some great tunes. Sounds like a great night in to me!

Flyer image for How Did I Get Here? Alternative 80s Night!

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

During recent months of working from home, the Wikimedia family of platforms, including Wikidata and Wikisource, have enabled many librarians and archivists to do meaningful work, to enhance and amplify access to the collections that they curate.

I’ve been very encouraged to learn from other institutions and initiatives who have been working with these platforms. So I recently invited some wonderful speakers to give a “World of Wikimedia” series of remote guest lectures for staff, to inspire my colleagues in the British Library.

Logos of the Wikimedia Family of platforms

Stuart Prior from Wikimedia UK kicked off this season with an introduction to Wikimedia and the projects within it, and how it works with galleries, libraries, archives and museums. He was followed by Dr Martin Poulter, who had been the Bodleian Library’s Wikimedian In Residence. Martin shared his knowledge of how books, authors and topics are represented in Wikidata, how Wikidata is used to drive other sites, including Wikipedia, and how Wikipedia combines data and narrative to tell the world about notable books and authors.

Continuing with the theme of books, Gavin Willshaw spoke about the benefits of using Wikisource for optical character recognition (OCR) correction and staff engagement. Giving an overview of the National Library of Scotland’s fantastic project to upload 3,000 digitised Scottish Chapbooks to Wikisource during the Covid-19 lockdown. Focusing on how the project came about, its impact, and how the Library plans to take activity in this area forward in the future.

Tippet is the dandy---o. The toper's advice. Picking lilies. The dying swan, shelfmark L.C.2835(14), from the National Library of Scotland's Scottish Chapbooks collection

Closing the World of Wikimedia season, Adele Vrana and Anasuya Sengupta gave an extremely thought provoking talk about Whose Knowledge? This is a global multilingual campaign, which they co-founded, to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities (the majority of the world) online. Their work includes the annual #VisibleWikiWomen campaign to make women more visible on Wikipedia, which I blogged about recently.

One of the silver linings of the covid-19 lockdown has been that I’ve been able to attend a number of virtual events, which I would not have been able to travel to, if they had been physical events. These have included LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group online meetings; which is a biweekly zoom call on Tuesdays at 9am PDT (5pm BST).

I’ve also remotely attended some excellent online training sessions: “Teaching with Wikipedia: a practical 'how to' workshop” ran by Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence at The University of Edinburgh. Also “Wikimedia and Libraries - Running Online Workshops” organised by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland (CILIPS), presented by Dr Sara Thomas, Scotland Programme Coordinator for Wikimedia UK, and previously the Wikimedian in Residence at the Scottish Library and Information Council. From attending the latter, I learned of an online “How to Add Suffragettes & Women Activists to Wikipedia” half day edit-a-thon event taking place on the 4th July organised by Sara, Dr t s Beall and Clare Thompson from the Protests and Suffragettes project, this is a wonderful project, which recovers and celebrates the histories of women activists in Govan, Glasgow.

We'd shared this elsewhere (on evilFB) but not twitter – here's the 'group pic' of #ProtestandSuffragettes recent #WikipediaWorkshop – we had 35 folks come along (many new to #Wiki) & we're looking forward to working w/ them again... #WMUKAGM20https://t.co/jlQy9cW3k0 pic.twitter.com/yAcnzSRLQ3

— dr t s Beall (@tsBeall) July 18, 2020

We have previously held a number of in person Wikipedia edit-a-thon events at the British Library, but this was the first time that I had attended one remotely, via Zoom, so this was a new experience for me. I was very impressed with how it had been organised, using break out rooms for newbies and more experienced editors, including multiple short comfort breaks into the schedule and having very do-able bite size tasks, which were achievable in the time available. They used a comprehensive, but easy to understand, shared spreadsheet for managing the tasks that attendees were working on. This is definitely an approach and a template that I plan to adopt and adapt for any future edit-a-thons I am involved in planning.

Furthermore, it was a very fun and friendly event, the organisers had created We Can [edit]! Zoom background template images for attendees to use, and I learned how to use twinkles on videocalls! This is when attendees raise both hands and wiggle their fingers pointing upwards, to indicate agreement with what is being said, without causing a soundclash. This hand signal has been borrowed it from the American Sign Language word for applause, it is also used by the Green Party and the Occupy Movement.

At our most recent Wikipedia Workshop on 4th July the ‘Protests and Suffragettes’ project created ZOOM backgrounds – just for fun – here are a few of them, which you can download from #Wiki Commons! #WMUKAGM20https://t.co/m7lGvnPFcg pic.twitter.com/GOo3HBbEJg

— dr t s Beall (@tsBeall) July 18, 2020

With enthusiasm fired up from my recent edit-a-thon attending experience, last Saturday I joined the online Wikimedia UK 2020 AGM. Lucy Crompton-Reid, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK, gave updates on changes in the global Wikimedia movement, such as implementing the 2030 strategy, rebranding Wikimedia, the Universal Code of Conduct and plans for Wikipedia’s 20th birthday. Lucy also announced that three trustees Kelly Foster, Nick Poole and Doug Taylor, who stood for the board were all elected. Nick and Doug have both been on the board since July 2015 and were re-elected. I was delighted to learn that Kelly is a new trustee joining the board for the first time. As Kelly has previously been a trainer at BL Wikipedia edit-a-thon events, and she coached me to create my first Wikipedia article on Coventry godcakes at a Wiki-Food and (mostly) Women edit-a-thon in 2017.

In addition to these updates, Gavin Willshaw, gave a keynote presentation about the NLS Scottish chapbooks Wikisource project that I mentioned earlier, and there were three lightning talks: Andy Mabbett; 'Wiki Hates Newbies', Clare Thompson, Lesley Mitchell and Dr t s Beall; 'Protests and Suffragettes: Highlighting 100 years of women’s activism in Govan, Glasgow, Scotland' and Jason Evans; 'An update from Wales'.

Before the event ended, there was a 2020 Wikimedia UK annual awards announcement, where libraries and librarians did very well indeed:

• UK Wikimedian of the Year was awarded to librarian Caroline Ball for education work and advocacy at the University of Derby (do admire her amazing Wikipedia dress in the embedded tweet below!)
• Honourable Mention to Ian Watt for outreach work, training, and efforts around Scotland's COVID-19 data
• Partnership of the Year was given to National Library of Scotland for the WikiSource chapbooks project led by Gavin Willshaw
• Honourable Mention to University of Edinburgh for work in education and Wikidata
• Up and Coming Wikimedian was a joint win to Emma Carroll for work on the Scottish Witch data project and Laura Wood Rose for work at University of Edinburgh and on the Women in Red initiative
• Michael Maggs was given an Honorary Membership, in recognition of his very significant contribution to the charity over a number of years.

Big congratulations to all the winners. Their fantastic work, and also in Caroline's case, her fashion sense, is inspirational!

I really ought to be wearing my amazing Wikipedia dress in celebration right now... https://t.co/ewvVT3gdGa pic.twitter.com/IqxJN12rZD

— Caroline Ball 🌈🦄🧁🏳️‍🌈 (@heroicendeavour) July 18, 2020

For anyone interested, the next online event that I’m planning to attend is a #WCCWiki Colloquium organised by The Women’s Classical Committee, which aims to increase the representation of women classicists on Wikipedia. Maybe I’ll virtually see you there…

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