Researching how to collect, curate and preserve emerging formats is important work for us in the Library. Fortunately we aren't alone in our quest to understand how to manage born digital collections, we are active members of organisations such as the Digital Preservation Coalition and the Videogame Heritage Society, which are excellent networks and forums for us to share and learn from fellow GLAM professionals working in this area.

The Videogame Heritage Society (VHS) is a subject specialist network for digital game preservation, led by the National Videogame Museum (NVM), based in Sheffield. They provide advocacy, support and expertise on the preservation of digital games and digital game culture through a network of museums, heritage institutions, developers, publishers, private collectors and anyone with an interest in videogame history.

The VHS launch event on 21 February 2020 was one of the last physical events I attended before the first Covid-19 lockdown started. Due to the global pandemic, the NVM had to completely re-think how to deliver their programme of planned VHS events, and this has produced a new series of online events called VHS Tapes, which started in February 2021.

At these events, VHS lead Mikey, has been in conversation with members of the VHS community regarding the many issues surrounding digital game preservation, exhibition, and collection. Recordings of these can be found on the NVM's YouTube channel, in this playlist. They include conversations with the NVM's Conor Clarke,  Foteini Aravani from the Museum of London and The Retro Hour Podcast. Not wanting to miss out on the fun! The British Library are invited speakers at an upcoming online VHS Tapes event on Tuesday 29 June 2021, 14:00-15:00, places are free, but please book here.

Lynda Clark, Giulia Carla Rossi and I will talk about the British Library’s research in collecting, curating and preserving emerging formats. Including eBook mobile apps, and web-based interactive works, such as those made with tools like Twine, which form the Interactive Narratives and New Media Writing Prize special collections in the UK Web Archive. We’ll discuss digital tools used to build these web archive collections, some of the content and themes of the interactive works collected, and the Library’s plans for the future. We hope to see you there!

An attendee working with the digital interactive writing tool Twine at a 2018 British Library Interactive Fiction Summer School course

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

Once I was set up on Wikipedia (see Triangulating Bermuda, Detroit and William Wallace), I got started with Wikidata. Wikidata is the part of the Wikimedia universe which deals with structured data, like dates of birth, shelf marks and more.

Adding data to Wikidata is really simple: it just requires logging into Wikidata (or creating an account if you don’t already have one) and then pressing edit on any page. you want to edit.

Editing Wikidata

If the page doesn’t already exist, then creating it is also very simple: just select ‘create a new item’ from the menu on the left-hand side of the page.

When using Wikidata, there are some powerful tools which make adding data quicker and easier. One of these is Quick Statements. Unfortunately, using QuickStatements requires that you have made 50 edits on Wikidata before you make your first batch. Fortunately, it is rather quicker than Citation Hunt (for which, see Triangulating Bermuda, Detroit and William Wallace).

Creating a new item in Wikidata

I made those 50 edits very quickly, by setting up Wikidata item pages for each of the sample items from the India Office Records that we are working with (at the moment we are prioritising adding information about the records; further work will take place before any digitised items are uploaded to Wikimedia platforms). Basic information was added to each of the item pages.

Q107074264 (India Office List January 1885)

Q107074434 (India Office List July 1885)

Q107074463 (India Office List January 1886)

Q107074676 (India Office List July 1886)

Q107074754 (India Office List 1886 Supplement)

Q107074810 (1888-9 Report on the Administration of Bengal)

Q107074801 (1889-90 Report on the Administration of Bengal)

Once I had done this, it became clear that I needed to create more general pages, which could contain the DOIs that link back to the digitised records which are currently only accessible via batch download through the British Library research repository.

Q107134086 Page for administrative reports (V/10/60-1) in general.

Q107136752 Page for India lists (v/13/173-6) in general.

The WikiProject page for the India Office Records

The final preparatory step was to create a WikiProject page, which will facilitate collaboration on the project. This page contains links to all the pages involved in the project and will soon also contain useful resources such as templates for creating new pages as part of the project and queries for using the data.

After this, I began to experiment with Quick Statements, making heavy use of the useful guide to it available on Wikidata.

I decided to upload information on members of a particular regiment in Bengal, since this was information I could easily copy into a spreadsheet because the versions of the reports in the British Library research repository support Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Section of the original India Office List containing information on members of the 14th Infantry Regiment (IOR/V/6/175, page 258)

Finally, once I had done all of this, I met with the curators of the India Office Records for feedback and suggestions. It became clear from this that there was in fact some confusion about the exact identification of the regiment they were involved in. Fortunately, it turned out we had identified the correct regiment, but had we made a mistake, it would have just required a simple batch of the Quick Statement edits to quickly put right.

Section of my spreadsheet of members of the 14th Infantry Regiment

All in all, I can recommend using Wikidata and I hope I have shown that I can be a useful tool, but also that it is easy to use. The next step for our Wikidata project will be to upload templates and case studies to help and support future volunteer editors to develop it further. We will also add resources to support research on the uploaded data.

Screenshot of Quick Statements for adding gender to each of the pages for the officers

This is a guest post by UCL Digital Humanities MA student Dominic Kane.

Folks interested in creative reuse of digitised sound recordings, may want to come along to the "Libraries & Museums & Archives (Oh My!)" online conference this Saturday (12th June 2021), organised by The Folklore Library & Archive. Where Cheryl Tipp, the British Library's Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds and I will give a talk on how the Library’s sound archive has been innovatively used to create atmospheric soundscapes both in the virtual landscapes of videogames, and for physical sites of archaeological interest, such as Creswell Crags Museum and Visitor Centre. Plus how the Wildlife and Environmental Sounds collection has been interpreted in other artistic projects, including visualisations by Andy Thomas, and some delightful needlework by textile artist Cat Frampton.

The Folklore Library & Archive artwork by Rhi Wynter

In our presentation we'll mention entries in the Off the Map competition, such as Midsummer by Tom Battey. Submissions to the recent Games in the Woods game jam for the Urban Tree Festival, such as Noisy Wood by Ash Green.

Also the fantastic Faint Signals by Invisible Flock, an interactive virtual woodland sound experience, which has been featured recently by Europeana Pro in an article on Seven tips for digital storytelling with cultural heritage, and in this BBC Culture story about The sounds that make us calmer.

Faint Signals by Invisible Flock

The conference will be held online via Zoom, with ticket money going towards the Folklore Library and Archive’s appeal to save the archive of the late folklorist Venetia Newall. Furthermore, all ticket holders will be able to access video replays of the talks after the event, go here for booking your place. There is a stellar line-up of speakers from other organisations, including:

• Jim Peters, Collections manager (Dept of Prehistory and Europe) from the British Museum talking about his favourite objects from the collections.
• Alexandra Stockdale-Haley from the National Science and Media Museum, talking about The Cottingley Fairy artefacts and their role in the modern day.
• Librarians from Senate House Library giving a presentation on The Harry Price Library of Magical Literature.
• Geraldine Beskin, owner of the Atlantis Bookshop talking about Ghosts of the Theatre.
• Rachel Morris, co-founder of Metaphor Museum Designers, speaking about the role of the archive in Museums and how to interpret it.
• Peter Hewitt, founder of the Folklore Museums Network talking about their work bringing museums together.
• Clare Smith, Historical Collections Curator from the Metropolitan Police Museum giving a talk on The Crime Museum fact vs fiction, and other police artifacts.
• Lucy Gibbon, Acting Senior Archivist from Orkney Library & Archive will round off the event with stories from the Orkney Archives.

Programme for the Libraries & Museums & Archives (Oh My!) conference

 We hope to see you there! Do follow #folklorelibrary for twitter chat during the conference.

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

Last Monday I began a work placement with the British Library working with its Wikimedian-in-Residence, Dr Lucy Hinnie, to add information and text from the India Office Records to Wikisource and Wikidata.

My first day mainly consisted of a several different meetings. I was introduced to the team dealing with the India Office Records, which really helped me to get a better sense of the importance of the project and its key objectives. I then attended a metadata workshop (metadata is, generally speaking, data about data, e.g. the author of a book, the time a photo was taken etc). This introduced me to the British Library’s current metadata practices and will be very useful when I begin to upload data to Wikidata in ensuring it is as useful as possible. Finally, I attended a meeting with the curators of the Contemporary British collections, which gave me an overview of the range of the Library’s activities online, its current and future exhibitions and its holdings.

On my second day, I finished my basic Wikipedia training and moved on to getting fully registered, which is needed if you want to add new pages to Wikipedia. This requires 10 edits to existing Wikipedia pages. The fastest way to do this was by completing Citation Hunt, according to Dr Hinnie. What she did not mention was Citation Hunt is roughly what would happen if the British Library catalogue and the Easter Bunny came together to plan an Easter egg hunt in St Pancras.

Screenshot of Citation Hunt

Citation Hunt gives a random passage of Wikipedia in need of citation and you can either add a citation or skip to another. As you might imagine, these pages are completely unrelated to one another. As such, Citation Hunt had me trawling the internet for such delights as:

• Proof that William Wallace appeared in Age of Empires II. Unfortunately, ‘I remember that bit from when I played’ does not meet Wikipedia’s reliable source guidelines. (William Wallace - Wikipedia)

• A discussion of the OECD ‘Acquis Communautaire.’ (Acquis communautaire - Wikipedia)

• The amount of RAM of in an Atari 1040ST, even though that computer is well and truly before my time. (Atari ST - Wikipedia)

• Evidence that Bill Gates invested in a particular company. (Bill Gates - Wikipedia)

I also found myself lost in the Bermudan Economy (Economy of Bermuda - Wikipedia) and growing into researching commercial agriculture (Ethylene - Wikipedia). Most surreal of all was adding directions from Google Maps for the relative locations of two places in Detroit. (Detroit - Wikipedia) I have never been to Detroit…

Ending my first week, I attended a meeting of the British Library’s Digital Scholarship team. It was really interesting to hear about all the different digital initiatives going on, both within the BL and in partnership with other organisations.

This week, I'm having further training on the tools I will need to use for this project and then, for the remaining four weeks of the placement, I will be uploading and enriching data from the India Office Records.

I look forward to updating you soon on the progress I make!

This is a guest post by UCL Digital Humanities MA student Dominic Kane.

At the beginning of this month, I began a work placement with the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme (EAP). The EAP hosted a group of University College London students for several projects, and I was working to further connect EAP collections with Wikimedia. We were able to tailor the project to our interests, which meant that I was able to spend my placement researching and writing about two pioneering women photographers, Marie-Lydie Bonfils (EAP644) and Annemarie Heinrich (EAP755).

Creating a Wikipedia article

I began with Marie-Lydie Bonfils (1837–1918), an early woman photographer and co-owner of the Maison Bonfils studio in Beirut. The Bonfils family archive was digitised in a 2013 project between the EAP and the Jafet Memorial Library, American University of Beirut, and the physical archive is currently preserved at the Sursock Museum.

Perhaps unsurprisingly to those interested in women’s history, while her husband, Félix Bonfils, already had his own Wikipedia article, Marie-Lydie did not. So, I created a new article for her, adding to Félix’s along the way as well. I worked from as many biographical sources as I could possibly access online, including the excellent EAP blog post on Marie-Lydie.

Marie-Lydie Cabanis Bonfils' Wikipedia entry

Wikipedia’s notability criteria were a concern for me when publishing. Topics on Wikipedia must be considered “notable” to avoid needless and self-promotional content. This can have the unintended consequence of noteworthy articles being removed if they are not able to demonstrate their significance to other users. Balancing the objective language of Wikipedia with the need to persuade others of Marie-Lydie’s importance was something I had to be careful of when writing the text.

Once published, the article was given a C rating, which shows room for improvement and expansion. As I was waiting in suspense to see if the article would be removed entirely, a C was really quite exciting! Wikipedia articles are ongoing, collaborative projects rather than the completed essays that I am more used to in my studies. This has encouraged me to have a different and more productive mindset about my work more broadly.

Editing a Wikipedia article

Next, I began to look into Annemarie Heinrich (1912–2005). A German photographer who lived most of her life in Argentina, Heinrich was particularly famous for her celebrity portraits, such as those of Carmen Miranda, Pablo Neruda and Eva Perón. Her archive was added to the EAP collections in 2016, in a project with the Institute for Research in Art and Culture, Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Argentina. I expanded upon Heinrich’s short existing Wikipedia article.

On beginning my research, I discovered that her article on Spanish Wikipedia was much more extensive. This provided a useful starting point for biographical information and tracking down additional citations (thank you GCSE Spanish!). Heinrich’s lack of recognition on the English-speaking web made research difficult, but also highlighted the importance of adding more information about her onto English Wikipedia.

A portrait of Annemarie Heinrich, date unknown. Public Domain.

Wrapping my head around Wikidata

I was also introduced to Wikidata on my placement, another of Wikimedia’s projects consisting of open linked data and a completely unknown field to me. On the placement, we were able to attend the IFLA Wikidata and Wikibase Working Group office hour. The thought-provoking whistle-stop tour of the platform that we were given in this meeting had me creating an account immediately after closing the Zoom call tab.

Wikidata logo, Public Domain.,

As expected due to their Wikipedia articles, Félix Bonfils and Annemarie Heinrich had Wikidata item entries already, but so did Marie-Lydie, their son, Adrien, and Maison Bonfils. This is likely because of the generally less intensive notability criteria on Wikidata.

I did have a few challenges with Wikidata over my second week. One arose when I tried to add the EAP to the Bonfils’ items. Adrien Bonfils had an existing property for “has works in the collection”, with museums and galleries listed, so I added the EAP to this section. However, on looking at a similar artist’s item entry, I found that there is also a property for “archives at” that might better apply.

Wikidata entry for the Bonfils Collection

Seeing this, I not only realised that I might have used the wrong category, but also that there might be others that were more relevant that I just hadn’t seen yet! Being able to search for each qualifier allows for a flexible and tailored user experience but, for a newbie, the amount of choice can be a bit overwhelming! The upside is that Wikidata is quite forgiving, with changes easily made and explanatory symbols popping up when the system recognises a mistake (as can be seen in the image below).

Amended Wikidata entry for the Bonfils Collection on Wikidata

To sum up, researching the lives and careers of these women photographers from the EAP collections has been fascinating. It has been so rewarding to help to increase their online discoverability, and that of the EAP.

Working remotely, this placement was bound to be unusual in some ways, but the BL team was really welcoming and encouraged us all to ask lots of questions (which I absolutely did!). I have learnt a lot about Wikimedia in these few weeks and I will definitely continue exploring and making edits in the future.

This is a guest post by UCL Archives and Records Management MA student and recent Wiki convert, Hope Lowther (@hopelowther)

BL/QFP Project celebrates two million images on the Qatar Digital Library and the creative ways we have used them.

This week we are celebrating a milestone achievement of two million images digitised and uploaded to the Qatar Digital Library (QDL). In addition to this bilingual, digital archive, the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership Project (BL/QFP Project) has also inspired creative and innovative pursuits. The material on the QDL is available to use and reuse, which allows for a wide variety of responses. Over the last few years, our Project’s diverse team has explored and demonstrated a multitude of ways to engage with these digital materials, including events, artwork, coding, and analysis.

The BL/QFP Project’s staff are skilled, experienced, and dedicated. They include cataloguers, historians, archivists, imaging specialists, conservators, translators, editors, and administrative support. This means that in one team (ordinarily housed in one office) we have a diverse pool of people, which has inspired some amazing interactions and ideas. Our skills range from photography, graphic design, and technology, to linguistics, history, and data analysis. By sharing and combining these talents, we have been able to engage with the digital material and resources in remarkable ways. We have all enjoyed learning about new areas, sharing skills and knowledge, engaging with fascinating materials, finding new ways of doing things, and collaborating with a range of people, such as the BL BAME Network and other partners.

Some of the work produced outside of our core deliverables is displayed below.

 

Hack Days

Hack Days are an opportunity to use innovative techniques to explore and respond to BL collections. The first BL/QFP Imaging Hack Day was held in October 2018, and led to an array of varied responses from our Imaging Team who used their skills to "hack" the QDL. Subsequent Hack Days have incorporated diverse topics, formats, collections, and participants. They are also award winning: the concept led by the Imaging Team won the British Library Labs Staff Award in 2019.

Figure 1: Poster for Hack Day created using images from manuscripts on the QDL

 

Figure 2: Astrolabe created by Darran Murray (Digitisation Studio Manager) using Or 2411

 

Figure 3: Example of images created to respond to the weaponry on the walls by Hannah Nagle (Senior Imaging Support Technician)

 

Figure 4: Social media banner created by Rebecca Harris (Senior Imaging Technician) for International Women’s Day

 

Figure 5: Imaging contrast showing insect damage to manuscript, ‘Four treatises on Astronomy’ (Or 8415), created by Renata Kaminska (Digitisation Studio Manager)

 

Figure 6: Behind the scenes visualisations including conservation treatment, created by Sotirios Alpanis (former Head of Digital Operations) and Jordi Clopes-Masjuan (Senior Imaging Technician)

 

Figure 7: Visual narratives made by combining digital images by Melanie Taylor (Senior Imaging Support Technician)

 

Figure 8: Colourisation of the portrait of the Sharif of Mecca, from 1781.b.6/7, using historically accurate colours by Daniel Loveday (Senior Imaging Technician)

 

Figure 9: Exquisite Corpse image created by collaging material from different images, including manuscripts from the QDL as well as BL Flickr and Instagram. By Morgane Lirette (Conservator (Books), Conservation), Tan Wang-Ward (Project Manager, Lotus Sutra Manuscripts Digitisation), Matthew Lee (Imaging Support Technician), Darran Murray (Digitisation Studio Manager), Noemi Ortega-Raventos (Content Specialist, Archivist). Exquisite Corpse: Head part 1 (QDL), Head part 2 (QDL), Head part 3 (QDL), Head part 4 (QDL) Head part 5 (QDL), torso (Flickr), legs (Flickr), feet (Instagram)

 

Cyanotype Workshops

Matt Lee (Senior Imaging Support Technician), Daniel Loveday (Senior Imaging Technician) and the Imaging Team

Members of the Imaging team have since gone on to develop cyanotype workshops. The photographic printing process of cyanotype uses chemicals and ultraviolet light to create a copy of an image. The team led experiments on the process at one of the Project’s Staff Away Days. After its success, the concept was developed further and workshops were delivered to students at the Camberwell College of Arts. Images from manuscripts on the QDL were used to create cyanotype collages like those displayed below.

Figure 10: Cyanotype created using collage of images from the QDL, by Matt Lee (Senior Imaging Support Technician)

 

Figure 11: Cyanotype created using collage of images from the QDL, by Louis Allday (Gulf History Cataloguing Manager)

 

Watermarks Project

Jordi Clopes-Masjuan (Senior Imaging Technician), Camille Dekeyser (Conservator), Matt Lee (Senior Imaging Support Technician), Heather Murphy (Conservation Team Leader)

The Watermarks Project is an ongoing collaboration between the Conservation and Imaging Teams. Together they have sought to examine and display watermarks found in our collection items. Starting with the physical items, and figuring out how best to capture them, they have experimented with ways to display the watermarks digitally. The process requires many forms of expertise, but the results facilitate the study and appreciation of the designs.

Figure 12: Studio setup for capturing the watermarks

 

Figure 13: Gif image showing traditional and translucid view with watermark highlighted by digital tracing.

 

Addressing Problematic Terms in our Catalogues and Translations Project

Serim Abboushi (Arabic & English Web Content Editor), Mariam Aboelezz (Translation Support Officer), Louis Allday (Gulf History Cataloguing Manager), Sotirios Alpanis (former Head of Digital Operations), John Casey (Cataloguer, Gulf History), David Fitzpatrick (Content Specialist, Archivist), Susannah Gillard (Content Specialist, Archivist), John Hayhurst (Content Specialist, Gulf History), Julia Ihnatowicz (Translation Specialist), William Monk (Cataloguer, Gulf History), Hannah Nagle (Senior Imaging Support Technician), Noemi Ortega-Raventos (Content Specialist, Archivist), Francis Owtram (Content Specialist, Gulf History), Curstaidh Reid (Cataloguer, Gulf History), George Samaan (Translation Support Officer), Tahani Shaban (Translation Specialist), David Woodbridge (Cataloguer, Gulf History), Nariman Youssef (Arabic Translation Manager) and special thanks to the BL BAME Staff Network.

The Addressing Problematic Terms in our Catalogues and Translations Project was joint winner of the 2020 BL Labs Staff Award. It is an ongoing, highly collaborative project inspired by a talk given by Dr Melissa Bennett about decolonising the archive and how to deal with problematic terms found in archive items. Using existing translation tools and a custom-built python script, the group has been analysing terms that appear in the original language of the documents, and assessing how best to address them in both English and Arabic. This work enables the project to treat problematic terms sensitively and to contextualise them in our catalogue descriptions and translations.

 

More projects

The work continues with projects that explore how to use and share different methods and technologies. For example, Hannah Nagle has taught us how to collage using digital images (How to make art when we’re working apart), Ellis Meade has created a Bitsy game based in the Qatar National Library that draws you inside a manuscript (‘Hidden world of the Qatar National Library’), and Dr Mariam Aboelezz has used the BL/QFP Translation Memory to analyse how we were using the Arabic Verb Form X (istafʿal) in our translations of catalogue descriptions (‘Investigating Instances of Arabic Verb Form X in the BL/QFP Translation Memory’).

Figure 14: Image of the Qatar National Library using Bitsy from ‘Hidden world of the Qatar National Library’ by Ellis Meade (Senior Imaging Technician)

 

We have also made the most of the Covid-19 restrictions and working from home, to share and learn skills such as coding, Arabic language, and photography. For example, through the Project’s ‘Code Club’, many of us have learnt about python and have written scripts to streamline our tasks. Furthermore, codes to explore the collections have also had creative outputs, such as Anne Courtney’s project “Making data into sound” (Runner-up, BL Labs Staff Awards, 2020).

The Project’s extraordinary collaborative work demonstrates some of the exciting and innovative ways to engage with library and archival collections. It also makes clear the wider benefits of digitisation and providing free online access to fully bilingual catalogued resources.

You can read about some of our projects in more detail in the blog posts below:

• ‘Making watermarks visible’ by Heather Murphy, Jordi Clopes-Masjuan and Matt Lee - https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2020/06/making-watermarks-visible-a-collaborative-project-between-conservation-and-imaging.html
• ‘Making data into sound’ by Anne Courtney - https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2020/09/making-data-into-sound.html
• ‘How to make art when we’re working apart’ by Hannah Nagle - https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2020/05/how-to-make-art-when-were-working-apart.html
• ‘Investigating Instances of Arabic Verb Form X in the BL/QFP Translation Memory’ by Mariam Aboelezz - https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2021/02/investigating-instances-of-arabic-verb-form-x-in-the-blqfp-translation-memory.html

You can read about previous BL/QFP Hack Days in the blog posts below:

• BL/QFP Imaging Hack Day (Part 1) - https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2018/11/the-british-library-qatar-foundation-partnership-imaging-hack-day.html
• BL/QFP Imaging Hack Day (Part 2) - https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2019/02/the-british-library-qatar-foundation-partnership-imaging-hack-day-part-2.html
• BL/QFP Imaging Hack Day: International Women’s Day - https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2019/03/the-british-library-qatar-national-library-partnership-imaging-hack-day-international-womens-day.html
• BL/QFP Project Hack Day: Collaboration - https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2019/11/the-british-library-qatar-foundation-partnership-project-hack-day-theme-collaboration.html
• BL/QFP Project & BL BAME Network Hack Day - https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2021/01/hacking-the-bl-from-home.html

This is a guest post by the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership Project, compiled by Laura Parsons. You can follow the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership on Twitter at @BLQatar.

The Urban Tree Festival got off to an active start on Saturday, including launch events for our tree themed Wikipedia edit-thon and our Games in the Woods game jam. If editing Wikipedia to add and improve articles about trees sounds like your jam, please do join our Urban Tree Wikithon dashboard (passcode: vmqytwdr) if you haven't already, so your edits will count towards our stats for #wiktreepedia tracked activity. However, if making games and writing interactive stories is more up your tree-lined avenue, then read on.

Games In the Woods is an online jam running all this week, until midnight on Sunday 23rd May. You are welcome to join alone or in a team to create digital and analogue games, interactive fiction, web comics, board games, escape games, card games – anything you want! We especially encourage creative re-use of images from the British Library’s Flickr collection of digitised 19th century books, do check out these online Flora and Fauna galleries. There is also a fabulous curated selection of wildlife and environmental sound recordings picked by Cheryl Tipp, available via this SoundCloud playlist, which you can use in your creations. 

At the jam's launch event, Ash Green gave a brilliant Bitsy tutorial (we blogged about Bitsy last week), and Marion Tessier shared our Games in the Woods Luography and tree themed BoardGameGeek Geeklist, as we appreciate not everyone may want to make games, but lots of people enjoy playing them. If you have a favourite game about trees, please do tell us.

We also provided an introduction to Twine, which is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. Slides from the launch event can be found here and here.

To get an idea of what you can do with Twine, we suggest reading some free tree themed interactive stories, which others have created using the tool. Both The Old Woman in the Wood and Through the Woods Demo are part of an itch.io collection of tree themed games on itch.io that we have curated to inspire Games in the Woods jam participants.

On Saturday we also watched this useful video; Making Interactive Fiction with Twine, by Matt Allen from Closed Forum, which explains:

• Folder structures
• Making passages and links
• Hidden passage links
• Background, fonts and font size
• Style sheets
• Adding images, music and video
• Timed text and timed links
• Variables and if else statements

If you are interested in trying out Twine to write an interactive story, then these online resources can help you to get started:

• The Twine Cookbook, which contains documentation, tips, and examples for using Twine
• A Total Beginner’s Guide to Twine 2.1 by Adam Hammond, which includes these useful videos:
  • Getting Started With Twine 2.1
  • Make Your Twine 2.1 Game Look Awesome with CSS (SugarCube 2)
  • Adding Images and Music to Your Twine 2.1 Game (SugarCube 2)
  • Variables, Conditionals, and Programming in Twine 2.1 (SugarCube 2)
• A Total Beginner’s Guide to HTML and CSS by Adam Hammond
• Twine for Beginners by Damon L. Wakes
• The Twine® Grimoire, Vol. 1, by G.C. Baccaris
• Video showing how to Publish Your Twine Game to Itch.io, by Eric Guadara

If you're new to using itch.io and participating in game jams, below is some advice about uploading and sharing your game. If you've created a game that is saved as a html file you can upload and allow people to play it on itch.io in their web browser, rather than getting people to download the file to play it. Both Bitsy and Twine, which we featured in the launch event save the games they produce as html files. To get the game to play in the browser tick the "This game will be played in the Browser" box underneath the filename you uploaded. If it's a game that can't be run in the browser leave the "This game will be played in the browser" box unticked.

When you upload a file and edit the game information page, it defaults to saving the page in draft. To publish it so everyone can see and play or download your game, select the "public" option under "visibility & access". To submit your game to the Games in the Woods game jam:

• Upload your game
• Then click on the Submit your project button
• Then select your game from the drop-down list that appears
• Click Submit

Good luck and have fun, we are looking forward to seeing, reading and playing your games.

This post is by Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom) with input from Ash Green (@ggnewed), Cheryl Tipp (@CherylTipp) and Marion Tessier from Kingston Libraries (@kinglibheritage).

We could not be more excited about the upcoming Urban Tree Festival and our Wikithon. If you’d like to join in the fun, there’s plenty of time! Come along to our online event on Saturday 15th May at 11:00 BST for free training and information. You do not need any prior Wikipedia experience and we have nurtured a forest of useful resources to share with you.

If you’d like to get a head start, you can read our handy guide to setting up your Wikipedia account. There is advice on creating your account, Wikipedia's username policy and how to create your user page.

Once you have done that, or if you already have a Wikipedia account, please join our Urban Tree Wikithon dashboard (the enrollment passcode is vmqytwdr) and go through the introductory exercises, which cover:

• Wikipedia Essentials
• Editing Basics
• Evaluating Articles and Sources
• Contributing Images and Media Files
• Sandboxes and Mainspace
• Sources and Citations
• Plagiarism

These exercises aren’t time consuming – it’s definitely not an Entmoot situation – and they will help you prepare for editing Wikipedia during the Urban Tree Festival.

The easiest and swiftest way to verify your Wikipedia account is to do 10 small edits, one way to do this is to find articles where citations are needed, and add them via Citation Hunt (please make sure you are logged in for this!). For further information on adding citations, this video may be useful.

Treebeard and Hobbits, by Tom Loback, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

While it’s nice to be prepared, we understand that life is hectic and we are all busy bees, so if you don’t have a chance to do these activities in advance, it’s no problem. We will provide instructions on how to start from scratch at the session this Saturday.

Absolutely anyone can edit Wikipedia, and we can’t wait to help you on your way.

‘Tree’ you later!

This post is by Wikimedian in Residence Lucy Hinnie (@BL_Wikimedian) & Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom). Embedded videos are by Ewan McAndrew (@emcandre), Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh.