Posted by Filipe Bento, BL Labs Technical Lead

I am passionate about libraries and digital initiatives within them, and am particularly interested in Open Knowledge, scholarly communication, scientific information dissemination, (Linked) Open Data, and all the innovative services that can be offered to promote their ultimate dissemination and usage, not only within academia, but also within the wider community such as industry and society. I have over twenty years experience in developing and supporting library tools, some of which have facilitated automation over manual methods to make the lives of people who work or use libraries easier.

Before working at the British Library, I was an independent consultant in the areas of digital strategies and initiatives, library technologies, information management, digital policies, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Open Source Software (OSS). Previous to that, I worked at EBSCO Information Services in several roles, firstly as the Discovery Service Engineering Support Team Manager (Europe and Latin America) and for three years as the Software Services, Application Programming Interfaces (API) and Applications (Apps) manager. My last role at EBSCO was implementing and managing the EBSCO App Store which involved working with several departments within the organisation such as marketing and legal.

Giving a talk the National Congress of BAD (Portuguese Librarians, Archivists and Documentalists Association), in the Azores

I helped the University of Aveiro's Library become the first Portuguese adopter of reference Open Source Software (OSS)  - OJS [Open Journal Systems] and implemented the institutional digital repository DSpace for the university (which included a massive data transformation and records deposit, often from citations exported from Scopus). I started my career as a lecturer and then as a computer specialist at the University of Aveiro’s Library, coordinating the development of information systems for its many branches for over fifteen years.

My PhD research in Information and Communication in Digital Platforms gave me the opportunity to connect with my professional interests in libraries, especially in the areas of information discovery. In my PhD, I was able to implement VuFind with innovative community features, as a proposal for the university, which involved engaging actively in its developer community, providing general and technical support in the process. My thesis is available via the link "Search 4.0: Integration and Cooperation Confluence in Scientific Information Discovery".

University of Aveiro (main campus), Portugal

I have also been very active in a number of communities;
I was the (former) chairman of the board of USE.pt, the Portuguese Ex Libris Systems’ Users Association, and a previous member of the DigiMedia Research Center - Digital Media and Interaction at the University of Aveiro.

In my personal life I had been a radio and club DJ and worked on a number of personal music projects. I enjoy photography and video and am a keen traveler. I especially like being behind the wheels of cars / motorbikes and the propellers of drones.

I am really excited in joining the BL Labs team as I believe it provides an excellent opportunity to apply my skills, knowledge and expertise in library digital collections development, systems, data and APIs in a digital scholarship and wider context. I am really looking forward in offering practical advice and implementations in providing access to data, data curation, data visualisation, text and data mining and interactive web based computing environments such as Jupyter Notebooks to name a few. BL Labs and the British Library offers a rich, innovative and stimulating environment to explore what its staff and users want to do with its incredible and diverse digital collections.

Introduction

On October 16^th 2019, the BL/QFP Project opened its doors to its third and biggest Hack Day to date. After the success of the first two, it was decided to extend participation beyond the Imaging Team and invite everyone from the rest of the project to get involved. We wanted to utilise the unique way the BL/QFP is set up within the Library, with different teams and specialities all working in one place, and emphasise collaboration across these different teams. The diverse people and teams within the BL/QFP bring a wide variety of skills and experience, from language and collections knowledge to artistic and technicial expertise. By bringing these together, we were able to learn from and teach each other whilst engaging with the collections and producing a variety of fascinating and thought-provoking hacks.

 

The Hacks

During the launch workshop the vast array of skills and expertise within the team were evident, as well as the abundant enthusiasm and ambition people had. After the proposed projects were raised and discussed, five teams were formed focusing on a wide range of ideas. On the day, almost half of the BL/QFP staff participated in some way, proving the collaboration objective was well and truly met. The diverse outputs, from animations and games to pinhole cameras and data visualisations, were presented at a “show and tell”, and some were displayed on the BL/QFP Twitter page.

Below is a summary of the day, including descriptions of the hacks from each of the five teams, enjoy!

 

Games

Team: Renata Kaminska, Mariam Aboelezz, Anne Courtney, Susannah Gillard and our Quality Assurance Officer

For our Hack Day project, we wanted to make the Qatar Digital Library (QDL) more accessible to non-experts, or people who might not be looking at it with a specific research aim. With this in mind, we decided to develop some quick and easy games to engage users with the collections. Using free browser-based software, we created a word search, jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, and a game of hangman. These all drew on the collections which were already digitised. Where possible, we tried to include links to the items on the QDL. Although the free software had some limitations, we feel that these games offer a foundation to build on in the future.

Games Crossword using information from a letter from Lieutenant William Bruce, Resident, Bushire, 1814 (IOR/R/15/1/14, ff 125v-127) Play: https://tinyurl.com/yespowj7 Jigsaw using image from Tarjumah-ʼi ʻAjā’ib al-makhlūqāt (Or 1621, f 391v) Play: https://tinyurl.com/yjuf9d7o Jigsaw using image of ‘Persia and Afghanistan. Map I’ (IOR/R/15/1/730, f 87) Play: https://tinyurl.com/yhpv3erw Hangman game using words from the QDL collection Play: https://tinyurl.com/yftf5vca Word Search using words from the QDL collection Play: https://tinyurl.com/yj9nugb9

 

Photogrammetry: Astrolabe Quadrant

Team: Darran Murray, Tony Grant, Nick Krebs, Matt Griffin, Rebecca Harris, Matthew Lee, Daniel Loveday and Annie Ward

Our Hack Day project centred on what the Library's Imaging Services can do with the technology and expertise they offer, in particular photogrammetry. Photogrammetry is a photographic process where any type of object can be rendered into a 3D image for display on a 2D screen. This process is beneficial as it displays the complete item, allowing users to see and understand collection items without having to handle them.

We chose an Astrolabe Quadrant from the collection and created a rendition but also an animation of the same object. As you can see from both renditions, they have certain advantages over a single photograph of a 3D object, bringing the object to life.

 

Camera view during photogrammetry creation

 

British Library St Pancras Studio during photogrammetry creation

 

Photogrammetry rendition of astrolabe quadrant

 

 

Animation created using images from astrolabe photogrammetry rendering

 

Obscura / Pinhole / Cyanotype

Team: Rebecca Harris, Matthew Lee, Daniel Loveday, Darran Murray and Annie Ward

Our team explored early types of photography. First off, we created a camera obscura in one of the bays in our Imaging Studio by blocking out the light and creating a small hole by the window. An optical phenomenon, this simple hack allowed us to create an upside-down projection of the London skyline, complete with moving clouds and the Shard. Viewing sessions were arranged throughout the day and resulted in a stream of curious visitors.

As well as the camera obscura, we each built our own pinhole cameras using card, stripy tape and light-sensitive paper. Once we can set up a temporary darkroom we plan to take and develop photographs illustrating different aspects of the BL/QFP Project. Lastly, an experiment using cyanotype paper in an old brownie camera is still in progress, taking a long exposure still-life of a spirit level borrowed from the Conservation Team.

Upside-down projection of the London skyline created using the camera obscura

 

Pinhole cameras

 

Time-lapse video showing creation of pinhole cameras

 

Behind The Scenes: Visualisations

Team: Jordi Clopes Masjuan and Sotirios Alpanis, with translation assistance from George Samaan

Our Hack Day project aimed to illuminate some aspects of our digitisation workflow that are not directly represented in the material displayed on the QDL. We wanted to represent and celebrate some of the hard work that goes into the creation of digitised material, particularly the tasks and processes that most people wouldn’t necessarily think about. The 45+ people involved in our workflow have a huge variety of skills and expertise, and it was some of this that we wanted to capture. We decided to use ‘every day’ objects from our workflow and picture them in interesting ways. Then pick out some interesting facts and figures about the processes they represent. Using Photoshop these two were combined to present the facts in their ‘every-day’ setting.

QDL Homepage combined with a picture of the BL/QFP Team

 

Permission letters sent by Rights Clearance Team to people identified as Rights Holders for material being digitised

 

A book undergoing conservation treatment

 

The British Library’s digital servers

 

A Leading Library Assistant’s trolley in the lift carrying collection items

 

The Workflow Team’s Kanban Board

 

A Foliator’s desk drawer

 

Visualising Data

Team: David Woodbridge, Sotirios Alpanis, Laura Parsons, with assistance from Anna Waghorn

We had the idea to display data about the Project in visually dynamic and appealing ways. We thought we could experiment with displaying authority terms used in the Project’s catalogue records and see what we could learn about data manipulation and data visualisation along the way.

Whilst we were able to export data about the Project and collections from SharePoint (the platform we use to manage items through the digitisation workflow) and IAMS (the Library's cataloguing system for archives, manuscripts, photographs and other visual materials), we needed to tidy up the data to make it useful. For example, the IAMS data is exported as code in an XML file format so Sotirios experimented with extracting particular elements. This work highlighted how data visualisations rely on having well-organised and complete data.

Using Microsoft Power BI, we tried a variety of ways for displaying the data, including network and force-directed graphs. These graphs show relationships between data points, such as the authority terms assigned to different shelfmarks. We also created other visualisations, such as pie charts, that quantified specific aspects of the data, for example showing the numbers of person authorities according to gender, or the language of their name. The challenge being to create something visually appealing but still meaningful.

 

Dashboard displaying data visualisations including network, force-directed and pie graphs.

 

Weaponry on Walls

Team: Hannah Nagle & the British Library’s BAME Staff Network

Working in collaboration with the Library’s BAME Staff Network, we wanted to investigate people’s perceptions of weaponry displayed in our offices. We prepared a survey and sent it out to the BL/QFP Project staff, asking them to fill it in. A work in progress, the results, quotes and related imagery will be collated into a zine illustrating the survey responses to the weapons. We will be using original photographs, images from the QDL and public domain images found on Flickr, including from the British Library’s Flickr account. With this, we hope to start a conversation about what the weaponry can represent to different people and why this is important to keep in mind.

Example of images created to respond to the weaponry on the walls

 

Further information

If you would like to explore the photographs and documents used in our Hack Day projects from the Qatar Digital Library or find out more about the India Office Records please follow the links below:

• References to Astrolabe Quadrant on QDL:
  • https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100066404465.0x000001
  • https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100025776458.0x000001
  • https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100042209331.0x000001
• References to Camera Obscura on QDL:
  • https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100023697729.0x00000d
  • https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100040977369.0x000006
• References to Cyanotype on QDL:
  • https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100024074586.0x000001

 

You can also read about the previous Hack Days in the blog posts below:

• https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2018/11/the-british-library-qatar-foundation-partnership-imaging-hack-day.html
• https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2019/02/the-british-library-qatar-foundation-partnership-imaging-hack-day-part-2.html
• https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2019/03/the-british-library-qatar-national-library-partnership-imaging-hack-day-international-womens-day.html

 

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

The BL/QFP Project’s Imaging Team won the Staff Award at the British Library Labs Symposium 2019 for their Hack Days.

 

This is a guest blog post by Dr Gethin Rees, Lead Curator for Digital Map Collections at the British Library. It was originally posted on the Pelagios Commons Blog.

 

The Web Maps-T working group aims to enhance the ability to visualise geospatial and temporal Linked Open Data on web maps. The group is coordinated by Gethin Rees and Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, see this previous post for more details. As a first step, we held a hack workshop in September at the British Library to scope applications to visualise and work with the GeoJSON-T standard. Participants at the workshop included from the Rainer Simon from the Austrian Institute of Technology, Karl Grossner from University Of Pittsburgh, Neil Jakeman from King’s College Digital Lab, Alex Butterworth and Simon Wibberley from Sussex University’s Humanities Lab alongside Mia Ridge and Olivia Vane from Digital Scholarship at the British Library. They came to the workshop with a variety of datasets derived from the art, archaeology and travelogues from the classical world for example, as well as the collections of the British Library, including contributions from the Endangered Archives Programme, Georeferencer and Two Centuries of Indian Print.

Matching datasets to visualisation types

 

Throughout the event we collaborated using repositories in the Pelagios GitHub organisation and Google Docs. After introductory talks, first by Gethin Rees on user stories and use cases for Web Maps-T, and second by Karl Grossner on GeoJSON-T and the Linked Traces app, participants introduced their own projects and use cases for geospatial and temporal visualisation.

Karl and Alex discuss the finer points of “The Prelude Timeline: On the Growth of My Own Mind” by Alex Butterworth and Stephanie Posavec, for The Wordsworth Trust

 

Participants then coalesced around several tasks and divided into groups to work. These tasks included:

• MoSCoW assessment of Web Maps-T app. This prioritisation technique divided potential features of the app into Must, Should, Could and Won’t. For example, our app must have a timeline, a map, and work with GeoJSON-T. On the other hand it could use animation for visualisation, and won’t include a text box querying for plain English.
• Classification of datasets and visualisation types. We wanted to explore several forms of visualisation and it quickly became clear that some were better suited to certain types of datasets than others. For histogram, linear journey, period horizontal bars, valid time intervals and beeswarm visualisations we recorded data type, size, examples and pros and cons.
• These activities were documented in detail and will form the basis of the white paper. Participants that wrote code worked on:
• WhenJSON— a front-end JavaScript utility library for manipulating temporal data in the GeoJSON-T format (the ‘when’ object). The utility could, for example, help in calculating the interval that separates two data sources.
• A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) web map with a time-slider componentto test visualisation types for different dataset classifications. This work borrows heavily from the work of Jonathan Skeate. The MVP allowed us to see how datasets looked when visualised using different methods such as histogram or time bars.

Visualisation of Endangered Archives Programme data

 

• Scoping the adaption Karl Grossner’s Linked Traces app to be used with any dataset and to add a time slider. This could be a more robust and presentable solution than our adaptation of Skeate’s Leaflet Timeline.

Itinerary of the Bordeaux pilgrim in Linked Traces

 

Next steps for the group are to write a white paper and to attend the Linked Pasts conference in Bordeaux. All the workshop participants had projects where they were keen to apply Web Maps-T and there must be many more use-cases out there. However, the path from hack event to an open-source, production-ready component that can visualise any GeoJSON-T data we throw at it is not straightforward. Like any open-source project, success rests on people and projects requiring the component and standard for their day-to-day work. There are plenty of potential applications in the Linked Pasts community and beyond, the main resources that we now require are developer time and GeoJSON-T datasets. We will continue to encourage others to contribute, perhaps you have potential applications. Get in touch at visualisation[at]pelagios.org

 

Happy Halloween! If you aren't heading out trick or treating this evening, and prefer a quiet night in, then you may like to play some of the wonderful games and interactive fiction that were created in last year's Gothic Novel Jam. My personal favourite is The Lady's Book of Decency, by Sean S. LeBlanc. If you feel like a longer read, Lynda Clark's first novel Beyond Kidding is launched today, I can't wait to get my teeth into this!

It is also very nearly International Games Week (3-9 November 2019), this is an initiative run by volunteers from around the world to reconnect communities through their libraries around the educational, recreational, and social value of all types of games. Check out this map to see if there is an event near you!

If you are based in the UK and work in libraries, you may be interested in coming along to the next Game Library Camp, which is being held at Leeds Central Library on Saturday 9th November. More details can be found at https://librarycamp.game.blog/, I'll be there to lead a discussion for the session "I hope you like jammin’ too"; for sharing advice on running online interactive fiction writing jams. 

Here at the British Library we have a couple of International Games Week (IGW) events, we are excited to be hosting the narrative games convention AdventureX on Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd November, all tickets are completely sold out, but the talks will be live streamed, online from http://adventurexpo.org/livestream/, check the schedule for times and watch from the comfort of your sofa.   

Continuing our IGW events at the British Library, on the evening of Monday 4th November we are holding a Digital Conversation on Games, Literature and Learning. This will be a panel discussion exploring how video games, such as Minecraft, can be used to engage learners of all ages with literature, libraries and museums.

Child trying Litcraft at SPARK: The Science and Art of Creativity, a festival of ideas organised by the British Council in Hong Kong, image credit ATUM Images

Jordan Erica Webber will be our chair for the evening. Jordan is a writer and presenter, Co-author of Ten Things Video Games Can Teach Us, host of the Guardian's digital culture podcast Chips With Everything and resident games expert on The Gadget Show.

Our panellists include: 

• Keith Stuart, Guardian journalist, writer and author of A Boy Made of Blocks, a Richard and Judy Book Club pick and a major bestseller. He has written about how Minecraft has helped his son Zac and will be talking from a parent’s perspective. Keith will also be available to sign books after the panel discussion.

A Boy Made of Blocks, by Keith Stuart

• Dr Lissa Holloway-Attaway and Dr Björn Berg Marklund from the University of Skövde in Sweden, whose whose research specialisms are digital game-based learning, educational games, 'Serious Games' and how games are used in classrooms. They have collaborated with museums and cultural organisations to run workshops with young people to co-create their communities within the Baltic Sea Region by constructing imaginative simulations of their cities and neighbourhoods in Minecraft. Another of their projects is the Augmented Reality, children's book app KLUB, which stands for Kiras och Luppes Bestiarium (Kiras and Luppes Bestiary) where mythical beings from books come to life in 3D.  

The Kiras och Luppes Bestiarium app 

• Professor Sally Bushell from the Department of English Literature & Creative Writing at Lancaster University; Sally is the Principle Investigator on the Litcraft project, which uses the popular Minecraft gaming platform to build accurate scale models of authorial maps from classic works of literature. Impact is achieved by re-engaging children with literature in a model of positive reinforcement that makes works accessible in entirely new ways, combining the textual and the digital. Reading and writing are integrated with an immersive experience of the literary worlds.

Promotional video for the third Litcraft release - the first pairing of connected texts. This build features the original and iconic castaway tales: Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe.

The Digital Conversation event takes place in The Knowledge Centre at the British Library on Monday 4th November, 18.30- 20.30; for more details including booking, visit: https://www.bl.uk/events/digital-conversation-games-literature-and-learning. Hope to see you there. 

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom, on twitter as @miss_wisdom. 

In this post, Nicolas Moretto, Metadata Systems Analyst at the British Library, reflects on his work trip to India.

Earlier this year I was given the opportunity to attend a workshop on “Digitisation Workflows & Digital Research Studies Methodologies” held at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore, India.

The workshop, which was held on the NCBS campus in the northern part of Bangalore, was jointly organised by Tom Derrick (Two Centuries of Indian Print - 2CIP) and our host Venkat Srinivasan who is the archivist at NCBS. Tom represented the 2CIP project while I attended to cover different metadata aspects. The event was attended by colleagues from 26 different institutions. Tom and I were kindly provided with accommodation on the campus.

Attendees of the workshop outside the NCBS main building                                                                                                         

The workshop was intended as an opportunity to learn more about cataloguing, digitisation and OCR, and for the Indian participants to meet colleagues from Bangalore and other parts of India, share experiences, exchange ideas and discuss common standards and best practices. The chance to meet with colleagues working on similar activities – and encountering similar challenges – was an important aspect of the workshop. Most attendees were not professional archivists but had come into archives from academic and other backgrounds and had been exposed to archives and cultural heritage in different ways. All participants shared a high level of enthusiasm for archives and a passion for preserving cultural heritage and the memory of their communities.

On the left: The Safeda Room at NCBS. On the right: the NCBS campus offered space for discussions during the breaks

 

The topics of the two-day workshop ranged from talks on description and arrangement of material (archival and related discovery standards), presentations on specific projects to digitisation workflows and OCR. Tom gave a practical demo of OCR tools for Indic scripts. I gave a presentation on each day, covering metadata description as well as reuse and discovery.

Ten of the Indian institutions presented five-minute lightning talks covering a diverse range of initiatives and describing their archival collections. The Ashoka Archives of Contemporary India presented their collection, which includes the Mahatma Ghandi papers as well as material from other Indian politicians and academics. The Keystone Foundation gave an overview of the opportunities and challenges around their work with indigenous communities in India. Their aim is to challenge traditional portrayals of indigenous culture by employing oral history interviews, which give a voice to parts of the culture that would otherwise remain unheard. The French Institute of Pondicherry featured material that had been digitised for several Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) projects, including ceiling murals and glass frames. The participants from FLAME University presented a project of digitising Indian cookbooks, showing the interdependencies between caste and cooking. The multimedia resource Sahapedia (https://www.sahapedia.org/) was presented as a way of curating Indian heritage in an online environment. All participants were looking for ways to make cultural heritage more accessible using digital tools. On the afternoon of the second day, the participants had an opportunity to undertake a hands-on activity testing OCR tools using their own material.

The workshop was well received and feedback was overall positive. The participants voiced interest in receiving more in-depth practical training and how-to guides around cataloguing and metadata capture, setting up systems as well as preservation and conservation.

On the left: MayaDodd from FLAME University presents the Indian recipes project. On the right: Venkat giving a tour of the NCBS archive

 

On the evening of the first day, Venkat gave us a tour of the NCBS archives, which he had built up from scratch, working with NCBS researchers and with the help of student volunteers. The archive was remarkably open, inviting in students and staff even if they did not have an explicit research interest. Venkat was very interested in maintaining it as an open space. His archive is accompanied by an open and evolving exhibition space, which students can contribute to.

Setting up archives in India is not an easy undertaking, and Venkat has put in a tremendous effort to make it work. Even the essentials can be difficult to come by, since there is no supplier for archival materials in India for example, and Venkat had to import all his acid-free boxes from Germany.

On my last day, I accompanied Tom on a visit to the Karnataka State Central Library. The Director of the Department of Public Libraries, Dr. Satish Kumar Hosamani was not present, but his team kindly offered to give us a tour of the library. The Librarian showed us the round reading room and newspaper reading room and the collection of rare books and manuscripts. The State Library is planning to digitise these in the near future. This activity is currently awaiting approval and funding from the Karnataka state government.

 

On the left: Karnataka State Central Library in Cubbon Park. On the right: the round reading room in the State Central Library

 

Trying to find our way to the library, we discovered the existence of a “British Library Road” in Bangalore but were unable to reach it due to the customary extremely heavy traffic in Bangalore. Getting to and from destinations usually took a long time. The best way to get around over short distances was by “Tuk-tuk”, the ever-present means of transport in Indian cities.

On the left: British Library Road in Bangalore. On the right: view from a Tuk-Tuk - the traffic in Bangalore was eternally gridlocked!

 

Image taken from page 203 of '[Griffith's new historical description of Cheltenham and its vicinity ... with ... engravings. L.P.]'

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs

The BL Labs team are pleased to announce that the seventh annual British Library Labs Symposium will be held on Monday 11 November 2019, from 9:30 - 17:00* (see note below) in the British Library Knowledge Centre, St Pancras. The event is FREE, and you must book a ticket in advance to reserve your place. Last year's event was the largest we have ever held, so please don't miss out and book early!

*Please note, that directly after the Symposium, we have teamed up with an interactive/immersive theatre company called 'Uninvited Guests' for a specially organised early evening event for Symposium attendees (the full cost is £13 with some concessions available). Read more at the bottom of this posting!

The Symposium showcases innovative and inspiring projects which have used the British Library’s digital content. Last year's Award winner's drew attention to artistic, research, teaching & learning, and commercial activities that used our digital collections.

The annual event provides a platform for the development of ideas and projects, facilitating collaboration, networking and debate in the Digital Scholarship field as well as being a focus on the creative reuse of the British Library's and other organisations' digital collections and data in many other sectors. Read what groups of Master's Library and Information Science students from City University London (#CityLIS) said about the Symposium last year.

We are very proud to announce that this year's keynote will be delivered by scientist Armand Leroi, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Imperial College, London.

Professor Armand Leroi from Imperial College
will be giving the keynote at this year's BL Labs Symposium (2019)

Professor Armand Leroi is an author, broadcaster and evolutionary biologist.

He has written and presented several documentary series on Channel 4 and BBC Four. His latest documentary was The Secret Science of Pop for BBC Four (2017) presenting the results of the analysis of over 17,000 western pop music from 1960 to 2010 from the US Bill Board top 100 charts together with colleagues from Queen Mary University, with further work published by through the Royal Society. Armand has a special interest in how we can apply techniques from evolutionary biology to ask important questions about culture, humanities and what is unique about us as humans.

Previously, Armand presented Human Mutants, a three-part documentary series about human deformity for Channel 4 and as an award winning book, Mutants: On Genetic Variety and Human Body. He also wrote and presented a two part series What Makes Us Human also for Channel 4. On BBC Four Armand presented the documentaries What Darwin Didn't Know and Aristotle's Lagoon also releasing the book, The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science looking at Aristotle's impact on Science as we know it today.

Armands' keynote will reflect on his interest and experience in applying techniques he has used over many years from evolutionary biology such as bioinformatics, data-mining and machine learning to ask meaningful 'big' questions about culture, humanities and what makes us human.

The title of his talk will be 'The New Science of Culture'. Armand will follow in the footsteps of previous prestigious BL Labs keynote speakers: Dan Pett (2018); Josie Fraser (2017); Melissa Terras (2016); David De Roure and George Oates (2015); Tim Hitchcock (2014); Bill Thompson and Andrew Prescott in 2013.

The symposium will be introduced by the British Library's new Chief Librarian Liz Jolly. The day will include an update and exciting news from Mahendra Mahey (BL Labs Manager at the British Library) about the work of BL Labs highlighting innovative collaborations BL Labs has been working on including how it is working with Labs around the world to share experiences and knowledge, lessons learned . There will be news from the Digital Scholarship team about the exciting projects they have been working on such as Living with Machines and other initiatives together with a special insight from the British Library’s Digital Preservation team into how they attempt to preserve our digital collections and data for future generations.

Throughout the day, there will be several announcements and presentations showcasing work from nominated projects for the BL Labs Awards 2019, which were recognised last year for work that used the British Library’s digital content in Artistic, Research, Educational and commercial activities.

There will also be a chance to find out who has been nominated and recognised for the British Library Staff Award 2019 which highlights the work of an outstanding individual (or team) at the British Library who has worked creatively and originally with the British Library's digital collections and data (nominations close midday 5 November 2019).

As is our tradition, the Symposium will have plenty of opportunities for networking throughout the day, culminating in a reception for delegates and British Library staff to mingle and chat over a drink and nibbles.

Finally, we have teamed up with the interactive/immersive theatre company 'Uninvited Guests' who will give a specially organised performance for BL Labs Symposium attendees, directly after the symposium. This participatory performance will take the audience on a journey through a world that is on the cusp of a technological disaster. Our period of history could vanish forever from human memory because digital information will be wiped out for good. How can we leave a trace of our existence to those born later? Don't miss out on a chance to book on this unique event at 5pm specially organised to coincide with the end of the BL Labs Symposium. For more information, and for booking (spaces are limited), please visit here (the full cost is £13 with some concessions available). Please note, if you are unfortunate in not being able to join the 5pm show, there will be another performance at 1945 the same evening (book here for that one).

So don't forget to book your place for the Symposium today as we predict it will be another full house again and we don't want you to miss out.

We look forward to seeing new faces and meeting old friends again!

Image taken from page 99 of 'Festival of Song: a series of Evenings with the Poets. Prepared by the author of “Salad for the Solitary” ... (F. Saunders). With ... pictures by Members of the National Academy of Design. Engraved by Bobbett and Hooper'

For any further information, please contact [email protected]

Looking for entries now!

Nominate a 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 2019 British Library Labs Staff Award, now in its fourth 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 12:00 (BST), Tuesday 5 November 2019.

Nominees will be highlighted on Monday 11 November 2019 at the British Library Labs Annual Symposium where some (winners and runners-up) will also be asked to talk about their projects.

You can see the projects submitted by members of staff for the last two years' awards in our online archive, as well as blogs for last year's winners and runners-up.

The Staff Award complements the British Library Labs Awards, introduced in 2015, which recognise outstanding work that has been done in the broader community. Last year's winner focused on the brilliant work of the 'Polonsky Foundation England and France Project: Digitising and Presenting Manuscripts from the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, 700–1200'.

The runner up for the BL Labs Staff Award last year was the 'Digital Documents Harvesting and Processing Tool (DDHAPT)' which was designed to overcome the problem of finding individual known documents in the United Kingdom's Legal Deposit Web Archive.

In the public competition, last year's winners drew attention to artistic, research, teaching & learning, and commercial activities that used our 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].

 

Posted by Mahendra Mahey Manager of BL Labs.

I can't believe it's been a year since people from national, state, regional, university libraries (as well as a few galleries, archives and museums) met in London to attend the first global 'Library Labs' event at the British Library on 13th and 14th of September 2018. These 'Labs' are increasingly found in cultural heritage and academic institutions around the world and offer a space for their users to experiment and innovate on-site and on-line with their own (and others') digitised and born digital collections and data.

We had over 70 people from 43 institutions and 20 countries attend the London event and it was really wonderful, with a very full programme. There was a palpable sense of excitement and willingness to want to share experiences, build new professional relationships and witness the birth of a new international 'Labs' community. Through the event, we were able to understand more about the digital 'Labs' landscape around the world from the results of Library Labs survey. For example, we learned that many institutions were in the process of planning a 'Lab', many wanted to learn more about how to set them up, maintain and sustain them and learn the lessons from those that had already done it. About half of the attendees in London had already set up Labs in their organisations and wanted to share their experiences with other professionals so that they could build better Labs and help others so they didn't have to reinvent the wheel to save time and precious resources.

Some of the presenters from the first Building Library Labs Event at the
British Library, London, UK on 13-14 September 2019

The event was a mixture of presentations and lightning talks, stories of how labs are developing, parallel discussion groups and debates, many of which were videoed. At the end of the event, the collaborative document we had created contained over 60 edited pages of notes, together with a folder of other useful documents and presentations. It was concluded that it would be wonderful to come together to perhaps convert these shared experiences into a useful book/guide, perhaps through a Book Sprint. A Book Sprint is where up to 15 people come together for a week, and with minimal distractions work together to create a book. Each day when the participants sleep, a team of illustrators and editors transform their content for the next day remotely. The week ends having created a book! A great idea for busy people! We felt it was a nice fit for the Labs community we work in or want to create, which are largely based on a 'mindset' of experimentation, taking risks and being prepared to learn from your mistakes. I started to research how it might be possible to hold such a Book Sprint by talking to the Book Sprint company that has had over 20 years experience organising and running these book creation events.

Collectively as a group we decided that we would continue to build the Labs community and establish a mailing list. Clemens Neudecker wrote an excellent blog post about the event.

A screen grab from a virtual zoom meeting of the building Labs community

Subsequently, we held various meetings from October 2018 through to February 2019 (some virtual and some face to face) and agreed to hold our next global Labs meeting at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, Denmark on 4-5 March 2019, again with an action packed programme with the help of Katrine Gasser and her team at kbtechlab. Directly after that event, some of us participated in a pre-conference workshop as part of Digital Humanities Nordic 2019, DHN-Labs - Digital Humanities and the National and University Libraries and Archives (in the Nordic and Baltic Countries) on the 6 March 2019.

Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, Denmark where the second
Building Library Labs event was held between 4-5 March, 2019

Over 50 people attended the 2-day event in Copenhagen, although similar to the previous event in London, this time we agreed we would hold it under Chatham House rule (an idea from Kirsty Lingstadt from the University of Edinburgh) which many of us found was very liberating.

Again, we managed to produce over 60 pages of notes and collect other relevant and helpful information. It was even more abundantly clear at the end of this event that we would definitely need to find a way for some of us to come together to write a book through the Book Sprint methodology previously proposed.

A very kind and generous offer of exploring funding from her institution was made by Milena Dobreva-McPherson Associate Professor Library and Information Studies at University College London Qatar. Abigail Potter from the Library of Congress Labs also kindly suggested that she and her team may be able to hold the next global Labs meeting in Washington between 4-6 May, 2020 in the USA.

Myself and Milena met in Qatar at the first Musuem's and Big Data conference in Qatar organised by her colleague Georgios Papaioannou Associate Professor of Museum Studies, in May 2019. We formulated a proposal to UCL Qatar (funded by the Qatar Foundation) which was successful. Milena also managed to also obtain funding from the University of Qatar. There has also been support from the British Library Labs, the Library of Congress Labs, Book Sprint Ltd, who agreed to donate half of the Book Sprint fee to run the event and finally Qatar National Library.

What was important from the outset was that the digital version of the book should be made FREELY available on the web to reuse, in line with the spirit and ethos of the group.

Milena also managed to secure funding for research assistants Somia Salim and Fidelity Phiri to help create a global directory of organisations which are doing Labs style things or might want to. They have also helped out and are helping at various Labs style events including the Book Sprint.

From the first building library labs event in September 2018 to the present day there have been various events where the work of this community has been mentioned. Here is a small sample:

• Digital Humanities Australasia 2018, Adelaide - Australia (27 September 2018);
• British Library Labs Symposium 2018, London - UK (12 November 2018)
• Libraries as Labs network, Canberra, Australia (28 March 2019)
• Publishing and reusing Linked Open Data in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs): opportunities and challenges, Museum’s for All, Madrid, Spain (4 April, 2019)
• Museum’s and Big Data Conference, Doha, Qatar (1 May 2019)
• Experimenting in the Digital Research Lab: a hands-on introduction to using digital collections for digital humanities research, DATECH Pre-conference, Workshop, May 2019, KBR Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium (8 May 2019)
• Growing an international Cultural Heritage Labs community - Libraries As Research Partner in Digital Humanities, DH 2019 Pre-conference, The Hague, The Netherlands (8 July 2018)
• ONB Labs Symposium 2019, Vienna, Austria (13 July 2019)
• Digital-Cultural-Heritage-Innovation-Labs Workshop, Livingstone-Museum, Livingstone, Zambia (Second blog post) (1 August 2019) 
• Library Labs as experimental incubators for digital humanities research, as part of TDPL, Oslo, Norway (10 September 2019)

In July 2019, we released an open invitation to apply to be part of the Book Sprint and received some fantastic entries. We would like to thank everyone that sent an application and we would like to reassure everyone that they can still contribute to the community even if they were not chosen on this occasion.

We can now finally announce who will be attending the Book Sprint...drum droll...:

1. Abigail Potter, Senior Innovation Specialist with the Library of Congress Digital Innovation Lab. She tweets at @opba.
2. Aisha Al Abdulla, Section Head of the Digital Repository and Archives at Qatar University Library.
3. Caleb Derven, Head of Technical and Digital Services at the University of Limerick with overall responsibility for strategy and operations related to collections, electronic resources and library systems. He tweets at @calebderven.
4. Ditte Laursen, Head of Department, The Royal Library Denmark responsible for the acquisition of digitally born cultural heritage materials, long-term preservation of digital heritage collections, and access to digital cultural heritage collections. She tweets at @DitteDla.
5. Gustavo Candela, Associate Professor at the University of Alicante and member of the Research and Development department at The Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. He tweets at @gus_candela.
6. Katrine Gasser, Section Head of IT at The Royal Library Denmark managing a team of 40 IT experts in programming, networking and research. She tweets at @blackat_ and kbtechlab
7. Kristy Kokegei, Director of Public Engagement at the History Trust of South Australia who oversees the organisation’s public programming, digital engagement, marketing, learning and education programs across 4 State Government funded museums and supporting and enabling 350 community museums and historical societies across South Australia. She tweets at @KristyKokegei and @SAGLAMLab.
8. Lotte Wilms, Digital Scholarship advisor managing the KB Research Lab and Digital Humanities in libraries advocate, co-chair for the LIBER working group Digital Humanities and a board member of the IMPACT Centre of Competence. She tweets at @Lottewilms.
9. Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs (BL Labs), an Andrew W. Mellon foundation and British Library funded initiative supporting and inspiring the use of its data in innovative ways with scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, educators and innovators through competitions, awards and other engagement activities. He tweets at @BL_Labs and @mahendra_mahey.
10. Milena Dobreva-McPherson, Associate Professor Library and Information Studies at UCL Qatar with international experience of working in Bulgaria, Scotland and Malta. She tweets at @Milena_Dobreva.
11. Paula Bray, DX Lab Leader at the State Library of NSW and responsible for developing and promoting an innovation lab utilising emerging and existing web technologies to deliver new ways to explore the Library’s collections and its data. She tweets at @paulabray #dxlab @statelibrarynsw
12. Sally Chambers, Digital Humanities Research Coordinator at Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities, Ghent University, Belgium and National Coordinator for DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities in Belgium. She tweets at @schambers3, @GhentCDH and @KBRbe
13. Sarah Ames, Digital Scholarship Librarian at the National Library of Scotland, responsible for developing a Digital Scholarship Service and launching the Data Foundry. She tweets at @semames1.
14. Sophie-Carolin Wagner, Co-Founder of RIAT Research Institute for Art and Technology, Co-Editor of the Journal for Research Cultures and Project Manager of ONB Labs at the Austrian National Library.
15. Stefan Karner, Technical Lead of the ONB Labs at the Austrian National Library, providing access to diverse data and metadata sources within the library, developing a platform for users of the digital library to create and share annotations and other user generated data with each other and the public.
16. Armin Straube, Teaching Fellow in Library and Information Studies at UCL Qatar. He is an archivist with work experience in data curation, digital preservation and web archiving and tweets at @ArminStraube.

Laia Ros Gasch will be facilitating the Book Sprint and has 10 years of experience as a cultural producer working all over the world with all kinds of groups. Laia speaks English, French, Spanish and Catalan. 

More detailed biographies are available here.

WE NEED YOUR HELP!

We all realise how incredibly lucky and privileged we are to be chosen. However, we want to hear from those of you who are interested in this area. What do you think we should be writing about, who should it be for, what style of writing should we use? Please HELP us by completing this questionnaire by Monday 23 September at 0600 BST! We will consider your thoughts and opinions seriously when we sit down to write the book on Monday morning in Doha in Qatar.

We would also like to get your help when we will be disseminating information about how to get hold of the book on social media, and at various events around the world, especially to coincide with International Open Access week 2019 (21-27 October 2019). Planned activities in 2019-2020 include:

• Open Preservation Foundation Consortium, Webinar (11 October 2019)
• RL UK Digital Scholarship Symposium, British Library, London, UK (14 October 2019),
• From Archives to Arch Lives, Cairo, Africa (13-15 October 2019)
• Hong Kong Baptist University - Digital Scholarship Symposium (18 October 2019),
• Australian National University, Canberra, Australia (23 October 2019)
• History Trust SA, Adelaide, Australia (Public Talk - 28 October 2019
• DX Lab, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (Public Talk - 1 November 2019)
• BL Labs Symposium, British Library, London (11 November 2019)
• 7th Estonian Digital Humanities Conference - Use of Digital Cultural Heritage in Research and Education, Tallin, Estonia (4-6 December, 2019)
• ONB Labs Symposium, Vienna, Austria (tba 2020)
• Transkribus User Conference, Innsbruck, Austria (6-7 February, 2020)
• European Labbers meet in Riga, Latvia, pre or post DHN 2020 (17-20 March, 2020)
• Library of Congress Labs, annual Labs group meeting, Library of Congress, Washington, USA (4-6 May, 2020)
• IIPC Research Working Group is planning a series of webinars to introduce work done by various labs, with focus on web archiving.
• LIBER DH Working Group is also planning a series of webinars, amongst which also one on “How to make a GLAM Workbench for Libraries” (tab 2020)

We plan to run a 'Read Sprint' in the near future to review the Book and perhaps create an improved version. We know what we will produce next week won't be perfect!

We have plans to ensure that the book is published on a interactive platform so that it becomes a 'living' book, so that others can add chapters, make amendments, enhancements and add new case studies. We will be making announcements about this soon after the book has been completed.

On a personal note, I feel incredibly grateful, lucky and privileged to have been involved at the very start of this journey. I also feel daunted to be part of the Book Sprint but excited too!

I really want us to create a useful handbook to help cultural heritage organisations build better innovation labs which are often strapped for resources and need help. I have a strong desire that our ‘Book’ will genuinely help and inspire galleries, libraries, archives, museums, universities and other cultural heritage organisations to learn and benefit from those of us who can talk honestly about and share our experiences. I want to share the risks we have taken, mistakes we have made, provide realistic lessons and give sensible advice about what we have learned over the many years in setting up, maintaining and sustaining innovation labs. I believe this approach could mean it may prevent many institutions from having to re-invent the wheel and save them time, money and resources too.

The people in this community have a passionate desire to create something useful and meaningful that will help all of us be better at our jobs and build better innovation labs for the benefit of all our users. Hopefully, we will be following the principles of kindness, generously sharing and understanding and having empathy for the contexts in which we work. In short we hope it sincerely makes a difference and prove that sharing and kindness really can change things.

Now that I have written this, I realise I have done it again, I have written too much! However, I am glad I have written the story of how we got here. What I realise is what a busy year it’s been for everyone and particularly for people in this community, it’s amazing what we have achieved and I want to thank everyone who has played an active role, no matter how small. Let’s hope it continues to grow.

Monday morning, fifteen of us have got to write a book, gulp!