Open source software is a valuable alternative to commercial software, but its decentralised nature often leads to less than polished user interfaces. This has also been the case for the Universal Viewer (UV), despite attempts over the years to improve the user experience (UX) for viewing digital collections. Improving the usability of the UV is just one of the challenges that the British Library's UV team have taken on. We've even recruited an expert volunteer to help!

Digital Curator Mia Ridge talks to UX expert Scott Jenson about his background in user experience design, his interest in working with open source software, and what he's noticed so far about the user experience of the Universal Viewer.

Mia: Hi Scott! Could you tell our readers a little about your background, and how you came to be interested in the UX of open source software?

Scott: I’ve been working in commercial software my entire life (Apple, Google and a few startups) and it became clear over time that the profit motive is often at odds with users’ needs. I’ve been exploring open source as an alternative.

Mia: I noticed your posts on Mastodon about looking for volunteer opportunities as you retired from professional work at just about the time that Erin (Product Owner for the Universal Viewer at the British Library) and I were wondering how we could integrate UX and usability work into the Library's plans for the UV. Have you volunteered before, and do you think it'll become a trend for others wondering how to use their skills after retirement?

Scott: Google has a program where you can leave your position for 3 months and volunteer on a project within Google.org. I worked on a project to help California Forestry analyse and map out the most critical areas in need of treatment. It was a lovely project and felt quite impactful. It was partly due to that project that put me on this path.

Mia: Why did you say 'yes' when I approached you about volunteering some time with us for the UV?

Scott: I lived in London for 4 years working for a mobile OS company called Symbian so I’ve spent a lot of time in London. While living in London, I even wrote my book in the British Library! So we have a lot in common. It was an intersection of opportunity and history I just couldn’t pass up.

Mia: And what were your first impressions of the project? 

Scott: It was an impactful project with a great vision of where it needed to go. I really wanted to get stuck in and help if I could.

Mia: we loved the short videos you made that crystallised the issues that users encounter with the UV but find hard to describe. Could you share one?

Scott: The most important one is something that happens to many projects that evolve over time: a patchwork of metaphors that accrue. In this case the current UV has at least 4 different ways to page through a document, 3 of which are horizontal and 1 vertical. This just creates a mishmash of conflicting visual prompts for users and simplifying that will go a long way to improve usability.

A screenshot from Scott's video showing multiple navigation areas on the UV

How can you help improve the usability of the Universal Viewer?

We shared Scott's first impressions with the UV Steering Group in September, when he noted that the UV screen had 32 'targets' and 8 areas where functionality had been sprinkled over time, making it hard for users to know where to focus. We'd now to like get wider feedback on future directions.

Scott's made a short video that sets out some of the usability issues in the current layout of the Universal Viewer, and some possible solutions. We think it's a great provocation for discussion by the community! To join in and help with our next steps, you can post on the Universal Viewer Slack (request to join here) or GitHub.

The British National Bibliography (BNB) has resumed publication, following a period of unavailability due to a cyber-attack in 2023.

Having started in 1950, the BNB predates the founding of the British Library, but despite many changes over the years its purpose remains the same: to record the publishing output of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. The BNB includes books and periodicals, covering both physical and electronic material. It describes forthcoming items up to sixteen weeks ahead of their publication, so it is essential as a current awareness tool. To date, the BNB contains almost 5.5 million records.

As our ongoing recovery from the cyber-attack continues, our Collection Metadata department have developed a process by which the BNB can be published in formats familiar to its many users. Bibliographic records and summaries will be shared in several ways:

• The database is searchable on the Share Family initiative's BNB Beta platform at https://bl.natbib-lod.org/ (see example record in the image below)
• Regular updates in PDF format will be made freely available to all users. Initially this will be on request
• MARC21 bibliographic records will be supplied directly to commercial customers across the world on a weekly basis

This image includes photographs of the very first BNB entry from 1950 (“Male and female”) and the first one we produced in this new process (“Song of the mysteries”)

Other services, such as Z39.50 access and outputs in other formats, are currently unavailable. We are working towards restoring these, and will provide further information in due course.

The BNB is the first national bibliography to be made available on the Share Family initiative's platform. It is published as linked data, and forms part of an international collaboration of libraries to link and enhance discovery across multiple catalogues and bibliographies.

The resumption of the BNB is the result of adaptations built around long-established collaborative working partnerships, with Bibliographic Data Services (who provide our CIP records) and UK Legal Deposit libraries, who contribute to the Shared Cataloguing Programme.

The International Federation of Library Associations describes bibliographies like the BNB as "a permanent record of the cultural and intellectual output of a nation or country, which is witnessed by its publishing output". We are delighted to be able to resume publication of the BNB, especially as we prepare to celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2025.

For further information about the BNB, please contact [email protected].

Mark Ellison, Collection Metadata Services Manager

Research Software Engineer James Misson writes...

On the 4^th and 5^th of September the Digital Humanities Congress was held in Sheffield, where the University of Sheffield continues to affirm its reputation as a hub for all things DH. The conference was a testament to the wide scope of DH methods, as well as researchers' abilities to adopt cutting edge technology to further our knowledge of human culture.

A common theme that emerged between papers was the application of machine learning to historical linguistics. Kate Wild, from the Oxford English Dictionary, shared the initial stages of the Oxford Corpus of Historical English, which will unite a vast amount of linguistic data spanning from the fifteenth century to the present day. The equally impressive Ansund project was presented by Mark Faulkner and Elisabetta Magnanti — a comprehensive corpus of Old English texts enriched from their manuscript sources by computer vision.

Keynote lectures were given by Melissa Terras and Simon Mahony, whose extensive experience gave them ideal vantage points from which to survey the Digital Humanities and the twists and turns it has taken since the beginnings of their careers. Likewise, Paola Marchionni and Peter Findlay (formerly of the British Library) presented the history of Jisc, elucidating its critical role within research institutes.

Conversations beyond the lecture hall were instructive for the Digital Scholarship team, especially for the BL’s recovery following the cyberattack last year. It was clear that the English Short Title Catalogue is a crucial resource for many scholars in attendance, not only as a finding aid but also as a dataset — encouraging to know, as the library works towards getting the ESTC back online. This is especially true of Fred Schurink’s research on the importation of early continental books to early modern England, which is an innovative contribution to the burgeoning field of Bibliographic Data Science. We look forward to learning more about this field at Dr Schurink’s upcoming workshop at the John Ryland’s Library in Manchester.

Digital Curator Mia Ridge writes...

While the British Library works to recover from the October 2023 cyber-attack, we're putting some information from our currently inaccessible website into an easily readable and shareable format. This blog post is based on a page captured by the Wayback Machine in September 2023.

Crowdsourcing at the British Library

Example of a crowdsourcing task

For the British Library, crowdsourcing is an engaging form of online volunteering supported by digital tools that manage tasks such as transcription, classification and geolocation that make our collections more discoverable.

The British Library has run several popular crowdsourcing projects in the past, including the Georeferencer, for geolocating historical maps, and In the Spotlight, for transcribing important information about historical playbills. We also integrated crowdsourcing activities into our flagship AI / data science project, Living with Machines.

• Agents of Enslavement uses 18th/19th century newspapers to research slavery in Barbados and create a database of enslaved people.
• Living with Machines, which is mostly based on research questions around nineteenth century newspapers

Crowdsourcing Projects at the British Library

• Living with Machines (2019-2023) created innovative crowdsourced tasks, including tasks that asked the public to closely read historical newspaper articles to determine how specific words were used.
• Agents of Enslavement (2021-2022) used 18th/19th century newspapers to research slavery in Barbados and create a database of enslaved people.
• In the Spotlight (2017-2021) was a crowdsourcing project from the British Library that aimed to make digitised historical playbills more discoverable, while also encouraging people to closely engage with this otherwise less accessible collection of ephemera.
• Canadian wildlife: notes from the field (2021), a project where volunteers transcribed handwritten field notes that accompany recordings of a wildlife collection within the sound archive.
• Convert a Card (2015) was a series of crowdsourcing projects aimed to convert scanned catalogue cards in Asian and African languages into electronic records. The project template can be found and used on GitHub.
• Georeferencer (2012 - present) enabled volunteers to create geospatial data from digitised versions of print maps by adding control points to the old and modern maps.
• Pin-a-Tale (2012) asked people to map literary texts to British places.

 

Research Projects

The Living with Machines project included a large component of crowdsourcing research through practice, led by Digital Curator Mia Ridge.

Mia was also the Principle Investigator on the AHRC-funded Collective Wisdom project, which worked with a large group of co-authors to produce a book, The Collective Wisdom Handbook: perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, through two 'book sprints' in 2021:

This book is written for crowdsourcing practitioners who work in cultural institutions, as well as those who wish to gain experience with crowdsourcing. It provides both practical tips, grounded in lessons often learned the hard way, and inspiration from research across a range of disciplines. Case studies and perspectives based on our experience are woven throughout the book, complemented by information drawn from research literature and practice within the field.

More Information

Our crowdsourcing projects were designed to produce data that can be used in discovery systems (such as online catalogues and our item viewer) through enjoyable tasks that give volunteers an opportunity to explore digitised collections.

Each project involves teams across the Library to supply digitised images for crowdsourcing and ensure that the results are processed and ingested into various systems. Enhancing metadata through crowdsourcing is considered in the British Library's Collection Metadata Strategy.

We previously posted on twitter @LibCrowds and currently post occasionally on Mastodon https://glammr.us/@libcrowds and via our newsletter.

Past editions of our newsletter are available online.

Hello everyone! I am Dr Valentina Vavassori, the new Digital Curator for Optical Character Recognition/Handwritten Text Recognition at the British Library.

I am part of the Heritage Made Digital Team, which is responsible for developing and overseeing the digitisation workflow at the Library. I am also an unofficial member of the Digital Research Team, where I promote the reuse and access to the Library’s collections.

My role has both an operational component (integrating and developing OCR and HTR in the digitisation workflow) and a research and engagement component (supporting OCR/HTR projects in the Library). I really enjoy these two sides of my role, as I have a background as a researcher and as a cultural heritage professional.

I joined the British Library from The National Archives, London, where I worked as a Digital Scholarship Researcher in the Digital Research Team. I worked on projects involving data visualisation, OCR/HTR, data modelling, and user experience.

Before that, I completed a PhD in Digital Humanities at King’s College London, focusing on chatbots and augmented reality in museums and their impact on users and museum narratives. Part of my thesis explored how to use these narratives using spatial humanities methods such as GIS. During my PhD, I also collaborated on various digital research projects with institutions like The National Gallery, London, and the Museum of London.

However, I originally trained as an art historian. I studied art history in Italy and worked for a few years in museums. During my job, I realised the potential of developing digital experiences for visitors and the significant impact digitisation can have on research and enjoyment in cultural heritage. I was so interested in the opportunities, that I co-founded a start-up which developed a heritage geolocation app for tourists.

Joining the Library has been an amazing opportunity. I am really looking forward to learning from my colleagues and exploring all the potential collaborations within and outside the Library.

Today the global Wikidata community is celebrating its 12th birthday! Wikidata originally went live on the 29th October 2012, back when Andrew Gray was the British Library’s first Wikipedian in Residence and since then it has massively expanded.  

Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines, which acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia and Wikisource. Wikidata content is available under a free license (CC0), exported using standard formats (JSON & RDF), and can be interlinked to other open data sets on the linked data web.

Over the past year Wikidata passed the incredible milestone of 2 Billion edits, making it the most edited Wikimedia project of all time. However, this growth has created Wikidata Query Service stability challenges and scaling issues. To address these, the development team have been working on several projects including splitting the data in the Query Service and releasing the multiple languages code to be able to handle the current size of Wikidata better.

Map of Wikidata’s geographic coverage as of October 2024

Another major focus during the past year has been promoting Wikidata reuse. To make it easier to access Wikidata’s data there is a new REST API. Plus developers who build with Wikidata’s data now have access to a Wikidata developer portal, which holds important information and provides inspiration about what is possible with Wikidata’s data.

The international library community actively engages with Wikidata. In 2019 the IFLA Wikidata Working Group was formed to explore the integration of Wikidata and Wikibase with library systems, and alignment of the Wikidata ontology with library metadata formats such as BIBFRAME, RDA, and MARC. There is also the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group, who hold Affinity Group Calls and Wikidata Working Hours throughout the year.

If you are new to Wikidata and want to learn more, there are many resources available, including this Zine about Wikidata, created by our recent Wikimedian in Residence Dr Lucy Hinnie, and these videos:

• An introduction to Wikidata by Jason Evans and Aaron Morris
• The global knowledge base: open data about everything by Martin Poulter
• Creating and enriching linked data with Wikidata by Jason Evans

You may also want to check out the online Bibliography of Wikidata, which lists books, academic conference presentations and peer-reviewed papers, which focus on Wikidata as their subject.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom.

This blog post is by Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator for Asian and African Collections, British Library. She's on Mastodon as @[email protected]. 

 

The British Library’s vast Southeast Asian collection includes manuscripts, periodicals and printed books in the languages of the countries of maritime Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines and East Timor, as well as on the mainland, from Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma) and Vietnam.

The display of literary manuscripts from Southeast Asia outside of the Asian and African Studies Reading Room in St Pancras (photo by Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert)

 

Several languages and scripts from the mainland were the focus of recent development work commissioned by the Library and done on the script conversion platform Aksharamukha. These include Shan, Khmer, Khuen, and northern Thai and Lao Dhamma (Dhamma, or Tham, meaning ‘scripture’, is the script that several languages are written in).

These and other Southeast Asian languages and scripts pose multiple challenges to us and our users. Collection items in languages using non-romanised scripts are mainly catalogued (and therefore searched by users) using romanised text. For some language groups, users need to search the catalogue by typing in the transliteration of title and/or author using the Library of Congress (LoC) romanisation rules.

Items’ metadata text converted using the LoC romanisation scheme is often unintuitive, and therefore poses a barrier for users, hindering discovery and access to our collections via the online catalogues. In addition, curatorial and acquisition staff spend a significant amount of time manually converting scripts, a slow process which is prone to errors. Other libraries worldwide holding Southeast Asian collections and using the LoC romanisation scheme face the same issues.

Excerpt from the Library of Congress romanisation scheme for Khmer

 

Having faced these issues with Burmese language, last year we commissioned development work to the open-access platform Aksharamukha, which enables the conversion between various scripts, supporting 121 scripts and 21 romanisation methods. Vinodh Rajan, Aksharamukha’s developer, perfectly combines language and writing systems knowledge with computer science and coding skills. He added the LoC romanisation system to the platform’s Burmese script transliteration functionality (read about this in my previous post).

The results were outstanding – readers could copy and paste transliterated text into the Library's catalogue search box to check if we have items of interest. This has also greatly enhanced cataloguing and acquisition processes by enabling the creation of acquisition records and minimal records. In addition, our Metadata team updated all of our Burmese catalogue records (ca. 20,000) to include Burmese script, alongside transliteration (side note: these updated records are still unavailable to our readers due to the cyber-attack on the Library last year, but they will become accessible in the future).

The time was ripe to expand our collaboration with Vinodh and Aksharamukha. Maria Kekki, Curator for Burmese Collections, has been hosting this past year a Chevening Fellow from Myanmar, Myo Thant Linn. Myo was tasked with cataloguing manuscripts and printed books in Shan and Khuen – but found the romanisation aspect of this work to be very challenging to do manually. In order to facilitate Myo’s work and maximise the benefit from his fellowship, we needed to have a LoC romanisation functionality available. Aksharamukha was the right place for this – this free, open source, online tool is available to our curators, cataloguers, acquisition staff, and metadata team to use.

Former Chevening Fellow Myo Thant Linn reciting from a Shan manuscript in the Asian and African Studies Reading Room, September 2024 (photo by Jana Igunma)

 

In addition to Maria and Myo’s requirements, Jana Igunma, Ginsburg Curator for Thai, Lao and Cambodian Collections, noted that adding Khmer to Aksharamukha would be immensely helpful for cataloguing our Khmer backlog and assist with new acquisitions. Northern Thai and Lao Dhamma scripts would be mostly useful to catalogue new acquisitions for print material, and add original scripts to manuscript records. The automation of LoC transliteration could be very cost-effective, by saving many cataloguing, acquisitions and metadata team’s hours. Khmer is a great example – it has the most extensive alphabet in the world (74 letters), and its romanisation is extremely complicated and time consuming!

First three leaves with text in a long format palm leaf bundle (សាស្ត្រាស្លឹករឹត/sāstrā slẏk rẏt) containing part of the Buddhist cosmology (សាស្ត្រាត្រៃភូមិ/Sāstrā Traibhūmi) in Khmer script, 18th or 19th century. Acquired by the British Museum from Edwards Goutier, Paris, on 6 December 1895. British Library, Or 5003, ff. 9-11

 

It was required, therefore, to enhance Aksharamukha’s script conversion functionality with these additional scripts. This could generally be done by referring to existing LoC conversion tables, while taking into account any permutations of diacritics or character variations. However, it definitely has not been as simple as that!

For example, the presence of diacritics instigated a discussion between internal and external colleagues on the use of precomposed vs. decomposed formats in Unicode, when romanising original script. LoC systems use two types of coding schemata, MARC 21 and MARC 8. The former allows for precomposed diacritic characters, and the latter does not – it allows for decomposed format. In order to enable both these schemata, Vinodh included both MARC 8 and MARC 21 as input and output formats in the conversion functionality.

Another component, implemented for Burmese in the previous development round, but also needed for Khmer and Shan transliterations, is word spacing. Vinodh implemented word separation in this round as well – although this would always remain something that the cataloguer would need to check and adjust. Note that this is not enabled by default – you would have to select it (under ‘input’ – see image below).

Screenshot from Aksharamukha, showcasing Khmer word segmentation option

 

It is heartening to know that enhancing Aksharamukha has been making a difference. Internally, Myo had been a keen user of the Shan romanisation functionality (though Khuen romanisation is still work-in-progress); and Jana has been using the Khmer transliteration too. Jana found it particularly useful to use Aksharamukha’s option to upload a photo of the title page, which is then automatically OCRed and romanised. This saved precious time otherwise spent on typing Khmer!

It should be mentioned that, when it comes to cataloguing Khmer language books at the British Library, both original Khmer script and romanised metadata are being included in catalogue records. Aksharamukha helps to speed up the process of cataloguing and eliminates typing errors. However, capitalisation and in some instances word separation and final consonants need to be adjusted manually by the cataloguer. Therefore, it is necessary that the cataloguer has a good knowledge of the language.

On the left: photo of a title page of a Khmer language textbook for Grade 9, recently acquired by the British Library; on the right: conversion of original Khmer text from the title page into LoC romanisation standard using Aksharamukha

 

The conversion tool for Tham (Lanna) and Tham (Lao) works best for texts in Pali language, according to its LoC romanisation table. If Aksharamukha is used for works in northern Thai language in Tham (Lanna) script, or Lao language in Tham (Lao) script, cataloguer intervention is always required as there is no LoC romanisation standard for northern Thai and Lao languages in Tham scripts. Such publications are rare, and an interim solution that has been adopted by various libraries is to convert Tham scripts to modern Thai or Lao scripts, and then to romanise them according to the LoC romanisation standards for these languages.

Other libraries have been enjoying the benefits of the new developments to Aksharamukha. Conversations with colleagues from the Library of Congress revealed that present and past commissioned developments on Aksharamukha had a positive impact on their operations. LoC has been developing a transliteration tool called ScriptShifter. Aksharamukha’s Burmese and Khmer functionalities are already integrated into this tool, which can convert over ninety non-Latin scripts into Latin script following the LoC/ALA guidelines. The British Library funding Aksharamukha to make several Southeast Asian languages and scripts available in LoC romanisation has already been useful!

If you have feedback or encounter any bugs, please feel free to raise an issue on GitHub. And, if you’re interested in other scripts romanised using LoC schemas, Aksharamukha has a complete list of the ones that it supports. Happy conversions!

 

This blog post is by members of the Imaging Team at British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership (BLQFP) Programme: Eugenio Falcioni (Imaging and Digital Product Manager), Dominique Russell, Armando Ribeiro and Alexander Nguyen (Senior Imaging Technicians), Selene Marotta (Quality Management Officer), Matthew Lee and Virginia Mazzocato (Senior Imaging Support Technicians).

The Imaging Team has played a pivotal role in the British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership (BLQFP) Programme since its launch in 2012. However, the journey has not been without hurdles. In October 2023, the infamous cyber-attack on the British Library severely disrupted operations across the organisation, impacting the Imaging Team profoundly. Inspired by the Library's Rebuild & Renew Programme, we used this challenging period to focus on research and development, refining our processes and deepening our understanding of the studio’s work practices. 

At the time of the attack, we were in the process of recruiting new members of the team who brought fresh energy, expertise, and enthusiasm. This also coincided with the appointment of a new Studio Manager. The formation of this almost entirely new team presented challenges as we adapted to the Library's disrupted environment. Yet, our synergy and commitment led us to find innovative ways of working.  Although the absence of an IT infrastructure, and therefore imaging hardware and software, posed significant difficulties for day-to-day activities in photography and digitisation, we had the time to focus on continuous improvement, without the usual pressures of deadlines. We enhanced our digitisation processes and expertise through a combination of quality improvements, strategic collaborations, and the development of innovative tools. Through teamwork and perseverance, we transformed adversity into an opportunity for growth. 

As an Imaging Team, we aim to create the optimal  digital surrogate of the items we capture. The BLQFP defined parameters for imaging which specify criteria such as colour and resolution accuracy, ensuring compliance with International Imaging Standards (such as FADGI or ISO 19264). 

During this unusual time, we focused on research and development into imaging standards, and updated our guidelines, resulting in a 150-page document detailing our workflow. This has improved consistency between setups and photographers, and has been fundamental in training new staff. We engaged in skills sharing workshops with Imaging Services, the Library’s core imaging department, and Heritage Made Digital (HMD), the Library’s department that manages digitisation workflows. 

Over the months, we have tested our images and setup, cameras, lighting, and colour targets, all while shooting directly to camera cards and using a laser measure device to check resolution (PPI). As a result of this work, we feel more confident in producing images that conform to International Imaging Standards; capturing images that truly represent the collection items. 

Colour target on a bound volume

Alongside our testing, we arranged visits to imaging studios at other institutions where we shared our knowledge and learnt from the working processes of those who are digitising comparable collection material. During these visits, we gained a better understanding of the different imaging set-ups, the various international quality standards followed, and of how images produced are analysed. We also shared our approaches to capturing and stitching oversized items such as maps and foldouts. Lastly, we discussed quality assurance and workflow management tools. Overall, these visits across the sector have been a valuable exercise in making new connections, sharing ideas, and understanding that other institutions face similar problems when digitisation collection items. 

Without the use of dedicated digitisation software, the capture of items such as manuscripts and large bound volumes has been challenging as we have been unable to check the images we were producing. For this reason, we prioritised items of the collection which were less demanding and postponed the quality assurance checks to a later date. We chose to capture 78 rpm records as they required only two shots (front and back), minimising any possible mistakes. The imaging of audio collection items was our first achievement as a team since the cyber-attack: we digitised over 1100 shellac discs, in collaboration with the BLQFP Audio Team, who had previously catalogued and digitised the sound recording. 

Image of a shellac disc (9CS0024993_ColumbiaGA3) digitised by the BLQFP

 Through this capture task we gained the optimism and confidence to start capturing more material, starting with the bindings of all the available bound collection items. The binding capture process is time-consuming and requires a specific setup and position of the item to photograph the front, back, spine, edge, head, and tail of each volume. By capturing bindings now, we will be able to streamline the process when we resume the digitisation of entire volumes.

Capturing the spine of a bound volume, using l-shaped card on support frame

During this time, we were also involved in scoping work to locate and assess the most challenging items and plan a digitisation strategy accordingly. We focused particularly on identifying oversized maps and foldouts, which will be captured in sections and subsequently digitally stitched. This task required frequent visits to the Library’s basement storage areas and collaboration with the BLQFP Workflow Team to optimise and migrate data from the scoping process into existing workflow management systems. By gathering this data, we could determine the physical characteristics of each collection series and select the most suitable capture device. It was also crucial to collaborate with the BLQFP Conservation Team to develop new digitisation tools for capturing oversized foldouts more quickly and securely.

Using c-shaped Plastazote created by the BLQFP Conservation Team to support an oversized fold-out

The past nine months have presented many challenges for our Team. Nevertheless, in the spirit of “Rebuild & Renew”, we have been able to solve problems and develop creative ways of working, pulling together all our individual skills and experiences. As we expand, we have used this time productively to understand the intricacies of digitising fragile, complex, and oversized material while working to rigorous colour and quality standards. With the imminent return of imaging software, the next step for the BLQFP Imaging Team will be to apply our knowledge and understanding to a mass digitisation environment with the expectations of targets and monthly deliverables.

Capturing a large foldout