The British Library has joined forces with the Guardian to hold a summit on the complex policy impacts of AI on media and information industries. The summit, chaired by broadcaster and author Timandra Harkness, brings together politicians, policy makers, industry leaders, artists and academics to shed light on key issues facing the media, newspapers, broadcasting, library and publishing industries in the age of AI. The summit was on Monday 11 March 2024 14:00 - 17:20; networking reception 17:30 - 19:00 GMT.

The video of the event is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4muZybkzMU4 and embedded below.

 

Lucy Crompton-Reid, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK; Sara Lloyd, Group Communications Director & Global AI Lead at Pan Macmillan and Matt Rogerson from the Guardian will tackle the issue of copyright in the age of algorithms.

Novelist Tahmima Anam; Greg Clark MP, Chair Science & Technology Committee; Chris Moran from the Guardian and Roly Keating, Chief Executive of the British Library will discuss the issue of AI generated misinformation and bias.

 

Speakers on stage at the AI Summit. Photo credit Mia Ridge

AI is rapidly changing the world as we know it, and the media and information industries are no exception. AI-powered technologies are already being used to automate tasks, create personalised content, and deliver targeted advertising. In the process AI is quickly becoming both a friend and a foe. People can use AI to flood the online environment with misinformation, creating significant worries, for example, around how deep fakes, and AI personalised and targeted content could influence democratic processes. At the same time, AI could become a key tool to combat misinformation by identifying fake news articles and social media posts.

Many creators of content - from the organisations creating and publishing content, to individual authors, artists and actors - are worried that their copyright has been infringed by AI and we have already seen a flurry of legal action, mostly in the United States. At the same time, many artists are embracing AI as a part of their creative process. The recent British Library exhibition on Digital Storytelling explored the ways technology provides new opportunities to transform and enhance the way writers write and readers engage, including interactive works that invite and respond to user input, and reading experiences influenced by data feeds.

And it is not only in the world of news that there is a danger of AI misinformation. In science, where AI is revolutionising many areas of research from helping us discover new drugs to aiding research on complexities of climate change, we are, at the same time, encountering the issue of fake, AI generated scientific articles. For libraries, AI holds the future promise of improving discovery and access to information, which would help library users to find relevant information quickly. Yet, AI is also introducing significant new challenges when it comes to understanding the provenance of information sources, especially in making the public aware if the information has been created or selected by algorithms rather than human beings.

How will we know - and will we care - if our future newspapers, television programmes and library enquiries are mediated and delivered by AI? Or if the content we are consuming is a machine rather than a human creation? We are used to making judgements about people and organisations that we trust on the basis of how we perceive their professional integrity, political leanings, their stance on the issues that we care about, or just likability and charisma of the individual in front of us. How will we make similar judgments about an algorithm and its inherent bias? And how will we govern and manage this new AI-powered environment?

Governmental regulation of AI is under development in the UK, the US, the EU and elsewhere. At the beginning of February 2024 the UK government released its response to the UK AI Regulation White Paper, signaling the continuation of ‘agile’ AI regulation in the UK, which attempts to balance innovation and economic benefits of AI while also giving greater responsibility related to AI to existing regulators. The government’s response also reserves an option for more binding regulation in the future. For some, such as tech companies investing in AI products, this creates uncertainty for their future business models. For others, especially many in the creative industries and artists affected by AI, there is a disappointment due to the absence of regulations in relation to AI being trained by using content under copyright.

Inevitably, as AI further develops and becomes more prevalent, the issues of its regulation and adoption in the society will continue to evolve. AI will continue to challenge the ways in which we understand creators’ rights, individual and corporate governance and management of information, and the ways in which we acquire knowledge, trust different information sources, and form our opinions on what to buy to who to vote for.

Join us to discuss the challenges and opportunities ahead. You can book your place on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/safeguarding-tomorrow-the-impact-of-ai-in-media-information-industries-tickets-814482728767?aff=oddtdtcreator.

In this post, Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator for Asian and African Collections, shares some background information on how the new post advertised for a Digital Curator for OCR/HTR will help the Library streamline post-digitisation work to make its collections even more accessible to users.

 

We’ve been digitising our collections for almost three decades, opening up access to incredibly diverse and rich collections, for our users to study and enjoy. However, it is important that we further support discovery and digital research by unlocking the huge potential in automatically transcribing our collections!

We’ve done some work over the years towards making our collection items available in machine-readable format, in order to enable full-text search and analysis. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology has been around for a while, and there are several large-scale projects that produced OCRed text alongside digitised images – such as the Microsoft Books project. Until recently, Western languages print collections have been the main focus, especially newspaper collections. A flagship collaboration with the Alan Turing Institute, the Living with Machines project, applied OCR technology to UK newspapers, designing and implementing new methods in data science and artificial intelligence, and analysing these materials at scale.

OCR of Bengali books using Transkribus, Two Centuries of Indian Print Project

 

Machine Learning technologies have been dealing increasingly well with both modern and historical collections, whether printed, typewritten or handwritten. Taking a broader perspective on Library collections, we have been exploring opportunities with non-Western collections too. Library staff have been engaging closely with the exploration of OCR and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) systems for English, Bangla and Arabic. Digital Curators Tom Derrick, Nora McGregor and Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert have teamed up with PRImA Research Lab and the Alan Turing Institute to run four competitions in 2017-2019, inviting providers of text recognition methods to try them out on our historical material.

We have been working with Transkribus as well – for example, Alex Hailey, Curator for Modern Archives and Manuscripts, used the software to automatically transcribe 19^th century botanical records from the India Office Records. A digital humanities work strand led by former colleague Tom Derrick saw the OCR of most of our digitised collection of Bengali printed texts, digitised as part of the Two Centuries of Indian Print project. More recently Transkribus has been used to extract text from catalogue cards in a project called Convert-a-Card, as well as from Incunabula print catalogues.

An example of a catalogue card in Transkribus, showing segmentation and transcription

 

The British Library is now looking for someone to join us to further improve the access and usability of our digital collections, by integrating a standardised OCR and HTR production process into our existing workflows, in line with industry best practice.

For more information and to apply please visit the British Library recruitment site and look for the Digital Curator for OCR/HTR position. Applications close on Sunday 5 November 2023. Please pay close attention to questions asked in the application process. Any questions? Drop us a line at [email protected].

Good luck!

 

This Friday (13^th October) the British Library invites you to join the world of Clockwork Watch by Yomi Ayeni, a participatory storytelling project, set in a fantastical retro-futurist vision of Victorian England, with floating cities and sky pirates, which is one of the showcased narratives in our Digital Storytelling exhibition.

We are delighted that Dark Box Images will be bringing their portable darkroom to the Late at the Library: Digital Steampunk event and taking portrait photographs. If this appeals to you, then please arrive early to have your picture taken. Photographer Gregg McNeill is an expert in the wet plate collodion process invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. Gregg’s skill in using an authentic Victorian camera creates genuinely remarkable results that appear right in front of your eyes.

Wet plate collodion photograph of Jennifer Garside of Wyte Phantom corsetry, taken by Gregg McNeill of Dark Box Images

If you want to pose for the camera at our steampunk Late, or have a portrait drawn by artist Doctor Geof, please don’t be shy, this is an event where guests are encouraged to dress to impress! The aesthetic of steampunk fashion is inspired by Victoriana and 19^th Century literature, including Jules Verne’s novels and the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Steampunk looks can include hats and googles, tweed tailoring, waistcoats, corsets, fob watches and fans. Whatever your personal style, we encourage you to unleash your creativity when putting together an outfit for this event.

Furthermore, whether you are seeking a new look or some finishing touches, there will be an opportunity to browse a Night Market at this Late event, where you can purchase and admire a range of exquisite hand crafted items created by:

• Jema Hewitt, a professional costumer and academic, will be bringing some of her unique, handmade jewellery and accessories to the Library Late event. She was one of the originators of the early artistic steampunk scene in the UK, subsequently exhibiting her costume work internationally, and having three how-to-make books published as her alter ego “Emilly Ladybird”. Jema currently specialises as a pattern cutter for film, theatre and TV, as well as lecturing and teaching workshops.

Jewellery, hats and clothing created by Jema Hewitt/Emilly Ladybird

• Doctor Geof, an artist, scientist, comics creator and maker of whimsical objects. His work is often satirical, usually with an historical twist, and features tea, goblins, krakens, steampunk, smut, nuns, bees, cats and more tea. Since 2004 you may have encountered him selling his comics, prints, cards, mugs, pins, and for some reason a lot of embroidered badges (including an Evil Librarian patch!) at various events. As one of the foremost Steampunk artists in the UK, Doctor Geof has worked with and exhibited at the Cutty Sark, Royal Museums Greenwich, and Discovery Museum Newcastle. He is a talented portrait artist, so please seek him out if you would like him to capture your likeness in ink and watercolour.

Evil Librarian embroidered patch by Dr Geof

• Jennifer Garside, a seamstress specialising in modern corsetry, which takes inspiration from historical styles. Her business, Wyte Phantom, opened in 2010, and she has made costumes for opera singers, performers and artists across the world.

• Tracy Wells, a couture milliner based in the Lake District. She creates all kinds of hats and headpieces, often collaborating with other artists to explore new styles, concepts and genres.

Millinery by Tracy Wells

• Herr Döktor, a renowned inventor, gadgeteer, and contraptionist, who has been working in his Laboratory in the Surrey Hills for the last two decades, building a better future via the prism of history. He will be bringing a small selection of his inventions and scale models of his larger ideas. (His alter ego, Ian Crichton, is a professional model maker with thirty years experience as a toy prototype maker, museum and exhibition designer, and, most recently, building props and models for the film industry, he also lives in the Surrey Hills). 

Herr Döktor, inventor, gadgeteer, and contraptionist. Photograph by Adam Stait

• Linette Withers established Anachronalia in 2012 to be a full-time bookbinder, producing historically-inspired books, miniature books, and quirky stationery. Her work has been shortlisted for display at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford as part of their ‘Redesigning the Medieval Book’ competition and exhibition in 2018 and one of her books is held in the permanent collection of The Lit & Phil in Newcastle after being part of an exhibition of bookbinding in 2021. She also teaches bookbinding in her studio in Leeds.

• Heather Hayden of Diamante Queen Designs creates handmade vintage inspired, kitsch, macabre, noir accessories for everybody to wear and enjoy. Heather studied fashion and surface pattern design in the 80's near Leeds during the emergence of Gothic culture and has remained interested in the darker side of life ever since. She became fascinated with Steampunk after seeing Datamancer's Steampunk computer, loving the juxtaposition of new and old technology. This inspired her to make steampunk clothing and accessories using old and found items and upcycling as much as possible.

Headpiece by Diamante Queen Designs

• Matthew Chapman of Raphael's Workshop specialises in creating strange and sublime chainmail items, bringing ideas to life in metal that few would ever consider. From collars to corsets, serpents to squids, arms to armour and medals to masterpieces, you should visit his stall and see what creations spark the imagination.

Chainmail jewellery and accessories created by Raphael's Workshop

We hope that this post has whetted your appetite for the delights available at the Late at the Library: Digital Steampunk event on Friday 13th October at the British Library. Tickets can be booked here.

All good things must come to an end, no I’m not talking about the collapse of a favourite high street chain store beginning with W, but the final few weeks of our Digital Storytelling exhibition, which closes on the 15^th October 2023. If you haven’t seen it yet, then this is your last chance to book!

Digital Storytelling showcases eleven different born digital works, including interactive narratives that respond to user input, reading experiences personalised by data feeds, and immersive multimedia story worlds developed through audience participation. From thought provoking autobiographical hypertexts to data journalism, uncanny ghost stories to weather poetry, steampunk literary adaptation to quirky Elizabethan medical comedy. 

If you want to hear more about this exhibition, Digital Curator Stella Wisdom will be giving two talks later this week. The first of these will be in-person on Thursday evening, 5^th October, in Richmond Lending Library for the Richmond Reads season of events, celebrating the joys and benefits of reading. The second will be held online on Friday morning, 6^th October, for the DARIAH-EU autumn 2023 Friday Frontiers series.

We are also delighted to share that there is a chapter about interactive digital books written by Giulia Carla Rossi, Curator for Digital Publications, in The Book by Design, which was recently launched by our colleagues in British Library Publishing. Giulia’s chapter discusses innovative Editions at Play publications, including Seed by Joanna Walsh and Breathe by Kate Pullinger, which are both currently displayed in Digital Storytelling.

Before the Digital Storytelling exhibition closes, we'd love you to join us for a party on the evening of Friday 13th October. For one night only, transmedia storyteller Yomi Ayeni will transform the British Library into the Clockwork Watch story world for an immersive steampunk late event.

Genre-bending DJ Sacha Dieu will be spinning the best in Balkan Gypsy, Electro Swing, and Global Beats. Professor Elemental will perform live for us, and we really hope he’ll sing I Love Libraries! You'll also be able to view the Digital Storytelling exhibition, and there will be quieter areas to explore 19^th Century London in Minecraft, play board games including Great Scott! The Game of Mad Invention with games librarian Marion Tessier, and to discover poetry with the Itinerant Poetry Librarian.

If you plan to party with us, book your ticket here.

Summer may be over, but there is much to look forward to this autumn, including our Late at the Library: Digital Steampunk event on Friday 13^th October 2023, where we invite you to immerse yourself in the Clockwork Watch story world, party with chap hop maestro Professor Elemental and explore 19th-century London in Minecraft. If these kind of shenanigans sound right up your street, then book tickets here and join us!

Clockwork Watch by Yomi Ayeni is currently showcased in the British Library’s Digital Storytelling exhibition, which is open until 15 October 2023. Set in a retro-futurist steampunk Victorian England, Clockwork Watch is a participatory story that includes multiple voices and perspectives on themes relating to empire, colonialism, exploitation and resistance, which is told across a range of formats, including a series of graphic novels (there is an overview of these titles here), immersive theatre, role play, and an online newspaper the London Gazette.

Steampunk Illustration by Brett Walsh

For the evening of Friday 13^th October, the British Library will transform into the story world of the next part of the Clockwork Watch narrative. Featuring an auction of the last few remaining properties on Peak B, and the opening of bids for Peak C, new housing developments situated on floating islands hovering over the British Channel. Leggett and Scarper, the estate agents managing these properties, will also be inviting inventors or anyone with a solution to problems plaguing these floating islands, to submit their plans for a chance to win a Golden Ticket to one of the new homes on Peak C.

© Clockwork Watch / Graham Leggett 2023

Attendees will be able to explore the streets of Sherlock Holmes’ London in Minecraft created by Blockworks and Lancaster University, visit the Night Market, have a photograph taken with authentic Victorian Dark Box photography, or a portrait drawn by artist Dr Geof, and that’s before the auction begins. But be warned, buying your way into this real estate dreamworld is not straightforward – this night is a golden opportunity for the Clockwork Watch underbelly of pickpockets, rogues and vagabonds.

Dressing up and joining in is heartily encouraged. To prepare for this event, we suggest reading the Clockwork Watch graphic novels, you can order these online, or purchase the first two ominbus editions from the British Library’s onsite shop. Also check out the London Gazette website and this special British Library edition of the newspaper. We hope to see you there!

© Clockwork Watch

Are you working in Galleries-Libraries-Archives-Museums (GLAM) and cultural heritage organisations as research support and research-active staff? Are you interested in developing knowledge and skills in open scholarship? Would you like to establish good practices, share your experience with others and collaborate? If your answer is yes to one or more of these questions, we invite you to join the Cultural Heritage Open Scholarship Network (CHOSN).

Initiated by the British Library’s Research Infrastructure Services built on the experience of and positive responses received from the open scholarship training programme, which was run earlier this year. CHOSN is a community of practice for research support and research-active staff who work in GLAMs, organisations interested in developing and sharing open scholarship knowledge and skills, organising events, and supporting each other in this area. 

GLAMs demonstrate a significant amount of research showcases, but we may find ourselves with inadequate resources to make that research openly available, gain relevant open scholarship skills to make it happen, or even identify what forms research in these environments. CHOSN aims to provide a platform to create synergy for those aiming for good practice in open scholarship.

This network can be of interest to anyone who is facilitating, enabling, supporting research activities in GLAM organisations. They include but are not limited to research support staff, research-active staff, librarians, curatorial teams, IT specialists, copyright officers and so on. Anyone interested in the areas of open scholarship and works in cultural heritage organisations are welcome.

Join us in the Cultural Heritage Open Scholarship Network (CHOSN) to;

• explore research activities, roles in GLAMs and make them visible,
• develop knowledge and skills in open scholarship,
• carry out capacity development activities to learn and grow, and
• create a community of practice to collaborate and support each other.

We have set up a JISC mailing list to start communication with the network, you can join by signing up here. We will shortly organise an online meeting to kick off the network plans, explore how to move forward and to collectively discuss what we would like to do next. This will all be communicated via the CHOSN mailing list.

If you have any questions about CHOSN, we are happy to hear from you at [email protected].

This blog post is by Harry Lloyd, Research Software Engineer in the Digital Research team, British Library. You can sometimes find him at the Rose and Crown in Kentish Town.

Last week Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert delved into the invaluable work that she and others have done on the Convert-a-Card project since 2015. In this post, I’m going to pick up where she left off, and describe how we’ve been automating parts of the workflow. When I joined the British Library in February, Victoria Morris and former colleague Giorgia Tolfo had prototyped programmatically extracting entities from transcribed catalogue cards and searching by title and author in the OCLC WorldCat database for any close matches. I have been building on this work, and addressing the last yellow rectangle below: “Curator disambiguation and resolution”. Namely how curators choose between OCLC results and develop a MARC record fit for ingest into British Library systems.

The Convert-a-Card workflow at the start of 2023

 

Entity Extraction

We’re currently working with the digitised images from two drawers of cards, one Urdu and one Chinese. Adi and Giorgia used a layout model on Transkribus to successfully tag different entities on the Urdu cards. The transcribed XML output then had ‘title’, ‘shelfmark’ and ‘author’ tags for the relevant text, making them easy to extract.

Card with layout model and resulting XML for an Urdu card, showing the `structure {type:title;}` parameter on line one

The same method didn’t work for the Chinese cards, possibly because the cards are less consistently structured. There is, however, consistency in the vertical order of entities on the card: shelfmark comes above title comes above author. This meant I could reuse some code we developed for Rossitza Atanassova’s Incunabula project, which reliably retrieved title and author (and occasionally an ISBN).

Chinese cards. Although the layouts are variable, shelfmark is reliably the first line, with title and author following.

 

Querying OCLC WorldCat

With the title and author for each card, we were set-up to query WorldCat, but how to do this when there are over two thousand cards in these two drawers alone? Victoria and Giorgia made impressive progress combining Python wrappers for the Z39.50 protocol (PyZ3950) and MARC format (Pymarc). With their prototype, a lot of googling of ASN.1, BER and Z39.50, and a couple of quiet weeks drifting through the web of references between the two packages, I built something that could turn a table of titles and authors for the Chinese cards into a list of MARC records. I had also brushed up on enough UTF-8 to fix why none of the Chinese characters were encoded correctly.

For all that I enjoyed trawling through it, Z39.50 is, in the words of a 1999 tutorial, “rather hard to penetrate” and nearly 35 years old. PyZ39.50, the Python wrapper, hasn’t been maintained for two years, and making any changes to the code is a painstaking process. While Z39.50 remains widely used for transferring information between libraries, that doesn’t mean there aren’t better ways of doing things, and in the name of modernity OCLC offer a suite of APIs for their services. Crucially there are endpoints on their Metadata API that allow search and retrieval of records in MARCXML format. As the British Library maintains a cataloguing subscription to OCLC, we have access to the APIs, so all that’s needed is a call to the OCLC OAuth Server, a search on the Metadata API using title and author, then retrieval of the MARCXML for any results. This is very straightforward in Python, and with the Requests package and about ten lines of code we can have our MARCXML matches.

Selecting Matches

At all stages of the project we’ve needed someone to select the best match for a card from WorldCat search results. This responsibility currently lies with curators and cataloguers from the relevant collection area. With that audience in mind, I needed a way to present MARC data from WorldCat so curators could compare the MARC fields for different matches. The solution needed to let a cataloguer choose a card, show the card and a table with the MARC fields for each WorldCat result, and ideally provide filters so curators could use domain knowledge to filter out bad results. I put out a call on the cross-government data science network, and a colleague in the 10DS data science team suggested Streamlit.

Streamlit is a Python package that allows fast development of web apps without needing to be a web app developer (which is handy as I’m not one). Adding Streamlit commands to the script that processes WorldCat MARC records into a dataframe quickly turned it into a functioning web app. The app reads in a dataframe of the cards in one drawer and their potential worldcat matches, and presents it as a table of cards to choose from. You then see the image of the card you’re working on and a MARC field table for the relevant WorldCat matches. This side-by-side view makes it easy to scan across a particular MARC field, and exclude matches that have, for example, the wrong physical dimensions. There’s a filter for cataloguing language, sort options for things like number of subject access fields and total number of fields, and the ability to remove bad matches from view. Once the cataloguer has chosen a match they can save a match to the original dataframe, or note that there were no good matches, or only a partial match.

Screenshot from the Streamlit Convert-a-Card web app, showing the card and the MARC table curators use to choose between matches. As the cataloguers are familiar with MARC, providing the raw fields is the easiest way to choose between matches.

After some very positive initial feedback, we sat down with the Chinese curators and had them test the app out. That led to a fun, interactive, user experience focussed feedback session, and a whole host of GitHub issues on the repository for bugs and design suggestions. Behind the scenes discussion on where to host the app and data are ongoing and not straightforward, but this has been a deeply easy product to prototype, and I’m optimistic it will provide a light weight, gentle learning curve complement to full deriving software like Aleph (the Library’s main cataloguing system).

Next Steps

The project currently uses a range of technologies in  Transkribus, the OCLC APIs, and Streamlit, and tying these together has in itself been a success. Going forwards, we have the possibility of extracting non-English text from the cards to look forward to, and the richer list of entities this would make available. Working with the OCLC APIs has been a learning curve, and they’re not working perfectly yet, but they represent a relatively accessible option compared to Z39.50. And my hope for the Streamlit app is that it will be a useful tool beyond the project for wherever someone wants to use Worldcat to help derive records from minimal information. We still have challenges in terms of design, data storage, and hosting to overcome, but these discussions should have their own benefits in making future development easier. The goal for automation part of the project is a smooth flow of data from Transkribus, through OCLC and on to the curators, and while it’s not perfect, we’re definitely getting there.

This year we will be continuing our collaboration with the British Fashion Council running our annual student research competition, which encourages fashion students to use the British Library collections in creating their fashion designs. Once again, we will start the collaboration with a fashion show produced by a leading designer. This year we are delighted to be working with Priya Ahluwalia. Earlier this year Priya worked with the Business and IP centre, contributing to the Inspiring Entrepreneurs’ International Women’s Day event, which discussed how we can best embrace and encourage diversity and inclusion in business.

On 15 September during London Fashion Week Priya will showcase her SS24 collection at the British Library. Following the show, Priya will lead this year’s student competition, focusing on the importance of research in design process. As a part of this competition students across the UK will create fashion portfolios inspired by the Library’s unique collections.

The previous collaborations with the British Fashion Council involved a range of exciting designers such as Nabil El Nayal, Phoebe English, Supriya Lele and Charles Jeffrey.

Phoebe English’s fashion installation at the British Library in 2021

 

The previous student work utilised the riches of the Library’s digital and physical collections, with the Flickr collection being especially popular with students. However, the inspiration came from many different directions - from art books, photographs and maps to the reading room bags.

This year’s student competition will be launched in October 2023.

From the winning portfolio of Mihai Popesku, Middlesex University student, who used the Library collections to research traditional Romanian dress

Update: there's been some great coverage in the fashion press (and social media), including this Vogue article that begins 'Priya Ahluwalia’s show purposefully took place at the British Library. More than just a venue, it tied into the theme of her work: bringing forgotten or untold stories about talented people to attention'.