The British Library is continuing to recover from last year’s cyber-attack. While our teams work to restore our services safely and securely, one of our goals in the Digital Research Team is to get some of the information from our currently inaccessible web pages into an easily readable and shareable format. We’ll be sharing these pages via blog posts here, with information recovered from the Wayback Machine, a fantastic initiative of the Internet Archive.  

The next page in this series is all about the student projects that came out of our Computing for Cultural Heritage project with the National Archives and Birkbeck University. This student project page was captured by the Wayback Machine on 7 June 2023.  

Computing for Cultural Heritage Student Projects

This page provides abstracts for a selection of student projects undertaken as part of a one-year part-time Postgraduate Certificate (PGCert), Computing for Cultural Heritage, co-developed by British Library, National Archives and Birkbeck University and funded by the Institute of Coding as part of a £4.8 million University skills drive.

“I have gone from not being able to print 'hello' in Python to writing some relatively complex programs and having a much greater understanding of data science and how it is applicable to my work."

- Jessica Green  

Key points

• Aim of the trial was to provide professionals working in the cultural heritage sector with an understanding of basic programming and computational analytic tools to support them in their daily work 
• During the Autumn & Spring terms (October 2019-April 2020), 12 staff members from British Library and 8 staff staff members from The National Archives completed two new trial modules at Birkbeck University: Demystifying computing for heritage professionals and Work-based Project 
• Birkbeck University have now launched the Applied Data Science (Postgraduate Certificate) based on the outcomes of the trial

Student Projects

Transforming Physical Labels into Digital References 

Sotirios Alpanis, British Library
This project aims to use computing to convert data collected during the preparation of archive material for digitisation into a tool that can verify and validate image captures, and subsequently label them. This will take as its input physical information about each document being digitised, perform and facilitate a series of validations throughout image capture and quality assurance and result in an xml file containing a map of physical labels to digital files. The project will take place within the British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership (BL/QFP), which is digitising archive material for display on the QDL.qa.  

Enhancing national thesis metadata with persistent identifiers

Jenny Basford, British Library 
Working with data from ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) Agency and EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service), both based at the British Library, I intend to enhance the metadata of both databases by identifying doctoral supervisors in thesis metadata and matching these data with ISNI holdings. This work will also feed into the European-funded FREYA project, which is concerned with the use of a wide variety of persistent identifiers across the research landscape to improve openness in research culture and infrastructure through Linked Data applications.

A software tool to support the social media activities of the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage Project

Lucia Cavorsi, British Library
Video
I would like to design a software tool able to flag forthcoming anniversaries, by comparing all the dates present in SAMI (sound and moving image catalogue – Sound Archive) with the current date. The aim of this tool is to suggest potential content for the Sound Archive’s social media posts. Useful dates in SAMI which could be matched with the current date and provide material for tweets are: birth and death dates of performers or authors, radio programme broadcast dates, recording dates).  I would like this tool to also match the subjects currently present in SAMI with the subjects featured in the list of anniversaries 2020 which the social media team uses. For example anniversaries like ‘International HIV day’, ‘International day of Lesbian visibility’ etc.  A windows pop up message will be designed for anniversaries notifications on the day.  If time permits, it would be convenient to also analyse what hashtags have been used over last year by the people who are followed by or follow the Sound Archive Twitter account. By extracting a list of these hashtags further, and more sound related, anniversaries could be added to the list of anniversaries currently used by the UOSH’s social media team.

Computing Cholera: Topic modelling the catalogue entries of the General Board of Health

Christopher Day, The National Archives
Blog / Other
The correspondence of the General Board of Health (1848–1871) documents the work of a body set up to deal with cholera epidemics in a period where some English homes were so filthy as to be described as “mere pigholes not fit for human beings”. Individual descriptions for each of these over 89,000 letters are available on Discovery, The National Archives (UK)’s catalogue. Now, some 170 years later, access to the letters themselves has been disrupted by another epidemic, COVID-19. This paper examines how data science can be used to repurpose archival catalogue descriptions, initially created to enhance the ‘human findability’ of records (and favoured by many UK archives due to high digitisation costs), for large-scale computational analysis. The records of the General Board will be used as a case study: their catalogue descriptions topic modelled using a latent Dirichlet allocation model, visualised, and analysed – giving an insight into how new sanitary regulations were negotiated with a divided public during an epidemic. The paper then explores the validity of using the descriptions of historical sources as a source in their own right; and asks how, during a time of restricted archival access, metadata can be used to continue research.

An Automated Text Extraction Tool for Use on Digitised Maps

Nicholas Dykes, British Library
Blog / Video
Researchers of history often have difficulty geo-locating historical place names in Africa. I would like to apply automated transcription techniques to a digitised archive of historical maps of Africa to create a resource that will allow users to search for text, and discover where, and on which maps that text can be found. This will enable identification and analysis both of historical place names and of other text, such as topographical descriptions. I propose to develop a software tool in Python that will send images stored locally to the Google Vision API, and retrieve and process a response for each image, consisting of a JSON file containing the text found, pixel coordinate bounding boxes for each instance of text, and a confidence score. The tool will also create a copy of each image with the text instances highlighted. I will experiment with the parameters of the API in order to achieve the most accurate results.  I will incorporate a routine that will store each related JSON file and highlighted image together in a separate folder for each map image, and create an Excel spreadsheet containing text results, confidence scores, links to relevant image folders, and hyperlinks to high-res images hosted on the BL website. The spreadsheet and subfolders will then be packaged together into a single downloadable resource.  The finished software tool will have the capability to create a similar resource of interlinked spreadsheet and subfolders from any batch of images.

Reconstituting a Deconstructed Dataset using Python and SQLite

Alex Green, The National Archives
Video
For this project I will rebuild a database and establish the referential integrity of the data from CSV files using Python and SQLite. To do this I will need to study the data, read the documentation, draw an entity relationship diagram and learn more about relational databases. I want to enable users to query the data as they would have been able to in the past. I will then make the code reusable so it can be used to rebuild other databases, testing it with a further two datasets in CSV form. As an additional challenge, I plan to rearrange the data to meet the principles of ‘tidy data’ to aid data analysis.

PIMMS: Developing a Model Pre-Ingest Metadata Management System at the British Library

Jessica Green, British Library
GitHub / Video
I am proposing a solution to analysing and preparing for ingest a vast amount of ‘legacy’ BL digitised content into the future Digital Asset Management System (DAMPS). This involves building a prototype for a SQL database to aggregate metadata about digitised content and preparing for SIP creation. In addition, I will write basic queries to aid in our ongoing analysis about these TIFF files, including planning for storage, copyright, digital preservation and duplicate analysis. I will use Python to import sample metadata from BL sources like SharePoint, Excel and BL catalogues – currently used for analysis of ‘live’ and ‘legacy’ digitised BL collections. There is at least 1 PB of digitised content on the BL networks alone, as well as on external media such as hard-drives and CDs. We plan to only ingest one copy of each digitised TIFF file set and need to ensure that the metadata is accurate and up-to-date at the point of ingest. This database, the Pre-Ingest Metadata Management System (PIMMS), could serve as a central metadata repository for legacy digitised BL collections until then. I look forward to using Python and SQL, as well as drawing on the coding skills from others, to make these processes more efficient and effective going forward.

Exploring, cleaning and visualising catalogue metadata

Alex Hailey, British Library
Blog / Video
Working with catalogue metadata for the India Office Records (IOR) I will undertake three tasks: 1) converting c430,000 IOR/E index entries to descriptions within the relevant volume entries; 2) producing an SQL database for 46,500 IOR/P descriptions, allowing enhanced search when compared with the BL catalogue; and 3) creating Python scripts for searching, analysis and visualisation, to be demonstrated on dataset(s) and delivered through Jupyter Notebooks.

Automatic generation of unique reference numbers for structured archival data.

Graham Jevon, British Library
Blog / Video / GitHub
The British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) funds the digital preservation of endangered archival material around the world. Third party researchers digitise material and send the content to the British Library. This is accompanied by an Excel spreadsheet containing metadata that describes the digitised content. EAP’s main task is to clean, validate, and enhance the metadata prior to ingesting it into the Library’s cataloguing system (IAMS). One of these tasks is the creation of unique catalogue reference numbers for each record (each row of data on the spreadsheet). This is a predominantly manual process that is potentially time consuming and subject to human inputting errors. This project seeks to solve this problem. The intention is to create a Windows executable program that will enable users to upload a csv file, enter a prefix, and then click generate. The instant result will be an export of a new csv file, which contains the data from the original csv file plus automatically generated catalogue reference numbers. These reference numbers are not random. They are structured in accordance with an ordered archival hierarchy. The program will include additional flexibility to account for several variables, including language encoding, computational efficiency, data validation, and wider re-use beyond EAP and the British Library.

Automating Metadata Extraction in Born Digital Processing

Callum McKean, British Library
Video
To automate the metadata extraction section of the Library’s current work-flow for born-digital processing using Python, then interrogate and collate information in new ways using the SQLite module.

Analysis of peak customer interactions with Reference staff at the British Library: a software solution

Jaimee McRoberts, British Library
Video
The British Library, facing on-going budget constraints, has a need to efficiently deploy Reference Services staff during peak periods of demand. The service would benefit from analysis of existing statistical data recording the timestamp of each customer interaction at a Reference Desk. In order to do this, a software solution is required to extract, analyse, and output the necessary data. This project report demonstrates a solution utilising Python alongside the pandas library which has successfully achieved the required data analysis.

Enhancing the data in the Manorial Documents Register (MDR) and making it more accessible

Elisabeth Novitski, The National Archives
Video
To develop computer scripts that will take the data from the existing separate and inconsistently formatted files and merge them into a consistent and organised dataset. This data will be loaded into the Manorial Documents Register (MDR) and National Register of Archives (NRA) to provide the user with improved search ability and access to the manorial document information.

Automating data analysis for collection care research at The National Archives: spectral and textual data

Lucia Pereira Pardo, The National Archives
The day-to-day work of a conservation scientist working for the care of an archival collection involves acquiring experimental data from the varied range of materials present in the physical records (inks, pigments, dyes, binding media, paper, parchment, photographs, textiles, degradation and restoration products, among others). To this end, we use multiple and complementary analytical and testing techniques, such as X-ray fluorescence (XRF), Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) and Fibre Optic Reflectance spectroscopies (FORS), multispectral imaging (MSI), colour and gloss measurements, microfading (MFT) and other accelerated ageing tests.  The outcome of these analyses is a heterogeneous and often large dataset, which can be challenging and time-consuming to process and analyse. Therefore, the objective of this project is to automate these tasks when possible, or at least to apply computing techniques to optimise the time and efforts invested in routine operations, so that resources are freed for actual research and more specialised and creative tasks dealing with the interpretation of the results.

Improving efficiencies in content development through batch processing and the automation of workloads

Harriet Roden, British Library
Video
With the purpose to support and enrich the curriculum, the British Library’s Digital Learning team produces large-scale content packages for online learners through individual projects. Due to their reliance on other internal teams within the workflow for content delivery, a substantial amount of resource is spent on routine tasks to duplicate collection metadata across various databases. In order to reduce inefficiencies, increase productivity and improve reliability, my project aimed to alleviate pressures across the workflow through workload automation, through four separate phases.

The Botish Library: building a poetry printing machine with Python

Giulia Carla Rossi, British Library
Blog / Video
This project aims to build a poetry printing machine, as a creative output that unites traditional content, new media and Python. The poems will be sourced from the British Library Digitised Books dataset collection, available under Public Domain Mark; I will sort through the datasets and identify which titles can be categorised as poetry using Python. I will then create a new dataset comprising these poetry books and relative metadata, which will then be connected to the printer with a Python script. The poetry printing machine will print randomized poems from this new dataset, together with some metadata (e.g. poem title, book title, author and shelfmark ID) that will allow users to easily identify the book.

Automating data entry in the UOSH Tracking Database

Chris Weaver, British Library
The proposed software solution is the creation of a Python script (to feature as a module in a larger script) to extract data from a web-based tool (either via obtaining data in JSON format via the sites' API or accessing the database powering the site directly). The data obtained is then formatted and inserted into corresponding fields in a Microsoft SQL Server database.

Final Module

Following the completion of the trial, participants had the opportunity to complete their PGCert in Applied Data Science by attending the final module, Analytic Tools for Information Professionals, which was part of the official course launched last autumn. We followed up with some of the participants to hear more about their experience of the full course:

“The third and final module of the computing for cultural heritage course was not only fascinating and enjoyable, it was also really pertinent to my job and I was immediately able to put the skills I learned into practice.  

The majority of the third module focussed on machine learning. We studied a number of different methods and one of these proved invaluable to the Agents of Enslavement research project I am currently leading. This project included a crowdsourcing task which asked the public to draw rectangles around four different types of newspaper advertisement. The purpose of the task was to use the coordinates of these rectangles to crop the images and create a dataset of adverts that can then be analysed for research purposes. To help ensure that no adverts were missed and to account for individual errors, each image was classified by five different people.  

One of my biggest technical challenges was to find a way of aggregating the rectangles drawn by five different people on a single page in order to calculate the rectangles of best fit. If each person only drew one rectangle, it was relatively easy for me to aggregate the results using the coding skills I had developed in the first two modules. I could simply find the average (or mean) of the five different classification attempts. But what if people identified several adverts and therefore drew multiple rectangles on a single page? For example, what if person one drew a rectangle around only one advert in the top left corner of the page; people two and three drew two rectangles on the same page, one in the top left and one in the top right; and people four and five drew rectangles around four adverts on the same page (one in each corner). How would I be able to create a piece of code that knew how to aggregate the coordinates of all the rectangles drawn in the top left and to separately aggregate the coordinates of all the rectangles drawn in the bottom right, and so on?  

One solution to this problem was to use an unsupervised machine learning method to cluster the coordinates before running the aggregation method. Much to my amazement, this worked perfectly and enabled me to successfully process the total of 92,218 rectangles that were drawn and create an aggregated dataset of more than 25,000 unique newspaper adverts.” 

-Graham Jevon, EAP Cataloguer; BL Endangered Archives Programme 

“The final module of the course was in some ways the most challenging — requiring a lot of us to dust off the statistics and algebra parts of our brain. However, I think, it was also the most powerful; revealing how machine learning approaches can help us to uncover hidden knowledge and patterns in a huge variety of different areas.  

Completing the course during COVID meant that collection access was limited, so I ended up completing a case study examining how generic tropes have evolved in science fiction across time using a dataset extracted from GoodReads. This work proved to be exceptionally useful in helping me to think about how computers understand language differently; and how we can leverage their ability to make statistical inferences in order to support our own, qualitative analyses. 

In my own collection area, working with born digital archives in Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts, we treat draft material — of novels, poems or anything else — as very important to understanding the creative process. I am excited to apply some of these techniques — particularly Unsupervised Machine Learning — to examine the hidden relationships between draft material in some of our creative archives. 

The course has provided many, many avenues of potential enquiry like this and I’m excited to see the projects that its graduates undertake across the Library.” 

- Callum McKean, Lead Curator, Digital; Contemporary British Collection

“I really enjoyed the Analytics Tools for Data Science module. As a data science novice, I came to the course with limited theoretical knowledge of how data science tools could be applied to answer research questions. The choice of using real-life data to solve queries specific to professionals in the cultural heritage sector was really appreciated as it made everyday applications of the tools and code more tangible. I can see now how curators’ expertise and specialised knowledge could be combined with tools for data analysis to further understanding of and meaningful research in their own collection area."

- Giulia Carla Rossi, Curator, Digital Publications; Contemporary British Collection

Please note this page was originally published in Feb 2021 and some of the resources, job titles and locations may now be out of date.

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].

Last week I came back from my very first ICDAR conference, inspired and energised for things to come! The International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) is the main international event for scientists and practitioners involved in document analysis and recognition. Its 17^th edition was held in San José, California, 21-26 August 2023.

ICDAR 2023 featured a three-day conference, including several competitions to challenge the field, as well as post-conference workshops and tutorials. All conference papers were made available as conference proceedings with Springer. 155 submissions were selected for inclusion into the scientific programme of ICDAR 2023, out of which 55 were delivered as oral presentations, and 100 as posters. The conference also teamed up with the International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) for a special journal track. 13 papers were accepted and published in a special issue entitled “Advanced Topics of Document Analysis and Recognition,” and were included as oral presentations in the conference programme. Do have a look at the programme booklet for more information!

ICDAR 2023 Logo

Each conference day included a thought-provoking keynote talk. The first one, by Marti Hearst, Professor and Interim Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information, was entitled “A First Look at LLMs Applied to Scientific Documents.” I learned about three platforms using Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods on PDF documents: ScholarPhi, Paper Plain, and SCIM. These projects help people read academic scientific publications, for example by enabling definitions for mathematical notations, or generating glossary for nonce words (e.g. acronyms, symbols, jargon terms); make medical research more accessible by enabling simplified summaries and Q&A; and classifying key passages in papers to enable quick and intelligent paper skimming.

The second keynote talk, “Enabling the Document Experiences of the Future,” was by Vlad Morariu, Senior Research Scientist at Adobe Research. Vlad addressed the need for human-document interaction, and took us through some future document experiences: PDF re-flows for mobile devices, documents read themselves, and conversational functionalities such as asking questions and receiving answers. Enabling this type of ultra-responsive documents is reliant on methods such as structural element detection, page layout understanding, and semantic connections.

The third and final keynote talk was by Seiichi Uchida, Distinguished Professor and Senior Vice President, Kyushu University, Japan. In his talk, “What Are Letters?,” Seiichi took us through the four main functions of letters and text: message (transmission of verbalised info), label (disambiguation of objects and environments), design (give a nonverbal info, such as impression), and code (readability under various noises and deformations). He provoked us to contemplate how our lives were affected by texts around us, and how could we analyse the correlation between our behaviour and the texts that we read.

Prof Seiichi Uchida giving his keynote talk on “What Are Letters?”

When it came to papers submitted for review by the conference committee, the most prominent topic represented in those submissions was handwriting recognition, with a growing number of papers specifically tackling historical documents. Other submission topics included Graphics Recognition, Natural Language Processing for Documents (D-NLP), Applications (including for medical, legal, and business documents), and other types of Document Analysis and Recognition topics (DAR).

Screenshot of a slide showing the main submission topics for ICDAR 2023

Some of the papers that I attended tackled Named Entity Recognition (NER) evaluation methods and genealogical information extraction; papers dealing with Document Understanding, e.g. identifying the internal structure of documents, and understanding the relations between different entities; papers on Text and Document Recognition, such as looking into a model for multilingual OCR; and papers looking into Graphics, especially the recognition of table structure and content, as well as extracting data from structure diagrammes, for example in financial documents, or flowchart recognition. Papers on Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) dealt with methods for Writer Retrieval, i.e. identifying documents likely written by specific authors, the creation of generic models, text line detection, and more.

The conference included two poster sessions, featuring an incredibly rich array of poster presentations, as well as doctoral consortia. One of my favourite posters was presented by Mirjam Cuper, Data Scientist at the National Library of the Netherlands (KB), entitled “Unraveling confidence: examining confidence scores as proxy for OCR quality.” Together with colleagues Corine van Dongen and Tineke Koster, she looked into confidence scores provided by OCR engines, which indicate the level of certainty in which a word or character were accurately recognised. However, other factors are at play when measuring OCR quality – you can watch a ‘teaser’ video for this poster.

Conference participants at one of the poster sessions

As mentioned, the conference was followed by three days of tutorials and workshops. I enjoyed the tutorial on Computational Analysis of Historical Documents, co-led by Dr Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello (University of Bale, Switzerland) and Dr Hussein Adnan Mohammed (University of Hamburg, Germany). Presentations focused on the unique challenges, difficulties, and opportunities inherent to working with different types of historical documents. The distinct difficulties posed by historical handwritten manuscripts and ancient artifacts necessitate an interdisciplinary strategy and the utilisation of state-of-the-art technologies – and this fusion leads to the emergence of exciting and novel advancements in this area. The presentations were interwoven with great questions and a rich discussion, indicative of the audience’s enthusiasm. This tutorial was appropriately followed by a workshop dedicated to Computational Palaeography (IWCP).

I especially looked forward to the next day’s workshop, which was the 7^th edition of Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP’23). It was all about making documents accessible in digital libraries, looking at methods addressing OCR/HTR of historical documents, information extraction, writer identification, script transliteration, virtual reconstruction, and so much more. This day-long workshop featured papers in four sessions: HTR and Multi-Modal Methods, Classics, Segmentation & Layout Analysis, and Language Technologies & Classification. One of my favourite presentations was by Prof Apostolos Antonacopoulos, talking about his work with Christian Clausner and Stefan Pletschacher on “NAME – A Rich XML Format for Named Entity and Relation Tagging.” Their NAME XML tackles the need to represent named entities in rich and complex scenarios. Tags could be overlapping and nested, character-precise, multi-part, and possibly with non-consecutive words or tokens. This flexible and extensible format addresses the relationships between entities, makes them interoperable, usable alongside other information (images and other formats), and possible to validate.

Prof Apostolos Antonacopoulos talking about “NAME – A Rich XML Format for Named Entity and Relation Tagging”

I’ve greatly enjoyed the conference and its wonderful community, meeting old colleagues and making new friends. Until next time!

Daniel van Strien, Digital Curator, Living with Machines, writes:

The British Library’s digital scholarship department has made many digitised materials available to researchers. This includes a collection of digitised books created by the British Library in partnership with Microsoft. This is a collection of books that have been digitised and processed using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to make the text machine-readable. There is also a collection of books digitised in partnership with Google. 

Since being digitised, this collection of digitised books has been used for many different projects. This includes recent work to try and augment this dataset with genre metadata and a project using machine learning to tag images extracted from the books. The books have also served as training data for a historic language model.

This blog post will focus on two challenges of working with this dataset: size and documentation, and discuss how we’ve experimented with one potential approach to addressing these challenges. 

One of the challenges of working with this collection is its size. The OCR output is over 20GB. This poses some challenges for researchers and other interested users wanting to work with these collections. Projects like Living with Machines are one avenue in which the British Library seeks to develop new methods for working at scale. For an individual researcher, one of the possible barriers to working with a collection like this is the computational resources required to process it. 

Recently we have been experimenting with a Python library, datasets, to see if this can help make this collection easier to work with. The datasets library is part of the Hugging Face ecosystem. If you have been following developments in machine learning, you have probably heard of Hugging Face already. If not, Hugging Face is a delightfully named company focusing on developing open-source tools aimed at democratising machine learning. 

The datasets library is a tool aiming to make it easier for researchers to share and process large datasets for machine learning efficiently. Whilst this was the library’s original focus, there may also be other uses cases for which the datasets library may help make datasets held by the British Library more accessible. 

Some features of the datasets library:

• Tools for efficiently processing large datasets 
• Support for easily sharing datasets via a ‘dataset hub’ 
• Support for documenting datasets hosted on the hub (more on this later). 

As a result of these and other features, we have recently worked on adding the British Library books dataset library to the Hugging Face hub. Making the dataset available via the datasets library has now made the dataset more accessible in a few different ways.

Firstly, it is now possible to download the dataset in two lines of Python code: 

We can also use the Hugging Face library to process large datasets. For example, we only want to include data with a high OCR confidence score (this partially helps filter out text with many OCR errors): 

One of the particularly nice features here is that the library uses memory mapping to store the dataset under the hood. This means that you can process data that is larger than the RAM you have available on your machine. This can make the process of working with large datasets more accessible. We could also use this as a first step in processing data before getting back to more familiar tools like pandas. 

In a follow on blog post, we’ll dig into the technical details of datasets in some more detail. Whilst making the technical processing of datasets more accessible is one part of the puzzle, there are also non-technical challenges to making a dataset more usable. 

Documenting datasets 

One of the challenges of sharing large datasets is documenting the data effectively. Traditionally libraries have mainly focused on describing material at the ‘item level,’ i.e. documenting one dataset at a time. However, there is a difference between documenting one book and 100,000 books. There are no easy answers to this, but libraries could explore one possible avenue by using Datasheets. Timnit Gebru et al. proposed the idea of Datasheets in ‘Datasheets for Datasets’. A datasheet aims to provide a structured format for describing a dataset. This includes questions like how and why it was constructed, what the data consists of, and how it could potentially be used. Crucially, datasheets also encourage a discussion of the bias and limitations of a dataset. Whilst you can identify some of these limitations by working with the data, there is also a crucial amount of information known by curators of the data that might not be obvious to end-users of the data. Datasheets offer one possible way for libraries to begin more systematically commuting this information. 

The dataset hub adopts the practice of writing datasheets and encourages users of the hub to write a datasheet for their dataset. For the British library books, we have attempted to write one of these datacards. Whilst it is certainly not perfect, it hopefully begins to outline some of the challenges of this dataset and gives end-users a better sense of how they should approach a dataset. 

BL Labs 9th Symposium – Special Climate Change Edition is taking place on Tuesday 7 December 2021. This special event is devoted to looking at computational research and climate change.

British Library digitised image from page 303 of "A Voyage of Discovery, made under the orders of the Admiralty, in his Majesty's ships Isabella and Alexander for the purpose of exploring Baffin's Bay, and enquiring into the possibility of a North-West Passage".

To help us explore a range of complex issues at the intersection of computational research and climate change we are delighted to announce our expert panel:

• Schuyler Esprit – Founding Director of Create Caribbean Research Institute & Research Officer at the School of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of West Indies
• Helen Hardy – Science Digital Programme Manager at the Natural History Museum, London, responsible for mass digitisation of the Museum’s collections of 80 million items
• Joycelyn Longdon – Founder of ClimateInColour, a platform at the intersection of climate science and social justice, and PhD Student on the Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Risk programme at University of Cambridge
• Gavin Shaddick – Chair of Data Science and Statistics, University of Exeter, Director of the UKRI funded Centre for Doctoral Training in Environmental Intelligence: Data Science and AI for Sustainable Futures, co-Director of the University of Exeter-Met Office Joint Centre for Excellence in Environmental Intelligence and an Alan Turing Fellow
• Richard Sandford – Professor of Heritage Evidence, Foresight and Policy at the Institute of Sustainable Heritage at University College London
• Joseph Walton – Research Fellow in Digital Humanities and Critical and Cultural Theory at the University of Sussex

Join us for this exciting discussion addressing issues such as how digitisation can improve research efficiency, discussing pros and cons of AI and machine learning in relation to climate change, and the links between new technologies, climate and social justice.

You can see more details about our panel and book your place here.

In response to the Climate Emergency and issues raised by the COP26, the 9th British Library Labs Symposium is devoted to looking at computational research and climate change.  Registration Now Open.

The British Library Labs is the British Library programme dedicated to enabling people to experiment with our digital collections, including deploying computational research methods and using our collections as data. This inevitably means that we, and the communities we work with, are increasingly applying computational tools and methods that have environmental impact on our planet.

As our millions of pages of digitised content are becoming an exciting new research frontier, and we are increasingly using machine learning methods and tools on the large-scale projects, such as the Living with Machines project, it is also inevitable that this exciting new work comes with the increased use of computational resource and energy. With the view of the climate emergency, we are hoping to ensure that climate and sustainability considerations inform everything we do – meaning that we need much better understanding of digital environmental impacts and how this should inform our practice in all things related to computational research.

We know that this is not a simple issue - digitisation and digital preservation is often a lifeline for cultural heritage in the communities where museums, libraries and archives are already endangered due to the climate change - for example, the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme is dedicated to digitising and saving archives in danger of destruction, including due to climate change. The new digital resources, such the UK Web Archive’s collections, the Climate Change collection in particular, as well as the International Internet Preservation Consortium’s Climate Change collection, are essential resources for climate researchers, especially as we are increasingly working with researchers who wish to text and data mine our collections for the insights that can broaden our understanding of changing climate and biodiversity, and the impact of these changes on different communities.

Equally, as in all other areas related to the impacts of climate change, we are aware that in relation to digital research, there is also a strong interdependency with the issues of equality and social justice. Digital advancements are enablers of new research, helping us to better understand different communities and to broaden access and opportunities, but we also need to consider how the complexities of computational research and access, as well as expensive set up and energy requirements of the state-of-art infrastructures, might disadvantage researchers and communities that do not have access to relevant technologies, or to prohibitively expensive and energy-demanding resources required to run them.

For this year’s BL Labs Symposium, we are bringing a group of speakers that will consider these issues from different angles - from large-scale digitisation, to digital humanities, climate and biodiversity research, as well as the impact of AI. We will look into how our digital strategies and projects can help us fight climate change and be more inclusive, but also how we can improve our sustainability and reduce our impact on the planet.

As well as the views from our panel, there will be an opportunity for an extended audience input, helping us to bring forward the views from the broader Labs community and learn together how our practice can be improved.

The 9th BL Labs Symposium takes place on Zoom on Tuesday 7^th December from 16.30 until 18.00. Book your place now.

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, former Manager of British Library Labs or "BL Labs" for short

[estimated reading time of around 15 minutes]

This is is my last day working as manager of BL Labs, and also my final posting on the Digital Scholarship blog. I thought I would take this chance to reflect on my journey of almost 9 years in helping to set up, maintain and enabling BL Labs to become a permanent fixture at the British Library (BL).

BL Labs was the first digital Lab in a national library, anywhere in the world, that gets people to experiment with its cultural heritage digital collections and data. There are now several Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum Labs or 'GLAM Labs' for short around the world, with an active community which I helped build, from 2018.

I am really proud I was there from the beginning to implement the original proposal which was written by several colleagues, but especially Adam Farquhar, former head of Digital Scholarship at the British Library (BL). The project was at first generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation through four rounds of funding as well as support from the BL. In April 2021, the project became a permanently funded fixture, helped very much by my new manager Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education and Science.

The great news is that BL Labs is going to stay after I have left. The position of leading the Lab will soon be advertised. Hopefully, someone will get a chance to work with my helpful and supportive colleague Technical Lead of Labs, Dr Filipe Bento, bright, talented and very hard working Maja and other great colleagues in Digital Research and wider at the BL.

The beginnings, the BL and me!

I met Adam Farquhar and Aly Conteh (Former Head of Digital Research at the BL) in December 2012. They must have liked something about me because I started working on the project in January 2013, though I officially started in March 2013 to launch BL Labs.

I must admit, I had always felt a bit intimidated by the BL. My first visit was in the early 1980s before the St Pancras site was opened (in 1997) as a Psychology student. I remember coming up from Wolverhampton on the train to get a research paper about "Serotonin Pathways in Rats when sleeping" by Lidov, feeling nervous and excited at the same time. It felt like a place for 'really intelligent educated people' and for those who were one for the intellectual elites in society. It also felt for me a bit like it represented the British empire and its troubled history of colonialism, especially some of the collections which made me feel uncomfortable as to why they were there in the first place.

I remember thinking that the BL probably wasn't a place for some like me, a child of Indian Punjabi immigrants from humble beginnings who came to England in the 1960s. Actually, I felt like an imposter and not worthy of being there.

Nearly 9 years later, I can say I learned to respect and even cherish what was inside it, especially the incredible collections, though I also became more confident about expressing stronger views about the decolonisation of some of these.  I became very fond of some of the people who work or use it, there are some really good kind-hearted souls at the BL. However, I never completely lost that 'imposter and being an outsider' feeling.

What I remember at that time, going for my interview, was having this thought, what will happen if I got the position and 'What would be the one thing I would try and change?'. It came easily to me, namely that I would try and get more new people through the doors literally or virtually by connecting them to the BL's collections (especially the digital). New people like me, who may have never set foot, or had been motivated to step into the building before. This has been one of the most important reasons for me to get up in the morning and go to work at BL Labs.

So what have been my highlights? Let's have a very quick pass through!

BL Labs Launch and Advisory Board

I launched BL Labs in March 2013, one week after I had started. It was at the launch event organised by my wonderfully supportive and innovative colleague, Digital Curator Stella Wisdom. I distinctly remember in the afternoon session (which I did alone), I had to present my 'ideas' of how I might launch the first BL Labs competition where we would be trying to get pioneering researchers to work with the BL's digital collections.

God it was a tough crowd! They asked pretty difficult questions, questions I myself was asking too which I still didn't know the answer too either.

I remember Professors Tim Hitchcock (now at Sussex University and who eventually sat (and is still sitting) on the BL Labs Advisory Board) and Laurel Brake (now Professor Emerita of Literature and Print Culture, Birkbeck, University of London) being in the audience together with staff from the Royal Library of Netherlands, who 6 months later launched their own brilliant KB Lab. Subsequently, I became good colleagues with Lotte Wilms who led their Lab for many years and is now Head of Research support at Tilburg University.

My first gut feeling overall after the event was, this is going to be hard work. This feeling and reality remained a constant throughout my time at BL Labs.

In early May 2013, we launched the competition, which was a really quick and stressful turnaround as I had only officially started in mid March (one and a half months). I remember worrying as to whether anyone would even enter!  All the final entries were pretty much submitted a few minutes before the deadline. I remember being alone that evening on deadline day near to midnight waiting by my laptop, thinking what happens if no one enters, it's going to be disaster and I will lose my job. Luckily that didn't happen, in the end, we received 26 entries.

I am a firm believer that we can help make our own luck, but sometimes luck can be quite random! Perhaps BL Labs had a bit of both!

After that, I never really looked back! BL Labs developed its own kind of pattern and momentum each year:

• hunting around the BL for digital collections to make into datasets and make available
• helping to make more digital collections openly licensed
• having hundreds of conversations with people interested in connecting with the BL's digital collections in the BL and outside
• working with some people more intensively to carry out experiments
• developing ideas further into prototype projects
• telling the world of successes and failures in person, meetings, events and social media
• launching a competition and awards in April or May
• roadshows before and after with invitations to speak at events around the world
• the summer working with competition winners
• late October/November the international symposium showcased things from the year
• working on special projects
• repeat!

The winners were announced in July 2013, and then we worked with them on their entries showcasing them at our annual BL Labs Symposium in November, around 4 months later.

'Nothing interesting happens in the office' - Roadshows, Presentations, Workshops and Symposia!

One of the highlights of BL Labs was to go out to universities and other places to explain what the BL is and what BL Labs does.  This ended up with me pretty much seeing the world (North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and giving virtual talks in South America and Africa).

My greatest challenge in BL Labs was always to get people to truly and passionately 'connect' with the BL's digital collections and data in order to come up with cool ideas of what to actually do with them. What I learned from my very first trip was that telling people what you have is great, they definitely need to know what you have! However, once you do that, the hard work really begins as you often need to guide and inspire many of them, help and support them to use the collections creatively and meaningfully. It was also important to understand the back story of the digital collection and learn about the institutional culture of the BL if people also wanted to work with BL colleagues.  For me and the researchers involved, inspirational engagement with digital collections required a lot of intellectual effort and emotional intelligence. Often this means asking the uncomfortable questions about research such as 'Why are we doing this?', 'What is the benefit to society in doing this?', 'Who cares?', 'How can computation help?' and 'Why is it necessary to even use computation?'.

Making those connections between people and data does feel like magic when it really works. It's incredibly exciting, suddenly everyone has goose bumps and is energised. This feeling, I will take away with me, it's the essence of my work at BL Labs!

A full list of over 200 presentations, roadshows, events and 9 annual symposia can be found here.

Competitions, Awards and Projects

Another significant way BL Labs has tried to connect people with data has been through Competitions (tell us what you would like to do, and we will choose an idea and work collaboratively with you on it to make it a reality), Awards (show us what you have already done) and Projects (collaborative working).

At the last count, we have supported and / or highlighted over 450 projects in research, artistic, entrepreneurial, educational, community based, activist and public categories most through competitions, awards and project collaborations.

We also set up awards for British Library Staff which has been a wonderful way to highlight the fantastic work our staff do with digital collections and give them the recognition they deserve. I have noticed over the years that the number of staff who have been working on digital projects has increased significantly. Sometimes this was with the help of BL Labs but often because of the significant Digital Scholarship Training Programme, run by my Digital Curator colleagues in Digital Research for staff to understand that the BL isn't just about physical things but digital items too.

Browse through our project archive to get inspiration of the various projects BL Labs has been involved in or highlighted.

Putting the digital collections 'where the light is' - British Library platforms and others

When I started at BL Labs it was clear that we needed to make a fundamental decision about how we saw digital collections. Quite early on, we decided we should treat collections as data to harness the power of computational tools to work with each collection, especially for research purposes. Each collection should have a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI) so researchers can cite them in publications.  Any new datasets generated from them will also have DOIs, allowing us to understand the ecosystem through DOIs of what happens to data when you get it out there for people to use.

In 2014, https://data.bl.uk was born and today, all our 153 datasets (as of 29/09/2021) are available through the British Library's research repository.

However, BL Labs has not stopped there! We always believed that it's important to put our digital collections where others are likely to discover them (we can't assume that researchers will want to come to BL platforms), 'where the light is' so to speak.  We were very open and able to put them on other platforms such as Flickr and Wikimedia Commons, not forgetting that we still needed to do the hard work to connect data to people after they have discovered them, if they needed that support.

Our greatest success by far was placing 1 million largely undescribed images that were digitally snipped from 65,000 digitised public domain books from the 19th Century on Flickr Commons in 2013. The number of images on the platform have grown since then by another 50 to 60 thousand from collections elsewhere in the BL. There has been significant interaction from the public to generate crowdsourced tags to help to make it easier to find the specific images. The number of views we have had have reached over a staggering 2 billion over this time. There have also been an incredible array of projects which have used the images, from artistic use to using machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify them. It's my favourite collection, probably because there are no restrictions in using it.

Read the most popular blog post the BL has ever published by my former BL Labs colleague, the brilliant and inspirational Ben O'Steen, a million first steps and the 'Mechanical Curator' which describes how we told the world why and how we had put 1 million images online for anyone to use freely.

It is wonderful to know that George Oates, the founder of Flickr Commons and still a BL Labs Advisory Board member, has been involved in the creation of the Flickr Foundation which was announced a few days ago! Long live Flickr Commons! We loved it because it also offered a computational way to access the collections, critical for powerful and efficient computational experiments, through its Application Programming Interface (API).

More recently, we have experimented with browser based programming / computational environments - Jupyter Notebooks. We are huge fans of Tim Sherrat who was a pioneer and brilliant advocate of OPEN GLAM in using them, especially through his GLAM Workbench. He is a one person Lab in his own right, and it was an honour to recognise his monumental efforts by giving him the BL Labs Research Award 2020 last year. You can also explore the fantastic work of Gustavo Candela and colleagues on Jupyter Notebooks and the ones my colleageue Filipe Bento created.

Art Exhibitions, Creativity and Education

I am extremely proud to have been involved in enabling two major art exhibitions to happen at the BL, namely:

Crossroads of Curiosity by David Normal

Imaginary Cities by Michael Takeo Magruder

I loved working with artists, its my passion! They are so creative and often not restricted by academic thinking, see the work of Mario Klingemann for example! You can browse through our archives for various artistic projects that used the BL's digital collections, it's inspiring.

I was also involved in the first British Library Fashion Student Competition won by Alanna Hilton, held at the BL which used the BL's Flickr Commons collection as inspiration for the students to design new fashion ranges. It was organised by my colleague Maja Maricevic, the British Fashion Colleges Council and Teatum Jones who were great fun to work with. I am really pleased to say that Maja has gone on from strength to strength working with the fashion industry and continues to run the competition to this day.

We also had some interesting projects working with younger people, such as Vittoria's world of stories and the fantastic work of Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller at the Australian National University. This is something I am very much interested in exploring further in the future, especially around ideas of computational thinking and have been trying out a few things.

GLAM Labs community and Booksprint

I am really proud of helping to create the international GLAM Labs community with over 250 members, established in 2018 and still active today. I affectionately call them the GLAM Labbers, and I often ask people to explore their inner 'Labber' when I give presentations. What is a Labber? It's the experimental and playful part of us we all had as children and unfortunately many have lost when becoming an adult. It's the ability to be fearless, having the audacity and perhaps even naivety to try crazy things even if they are likely to fail! Unfortunately society values success more than it does failure. In my opinion, we need to recognise, respect and revere those that have the courage to try but failed. That courage to experiment should be honoured and embraced and should become the bedrock of our educational systems from the very outset.

Two years ago, many of us Labbers 'ate our own dog food' or 'practised what we preached' when me and 15 other colleagues came together for 5 days to produce a book through a booksprint, probably the most rewarding professional experience of my life. The book is about how to set up, maintain, sustain and even close a GLAM Lab and is called 'Open a GLAM Lab'. It is available as public domain content and I encourage you to read it.

Online drop-in goodbye - today!

I organised a 30 minute ‘online farewell drop-in’ on Wednesday 29 September 2021, 1330 BST (London), 1430 (Paris, Amsterdam), 2200 (Adelaide), 0830 (New York) on my very last day at the British Library. It was heart-warming that the session was 'maxed out' at one point with participants from all over the world. I honestly didn't expect over 100 colleagues to show up. I guess when you leave an organisation you get to find out who you actually made an impact on, who shows up, and who tells you, otherwise you may never know.

Those that know me well know that I would have much rather had a farewell do ‘in person’, over a pint and praying for the ‘chip god’ to deliver a huge portion of chips with salt/vinegar and tomato sauce’ magically and mysteriously to the table. The pub would have been Mc'Glynns (http://www.mcglynnsfreehouse.com/) near the British Library in London. I wonder who the chip god was?  I never found out ;)

The answer to who the chip god was is in text following this sentence on white on white text...you will be very shocked to know who it was!- s

Spoiler alert it was me after all, my alter ego

Mahendra's online farewell to BL Labs, Wednesday 29 September, 1330 BST, 2021.
Left: Flowers and wine from the GLAM Labbers arrived in Tallinn, 20 mins before the meeting!
Right: Some of the participants of the online farewell

Leave a message of good will to see me off on my voyage!

It would be wonderful if you would like to leave me your good wishes, comments, memories, thoughts, scans of handwritten messages, pictures, photographs etc. on the following Google doc:

http://tiny.cc/mahendramahey

I will leave it open for a week or so after I have left. Reading positive sincere heartfelt messages from colleagues and collaborators over the years have already lifted my spirits. For me it provides evidence that you perhaps did actually make a difference to somone's life.  I will definitely be re-reading them during the cold dark Baltic nights in Tallinn.

I would love to hear from you and find out what you are doing, or if you prefer, you can email me, the details are at the end of this post.

BL Labs Sailor and Captain Signing Off!

It's been a blast and lots of fun! Of course there is a tinge of sadness in leaving! For me, it's also been intellectually and emotionally challenging as well as exhausting, with many ‘highs’ and a few ‘lows’ or choppy waters, some professional and others personal.

I have learned so much about myself and there are so many things I am really really proud of. There are other things of course I wish I had done better. Most of all, I learned to embrace failure, my best teacher!

I think I did meet my original wish of wanting to help to open up the BL to as many new people who perhaps would have never engaged in the Library before. That was either by using digital collections and data for cool projects and/or simply walking through the doors of the BL in London or Boston Spa and having a look around and being inspired to do something because of it.

I wish the person who takes over my position lots of success! My only piece of advice is if you care, you will be fine!

Anyhow, what a time this has been for us all on this planet? I have definitely struggled at times. I, like many others, have lost loved ones and thought deeply about life and it's true meaning. I have also managed to find the courage to know what’s important and act accordingly, even if that has been a bit terrifying and difficult at times. Leaving the BL for example was not an easy decision for me, and I wish perhaps things had turned out differently, but I know I am doing the right thing for me, my future and my loved ones. 

Though there have been a few dark times for me both professionally and personally, I hope you will be happy to know that I have also found peace and happiness too. I am in a really good place.

I would like to thank former alumni of BL Labs, Ben O'Steen - Technical Lead for BL Labs from 2013 to 2018, Hana Lewis (2016 - 2018) and Eleanor Cooper (2018-2019) both BL Labs Project Officers and many other people I worked through BL Labs and wider in the Library and outside it in my journey.

Where I am off to and what am I doing?

My professional plans are 'evolving', but one thing is certain, I will be moving country!

To Estonia to be precise!

I plan to live, settle down with my family and work there. I was never a fan of Brexit, and this way I get to stay a European.

I would like to finish with this final sweet video created by writer and filmaker Ling Low and her team in 2016, entitled 'Hey there Young Sailor' which they all made as volunteers for the Malaysian band, the 'Impatient Sisters'. It won the BL Labs Artistic Award in 2016. I had the pleasure and honour of meeting Ling over a lovely lunch in Kuala Lumpa, Malaysia, where I had also given a talk at the National Library about my work and looked for remanants of my grandfather who had settled there many years ago.

I wish all of you well, and if you are interested in keeping in touch with me, working with me or just saying hello, you can contact me via my personal email address: [email protected] or follow my progress on my personal website.

Happy journeys through this short life to all of you!

Mahendra Mahey, former BL Labs Manager / Captain / Sailor signing off!

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

This action packed, detailed 'rewind' and festive bumper edition blog post about last week's largest ever BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020, contains some hidden seasonal gifts🎁(if you read very carefully) to bring you seasonal cheer. The post rounds off a difficult and challenging 2020 for the BL Labs team and I am sure for everyone else.

In the new year, we will release this post in a series of shorter parts, but for now you have the opportunity to read the whole account together.

BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020 - detailed report

The BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020 is an annual event and awards ceremony showcasing innovative projects that use, experiment with and have been inspired by the British Library's physical and digital collections and data through BL Labs and / or through collaborations with other people in and outside the Library.

The Labs symposium provides a platform for highlighting and engaging with the British Library’s and other  Galleries,  Libraries,  Archives and Museums or (GLAMs) through their Labs or similar facilities that enable, support and encourage access and experimentation with their digital collections and data for research, inspiration and enjoyment.

For those GLAMs and / or organisations that don't have similar digital Labs, would like one, support the concept of experimentation with their digital collections generally, or even for those that haven't engaged with GLAM Labs before, why not join our GLAM Labs mailing list or slack channel 🎁 to start a conversation with us. 

You can also download our 🎁 book 'Open a GLAM Lab' to read over this festive period to inspire you to start on your own personal journey into the world of GLAM Labs.

The BL Labs Awards this year recognised outstanding use of British Library's digital content in the categories of Research, Artistic, Educational, Community and British Library staff contributions. Through the BL Labs Public Awards 2020, we made a special request for project submissions about or developed during this century-defining COVID-19 pandemic and / or a request for work that focused on some of the current BL Labs priorities, namely anti-racism (especially in the context for racial equality globally) and the use of Jupyter Notebooks for computational research with data.

Our eighth annual symposium took place for the first time entirely online via the 'Zoom Webinar' platform and was broadcast live and simultaneously on YouTube between 1400-1700 GMT on Tuesday 15 December 2020. We have also had a suggestion from Sarah Cole to try out an alternative platform called 'Hopin'🎁, which we will definitely be looking at (Sarah was a previous BL Labs Awards Commercial Award runner-up with Poetic Places🎁and had two other submissions one for the Awards  - 'Badigical Kingdom: Repurposing Public Domain Images to Make Badges🎁and an idea submitted for the BL Labs competition called 'The Maniacal Curator: A Tabletop Game using the British Library Flickr Collection'🎁).

We had over 350 unique attendees who participated live in the Labs symposium. People came from all over the world, ranging from Europe, the USA and Australia and from different academic fields and professional sectors.  The total number of viewers who have now watched the symposium is steadily rising largely because of those who are watching it after the live broadcast, we really hope the event will reach a wider global audience over time. I feel the way we consume events such as the symposium as well as other types of 'conferences' will be more online and be the new 'normal' in the future. It's clear that what is currently happening to the events' industry happened to terrestrial broadcast TV a number of years ago, in that it has now largely  a mostly on-demand service. Having over 350 viewers for a live online broadcast may seem like a modest number, however for us, this was actually the most number of live attendees we have ever had for our symposium and an opportunity for many to attend who were never able to attend previously because of time zone clashes and not being able to be physically present in London. We were especially pleased with this number, considering that there were a host of other similar online events going on at exactly the same time. So in case you missed it, you can still watch it for the first time (see details below as to how) or watch it again in case you missed something specific.

Going completely online for our symposium this year was a new 'experiment' for us in the BL Labs team.  We really wanted to ensure that the online version should still try to capture the spirit of the awards symposium, i.e. keep the audience engaged right through to the end, inject some fun, make it a true celebration and enable people to connect with each other. We learned a lot from the experience, we knew that there would inevitably be some teething problems however we are pretty pleased with how things went and what we were able to achieve given the time and resources we had available.

Embracing and learning from our mistakes is something we constantly do in a 'Labs' context, fail fast and better. It's part of my own guiding professional principles and something I constantly say when I speak to people who want to engage with BL Labs, especially when we work on experimental projects. A superb example which exemplifies and illustrates this philosophy is in a book by Shawn Graham, in Failing Gloriously and other Essays 🎁in which he documents his personal, entertaining, humorous, insightful and honest journey through digital humanities and digital archaeology against the backdrop of the 21st-century university.

Dan van Strien's tweet about the 'build up' video before the BL Labs Symposium 2020 started, describing a 'clubbing' vibe' with music and graphics.
My colleague Filipe Bento (Technical Lead for BL Labs) was responsible for this as well as other snazzy videos during transitions between breaks and presenters. We hope they injected a bit of fun and a taste and spirit of an MTV style awards show into the event.

The online version of the symposium has sparked some great ideas for me personally in how to run events like this and we hope to implement some new innovations and experiments in the future.

Did you miss attending the BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020 or want to watch a part or the whole thing again?

You can view the recorded live footage of the Symposium below via YouTube below:

🎁Recording of the YouTube live-stream of the 8th BL Labs Symposium, 15 December 2020, conducted on Zoom Webinar.

If you prefer, you may want to 'skip' to key moments in the programme detailed in the list of links below:

14:00 - 14:05  Welcome and introduction (skip to this section)
Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education and Science, British Library

14:05 - 14:45 Humanists Living with Machines: reflections on collaboration and computational history during a global pandemic (skip to this section)
Ruth Ahnert, Professor of Literary History and Digital Humanities at Queen Mary University of London  and Principal Investigator on 'Living With Machines' at The Alan Turing Institute.

14:45- 14:55  BL Labs update (skip to to this section)
Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs, British Library

15:10 - 15:15 Research Award (skip to this section) 
Naomi Billingsley, Research Development Manager, British Library

15:15 - 15:25  Digital Scholarship projects update (skip to this section) 
Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator, Asian and African Collections, the British Library.

15:25 – 15:30  The Artistic Award (skip to this section)
Jamie Andrews, Head of Culture and Learning, British Library

15:30 - 15:40  Research Services update (skip to this section)
Rachael Kotarski, Head of Research Infrastructure Services, British Library

15:40 - 15:45  The Teaching & Learning Award (skip to this section)
Ria Bartlett, Lead Producer: Onsite Learning at the British Library
(Please note that some of the videos shown in this section had poor audio and can be seen and heard again in our BL Labs Public Awards 2020 YouTube Playlist)

16:10 – 16:15  The Community Award (skip to this section)
Liz White, Head of Public Libraries and Community Engagement

16:15 - 16:25  The British Library Staff Award (skip to this section)
Jas Rai, Head of People, British Library
(Please note that some of the videos shown in this section had no audio and can be seen and heard again in our BL Labs Staff Awards YouTube playlist 2020.)

16:25 – 17:05  How to Decolonise the British Library in 3 (Un)Easy Step (skip to this section)
Anasuya Sengupta, Co-Director, Whose Knowledge?

17:05 – 17:15  'People's Favourite BL Labs Award' the RESULT and closing comments (skip to this section)
Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs, British Library

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Feedback on Symposium (during and after)

We have received some really positive comments about the event from live participants who rated it with an average of 8.9 out of 10 in terms of overall satisfaction by completing an event feedback survey at the time the event was live.

Comments included:

• 'It was excellent, especially the opening and closing talks'
• 'Getting a 'save the date' a bit earlier as there was a clash between many similar events online'
• 'Having an event half way through the year would be great to give an update on BL Labs and other Digital Research projects as there are so many of them!!'

There were several other useful constructive comments which we are definitely going to think about and consider taking on board for future events and activities.

Calls to action

Participants on the day also logged 'calls to action' i.e. things they were going to do as a result of the event or things they wanted to encourage others to do:

• 'Everyone must all watch the recordings and listen to the papers!'
• 'Everyone who has done something relevant should enter the Awards, even if they're not sure that their work fits'
• 'The event seemed quite academic, but it shed a light on how the digital archives are being used even if not all the terms are understood by the layman'
• 'Several of the speakers highlighted extremely important topics that necessitate further engagement and research'
• 'Machine learning based labelling and annotation and novel visualisation techniques to explore archives is something I am going to look into'
• 'My personal research interest is identity (ethnic, cultural, religious, language, etc.) and how it is expressed both in literature and culture more generally by immigrants from other countries and cultures. I now have ideas of digital ways to pursue this within the BL collections as opposed to simply printed books'
• 'Separate to the learning award, could there be a schools award? I'm thinking that maybe BL Labs could set a task and invite any school to take part'
• The work on decolonaziation should be continued
• 'Oral history archives - accessing transcripts, sound recordings and contextual information from a range of collections that could illuminate my current research based on published books of fiction and non-fiction in English'

Format for next year's event?

Interestingly, there was an overwhelming plea from participants that next year's event should be 'hybrid', online with an option to attend physically if possible. We will try our best (vaccines permitting) to consider this!

Feedback on watching as a pre-recorded event

If you do end up watching the recorded footage, it would really be incredibly helpful for us to receive your feedback about what you liked and what could be improved. This is in order to help us to continue justifying investing so much time and resources in organising such events. Please let us know what you thought about it, through our feedback page 🎁(your gift to us) or on social media / twitter using the @BL_Labs handle.

Behind the scenes team

The team 'behind the scenes' were:

8th BL Labs Symposium Organising Team

Top (Left to right) - Mahendra Mahey (BL Labs Manager), Filipe Bento (BL Labs Technical Lead), Robin Saklatvala (Event Manager)
Bottom (left to right) - Maja Maricevic (Head of Higher Education and Science), Ruth Hansford (Endangered Archives Programme Grants Portfolio Manager), Dan van Strien (Digital Curator with Living with Machines), Rossitza Atassanova (Digital Curator, Digitisation)

 

Mahendra Mahey, BL Labs Manager 'behind' the screen during the BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020

I would like to thank them all, especially Filipe and Robin who with me, did the heavy lifting.

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Welcome address from Maja Marcievic

Maja Maricevic, is the Head of Higher Education and Sciences at the British Library and manages me. She welcomed everyone who was attending the symposium and was 'master of ceremonies' for the first block of talks detailing some essential housekeeping duties. She then gave a summary of the direction that BL Labs will be moving into the future and detailed how the BL Labs team have been supporting and shining a light on research, artistic, educational as well as showcasing the incredibly important work which focuses on community activism over the year. Finally, she formally introduced the keynote speaker.

Keynote: Humanists Living with Machines: reflections on collaboration and computational history during a global pandemic

This year's keynote was delivered by Ruth Ahnert, Professor of Literary History and Digital Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on 'Living With Machines' project at The Alan Turing Institute.

Ruth spoke passionately and very engagingly about her impressive journey and rise as a literary historian. Ruth's academic work has increasingly involved using computational approaches. She highlighted some of the latest results from the Living With Machines project and included descriptions of some poignant and personal reflections on how the Digital Humanities community have been effected by recent developments such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and the push provided by the Black Lives Matter movement for memory organisations to provide greater transparency to their collections. Many of the attendees responded enthusiastically to Ruth's talk and there was a lot of buzz on social media about it. She was even able to answer 5 questions from the audience at the end of her talk.

Press Picker by Living with Machines Project

We are also very excited to announce that Ruth has joined the BL Labs Advisory board and was part of this year's judging panel for our Public Awards 2020. We are delighted that her energy, warmth, humanity and enthusiasm will be helping shape the future of BL Labs moving forward.

You can download her full set of slides as a PDF from here 🎁.

You can follow Ruth on Twitter.

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End Keynote: How to Decolonise the British Library in 3 (Un)Easy Steps

Anasuya Sengupta, Co-Director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge? explored the notions of epistemic injustice and how different structures of power and privilege impact the ways we understand (digital) knowledge and scholarship. In particular, she offered some practices of decolonisation that might move us from metaphor to the ongoing (and never complete) transformation of our organisations and ourselves. Her talk was extremely well received by the audience with very positive comments and feedback such as 'Incredible presentation from Anasuya'. Thank you Anasuya for delivering a very powerful talk.

For me personally, Anasuya's presentation resonated deeply and emotionally. As someone who has a lived experience of racism, prejudice and castetism (as I am of Indian decent) I am very aware of the British Library's / Museum's colonial past and conversely I also try to be aware of my privilege and my awareness that changing things for the better starts with our own individual actions, no matter how small they may be. Her talk reminded me of my own efforts and motivations in trying to address some of these issues when I came to help set up the Lab nearly eight years ago. I saw that BL Labs could help facilitate opening up the Library's collections through digital experimentation. Subsequently, I have wanted it to connect with a new set of diverse audiences that previously would have never even known about the British Library, let alone engage with it. I really want to help people to create new, open, honest transparent narratives and initiate new dialogues about history and tell new inspirational 'time-travel' stories by remixing the past with the present and projecting into an imagined future. This was and still is one of my main motivations to get up in the morning and to continue to manage and lead BL Labs.

One of Anasuya's final slides brilliantly sums up what is needed:

Anasuya Sengupta's call to action

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the British Library's BAME (Black and Minority Ethnic) staff group for all their hard work in especially addressing anti-racism at the British Library over many years, which I know can be exhausting and emotionally draining and is often not always visible. I would like to raise awareness that our new head of diversity, appointed in August 2019, Hugh Brown has been looking at implementing actions to combat anti-racism within the Library, largely articulated in a press release this summer about the Library's commitment in becoming an anti-racist organisation.

You can download her full set slides as a PDF from here 🎁.

You can also follow Anasuya on Twitter.

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Updates from BL Labs', Digital Research's and Research Services' Teams at the British Library Library

BL Labs

I gave an update on behalf of the BL Labs Team about our activities and I looked forward to new projects and developments some of which are already underway. There was a call to action for people to seek their inner 'Labber', to experiment, create magic, tell fantastic engaging, moving and meaningful stories and conduct valuable and impactful research with the British Library's and other GLAMs' digital collections and data.

Francis Owtram's Tweet

I gave an overview of some details with statistics of work we have done up to now.  There was a personal reflection of my own struggles through this ongoing pandemic period. One BL Labs project that is close to completion is to provide computational access via browser based Jupyter Notebooks for British Library registered readers for some onsite-only available digital collections and data. Another BL Labs project is about building on and getting more of our data used in Higher Education and in the Sciences, especially Data Science, hopefully you will hear more about this in the new year.

You can download my full set slides as a PDF from here🎁.

You can follow me (Mahendra) on Twitter, the @BL_Labs twitter channel which is getting near to 9,000 followers and @GLAM_labs which represents the global GLAM Labs community. All of which I am proud to say I helped set up and run with colleagues.

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Digital Research Team

Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator, Asian and African Collections, at the British Library, presented some highlights of the incredible range of innovative projects and work being done by her and our colleagues in the Digital Research team at the British Library over the last year, such as:

• Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship
• Living with Machines
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) /Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR)
• Digital Comics Collaborative Doctoral Students (see other blog post too)
• Computing for Cultural Heritage PGCert
• Digital Scholarship Training Programme Online
• World of Wikimedia and Wikimedia Wednesdays Talks and Training Sessions for BL Staff (hiring a Wikimedian in residence)

You can download the full set slides as a PDF from here🎁.

You can also follow Adi on Twitter and members of her team, Rossitza Atassanova, Mia Ridge, Tom Derrick, Stella Wisdom, Nora McGregor, Deirdre Sullivan , Dan van Strien, Olivia Vane, Giorgia Tolfo, Claire Austin, some of whom are managed by Neil Fitzgerald.

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Research Services Update

Rachael Kotarski, Head of Research Infrastructure Services at the British Library, gave some highlights of current projects and services in the Research Services team. Their role is to improve the services the Library offers to researchers and research organisations - onsite and online, BL Labs has been collaborating with them for many years. A particular focus of her team is to make it easier to find and use items from our collections and relevant content globally such as license, acquire and process content, understand our users, what is our content strategy, digital preservation and tools and infrastructure. Highlights from Rachael's presentation include:

• The British Library's Content strategy
• Supporting research, such as webinars on a range of services and highlighting the 'Open and Engaged 2020' conference
• Highlight content available off site such as EThOS 
• Making our research and data available through our institutional repository to enable search within and across partner content
• Make content citable and have links to ORCID, thanks to the FREYA project
• Refreshing of the British Library's data service strategy
• Unified discovery of content across the BL and also across wider open cultural content
• Towards a National Collection and the hope to build on Heritage Persistent Identifiers  (PIDs)
• Single Digital Presence

You can download the full set slides as a PDF from here 🎁.

You can follow Rachael on Twitter.

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BL Labs Public Awards 2020

The BL Labs Public Awards 2020 winners in Research, Artistic, Educational and Community categories were decided by BL Labs, the BL Labs Advisory Board and some of the British Library's Digital Research team:

From the BL Labs Advisory Board it included:

• David De Roure, Professor of e-research, Oxford e-research Centre, University of Oxford and Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute
• Tim Hitchcock, Professor of Digital History, University of Sussex
• Bill Thompson, Principal Research Engineer, BBC
• Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh‘s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
• Ruth Ahnert, Professor of Literary History and Digital Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on 'Living With Machines' at The Alan Turing Institute (joined in December 2020)
• Kelly Foster, open knowledge advocate and public historian, London Blue Badge Guide, chapter lead for Creative Commons UK and founding organiser of AfroCROWD UK, an initiative to encourage more people of African heritage to contribute to Wikipedia and it’s sister projects and founding member of TRANSMISSION, a collective of archivists and historians of African descent (joined in December 2020)

Unfortunately, Andrew Prescott, Professor of Digital Humanities (English Language), University of Glasgow was unable to participate due to a clash with a PhD viva. However, he was able to participate on the day as a delegate at the symposium.

On a sad note, our colleague George Oates, Director of Good, Form & Spectacle Ltd has had to step down from the BL Labs Advisory Board after 4 years of excellent service for personal reasons, so we would like to wish George and thank her for all her help over the years.

From the British Library, the judging panel was made up of:

• Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs
• Filipe Bento, Technical Lead BL Labs
• Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education and Science
• Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator, Contemporary British Collections
• Deidre Sullivan, Business Support Officer
• Nora McGregor, Digital Curator, European and Americas Collections
• Neil Fitzgerald, Head of Digital Research

We had a wide range of fantastic and diverse range of entries from around the world this year, all of which can be downloaded as a .zip file. If you are curious about previous years Awards entries, you can also download all our Award entries since its inception🎁. We also strongly recommend you browse the huge BL Labs Digital Projects Archive 🎁where information about this year's entries together with over 300 projects and many BL Labs collaborations, competitions and projects over the nearly last 8 years BL Labs has been involved in or showcased can found. We keep this archive as a historic record to provide evidence of the impact of BL Labs and what it does as well as other initiatives in the Library. The archive could also provide inspiration and insights for you if you are contemplating starting your own projects or collaborations using the Library's and other GLAMs' digital collections and data.

Brief information about which entries were shortlisted this year (2020) can be viewed in just five minutes via a YouTube play list of 10 shortlisted entries for the Public Awards 2020:

BL Labs Public Awards 2020 - YouTube playlist of ten 30-second videos

So now onto the BL Labs Awards for 2020 by category.

Research Award

The BL Labs Research Award recognises a project or activity which demonstrates the development of new knowledge, research methods, or tools using the Library’s digital collections or data.

The winners were announced by my colleague Naomi Billingsley, Research Development Manager, at the British Library, her slide deck is available to download here 🎁.

Shortlisted

• Afrobits
  An interactive installation of African music and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade .
  
  By Javier Pereda (Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design and Illustration and Researcher in the Experimental Technologies Lab, Liverpool John Moores University), Patricia Murrieta Flores (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Hub at Lancaster University), Nicholas Radburn (Lecturer in the History of the Atlantic World 1500 – 1800, Co-Editor of the Slave Voyages Research Project, Lancaster University), Lois South (History Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University) and Christian Monaghan, Graphic Design and Illustration Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University.
  
  Links: Short video, longer video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

• Inspiring computationally-driven research with the BL’s collections: a GLAM Notebooks approach
  Enabling cultural heritage institutions and researchers to experiment with Collections as Data and GLAM notebooks by showcasing practical implementations from a wide range of GLAM institutions and digital collections.
  
  By Gustavo Candela, Pilar Escobar, María Dolores Sáez and Manuel Marco-Such  from the Research Libraries Team, Department of Software and Computing Systems, the University of Alicante, Spain
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Runner-up

• Unlocking our Sound Heritage - Artist in Residence 2019-2020: The Unearthed Odyssey
  Research project culminating in two performances, a genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album using 19 samples from the Sound Archive, three comprehensive blogs and work with three youth groups to unpack the themes and content.
  
  By AWATE (Awate Suleiman - rapper and multimedia artist, England)
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details

Panel comments

The judging panel we were simply 'blown away' by Awate's work.

Winner

• Asking questions with web archives – introductory notebooks for historians
  16 Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate how specific historical research questions can be explored by analysing data from web archives.
  
  By Tim Sherratt (Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra and founder and creator of the GLAM workbench), Andrew Jackson (Technical Lead - UK Web Archive, British Library), Alex Osborne (Technical Lead Australian Web Archive - National Library of Australia),  Ben O’Brien (Technical Lead New Zealand Web Archive - National Library of New Zealand) and Olga Holownia (International Internet Preservation Coalition (IIPC) Programmes & Communications Officer)
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Panel comments

Congratulations Tim Sherratt, Andrew Jackson; Alex Osborne, Ben O’Brien and Olga Holownia. The panel were impressed with the quality of documentation and thought that went into how to work computationally through Jupyter Notebooks with web archives, which are challenging to work with because of their. These tools are some of the first of their kind for Web Archives.

The BL Labs advisory board wanted to acknowledge and reward the incredible work of Tim Sherratt in particular.

"Tim, you have been a pioneer as ‘a one person Lab’ over many years, and these 16 notebooks are a fine addition to your already extensive suite in your GLAM work-bench. Your work has inspired so many in GLAMs, the Humanities community and BL Labs to develop their own notebooks".

We strongly recommend that you look at the GLAM work-bench if you are interested in doing computational experiments with many institutions’ data sources, we genuinely think Tim's work has been at the forefront of computational hacking work in GLAMs.

Artistic Award

This Award recognises an artistic or creative endeavour that has used the Library’s digital content to inspire, amaze and provoke. This year's Awards were announced for the fourth time by Jamie Andrews, Head of Culture and Learning, British Library, his slide deck is available here🎁.

Special commendation

• Afrobits
  An interactive installation of African music and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade .
  
  By Javier Pereda (Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design and Illustration and Researcher in the Experimental Technologies Lab, Liverpool John Moores University), Patricia Murrieta Flores (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Hub at Lancaster University), Nicholas Radburn (Lecturer in the History of the Atlantic World 1500 – 1800, Co-Editor of the Slave Voyages Research Project, Lancaster University), Lois South (History Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University) and Christian Monaghan, Graphic Design and Illustration Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University.
  
  Links: Short video, longer video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Panel comments

This is an interactive installation of influence of African music on culture and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. It's a piece that is absolutely vital for our times.

• Afro Hair And Its Heritage
  A celebration of Black Heritage through Black Afro Hair.
  
  By Roslyn Henry (self-taught surface pattern designer, from Les Belles Bêtes, France)
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details(1) and (2)

Panel comments

Rosyln's work is a celebration of black heritage through black afro hair developed in the context of doing something positive given negative images of police brutality against black people around the world. She used images of Bantu, Balondo and Akan men and women from British Library’s Flickr Commons collection, using them to make patterns for fabrics and wallpapers, t-shirts and mugs and intend to use the fabrics to make other products. The panel loved how Rosyln created some positive out of the tremendous negativity that has been directed towards black people around the world. The team liked the designs, they were vibrant, fresh and cool.

Runner-up

• Faint Signals
  Interactive artwork that generates an imagined Yorkshire forest, densely populated with sounds of nature from the British Library's archive.
  
  By the Invisible Flock team who are Ben Eaton (Technical Director), Victoria Pratt (Creative Director),  Klavs Kurpnieks (Studio Manager), Catherine Baxendale (Executive Producer), Amy Balderston (General Manager) and Simon Fletcher (Interactions Engineer).
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Panel comments

This entry was very well received by everyone. The panel felt Faint Signals was wonderfully inventive use of the environmental sounds collection, clever imaginative use of Unity 3D technology, perfect impact over the COVID period. It's a piece that draws you in, that is relaxing and rather beguiling and certainly in these challenging times when travelling is impossible, and perhaps travelling into nature is difficult, this gives you a sense of the glories and the vastness of the sounds of nature.

Winner

• Unlocking our Sound Heritage - Artist in Residence 2019-2020: The Unearthed Odyssey
  Research project culminating in two performances, a genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album using 19 samples from the Sound Archive, three comprehensive blogs and work with three youth groups to unpack the themes and content.
  
  By AWATE (Awate Suleiman - rapper and multimedia artist, England)
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details

Panel comments

The panel were incredibly moved by the performance of Awate. They were impressed by the quality of story telling and research needed to stitch together such powerful archive footage such as Grace Nichols’ poem ‘I have crossed an ocean’ (see below):

A reading's of Grace's work is available to listen to onsite at the British Library, together with other recordings of extraordinary people.

Congratulations to Awate, for creating this captivating performance, and I think, gave all of us who experienced it, goose bumps! We strongly urge you to please listen to his work, it’s very moving and inspiring.

Learning and Teaching (Educational) Award

This Award celebrates quality learning experiences created for learners of any age and ability that use the Library's digital content. This year's awards were announced for the third time by Ria Bartlett, Lead Producer: Onsite Learning at the British Library, her slide deck is available here.

Special Commendation

• Mapping the Reparto de Tierras in Michoacán, Mexico (1868 - 1929)
  Research in 19th-century Mexican sources and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based approaches underpinning the creation of an interactive web map that enables users to spatially explore the British Library's recently digitized Libros de Hijuelas collection.
  
  By John Erard (Undergraduate researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, USA).
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Panel comments

The panel were particularly impressed by the quality of the tool produced by a student in their own time and his generosity and kindness to share the tool for the benefit of all. Also, this is the first time an Endangered Archives Programme's (EAP) digitised collections have been recognised with a BL Labs award. We hope many more projects will be submitted in the future that use EAP’s incredible range of digital collections.

• Unlocking our Sound Heritage - Artist in Residence 2019-2020: The Unearthed Odyssey
  Research project culminating in two performances, a genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album using 19 samples from the Sound Archive, three comprehensive blogs and work with three youth groups to unpack the themes and content.
  
  by AWATE (Awate Suleiman - rapper and multimedia artist, England)
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details

Panel comments

We were particularly impressed how Awate worked with young people to unpack his journey of research in the British Library to make his piece, teaching at The Roundhouse in Camden and Fairbeats in Lewisham and recording voices from children from London to be included in some of his pieces, which was a geat honour for them. We particularly liked the narrative you created. The story takes place on a generation ship, during the one day a year a group of children are awake for a lesson taught to them by an artificial intelligence tutor. The tutor uses an algorithm to sample from the British Library archive from the years 1896-2019 in order to tell them stories of human migration using clips from Oral History recordings. As they are travelling to a different planet, the AI places them in the greater context of migration, exploring themes such as war, corruption, famine and drought.

Well done Awate! We urge you all to listen to his ‘The Unearthed Odyssey’ performance, it’s brilliant.

Runner-up

• Inspiring computationally-driven research with the BL’s collections: a GLAM Notebooks approach
  Enabling cultural heritage institutions and (digital) humanities researchers to experiment with Collections as Data and GLAM notebooks by showcasing practical implementations from a wide range of GLAM institutions and digital collections. 
  
  By Gustavo Candela, Pilar Escobar, María Dolores Sáez and Manuel Marco-Such  from the Research Libraries Team, Department of Software and Computing Systems, the University of Alicante, Spain
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Panel comments

We were impressed that the notebooks the team have developed are being used in the team's own teaching on university courses. We also liked how the team have very generously created Jupyter Notebooks for other GLAMs' data, where many do not have the capacity to do so. That’s 15 notebooks for 12 GLAMs.

Winner

• Beyond the Rubric: Collaborating with the Cultural Heritage Sector in Higher Education Teaching and Research
  A project-based, research-led collaboration between the British Library and students of the Centre for Digital Humanities Research at the Australian National University.
  
  By Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia)
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details

Panel comments

Well done Terhi and especially her students who produced such outstanding work in only 12 weeks through their group projects. The panel felt this was an exemplary use of the British Library’s digital collections and data in a Digital Scholarship context and an excellent template for further collaboration with BL Labs and other GLAM Labs working with educational institutions especially in area of Digital Humanities. We were particularly impressed with Terhi’s grading criteria that recognised ambition in projects and Terhi’s decision to have interdisciplinary, gender-balanced, multi-lingual project groups.

Community

This Award celebrates an activity / work / project that has been created by an individual or group in a community inspired by or using our digital collections and data. This year's awards were announced for first time by Liz White, Head of Public Libraries and Community Engagement, her slide deck is available here.

Special Commendation

• Inspiring computationally-driven research with the BL’s collections: a GLAM Notebooks approach
  Enabling cultural heritage institutions and (digital) humanities researchers to experiment with Collections as Data and GLAM notebooks by showcasing practical implementations from a wide range of GLAM institutions and digital collections. 
  
  By Gustavo Candela, Pilar Escobar, María Dolores Sáez and Manuel Marco-Such  from the Research Libraries Team, Department of Software and Computing Systems, the University of Alicante, Spain
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Panel comments

This entry was in fact the most nominated across 3 of the 4 BL Labs public Awards categories. The panel particularly loved the generosity of the group in developing computational access to 12 Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum’s (GLAMs) data through 15 Jupyter Notebooks, including the British Library. Many of these institutions do not have the capacity or expertise to do this, so this was some really kind and fantastic work moving these organisations forward computationally. A great contribution to the GLAM Labs community, initiated of course by Mahendra at BL Labs. Find out more about GLAM Labs at glamlabs.io.

Special Commendation

• Unlocking our Sound Heritage - Artist in Residence 2019-2020: The Unearthed Odyssey
  Research project culminating in two performances, a genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album using 19 samples from the Sound Archive, three comprehensive blogs and work with three youth groups to unpack the themes and content.
  
  By AWATE (Awate Suleiman - rapper and multimedia artist, England)
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details

Panel comments

We were particularly impressed how Awate worked with British Library staff before and during lockdown, with school children from South London to unpack his journey of research in the British Library to make his piece. He also taught at the Roundhouse in Camden and Fairbeats in Lewisham and recorded voices from local children to be included in some of his pieces, a great honour for them.  Well done Awate, great work!

Winner

• Flickr Georeferencing completed by volunteers
  Volunteer georeferencers have added coordinates to all the images of over 50,000 maps from the British Library's Flickr Commons site.
  
  By 'Volunteer geo-referencers' nominated by Gethen Rees, Digital Mapping Curator, British Library
  
  Links: Short video, Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Panel comments

Volunteer Geo-referencers with over 50,00 Maps geo-referenced was nominated on behalf of the volunteers by Gethen Rees, Digital Mapping Curator. It took them nearly 6 years to geo-reference over 50,000 maps, incredible and epic work that deserves a tremendous amount of recognition. Previously James Heald (2105) and Maurice Nicholson (2016)  from the volunteer mapping community have been recognised for their excellent work.

BL Labs will be donating the prize money to a Humanitarian Mapping charity.

• In the Spotlight volunteers
  Since 2017, thousands of volunteers have helped bring the British Library's historic playbills collection to life through the In the Spotlight crowdsourcing project.
  
  By 'In the Spotlight volunteers' nominated by Mia Ridge, Digital Curator, Western Heritage Collections, British Library
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

Panel comments

In the Spotlight volunteers was nominated by Mia Ridge, digital curator at the British Library on behalf of thousands of volunteers adding information to digitised historic playbills of plays and performances, with nearly a quarter of a million tasks”.

BL Labs will be donating the prize money to a charity that supports out-of-work actors who have especially been effected by the pandemic.

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BL Labs People's Choice Public Award 2020

Between 1100 (GMT) Monday 14 December 2020 to 1615 ( GMT) Tuesday 15 December 2020 an international public vote took place using Menti to decide on the overall favourite entry of all the shortlisted entrants to the BL Labs Public Awards 2020.

The results were as follows:

BL Labs People's Favourite Public Award 2020 Results of Public Vote (1230 votes cast) Numbers on image correspond to the those in the table below:

The overall ranked list (by number of votes) was:

CONGRATULATIONS TO...

• Inspiring computationally-driven research with the BL’s collections: a GLAM Notebooks approach
  Enabling cultural heritage institutions and (digital) humanities researchers to experiment with 'Collections as Data' and GLAM notebooks by showcasing practical implementations from a wide range of GLAM institutions and digital collections. 
  
  By Gustavo Candela, Pilar Escobar, María Dolores Sáez and Manuel Marco-Such  from the Research Libraries Team, Department of Software and Computing Systems, the University of Alicante, Spain
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

They are the FIRST WINNERS of the BL Labs People's Choice Public Award 2020!

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BL Labs Staff Awards 2020

The BL Labs Staff Awards were established in 2016 to highlight the exceptional work British Library staff have done with its data and / or digital collections and technology.

The 2020 British Library Labs Staff Award, now in its fifth year, gives recognition to current British Library staff who have created something brilliant using the Library's data and / or digital collections to answer and address the following questions and statements:

• 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?
• Have you worked on a project that used the Library's digital collections in the local community?

A panel comprised of the BL Labs Team and other British Library staff:

• Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs
• Filipe Bento, Technical Lead BL Labs
• Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education and Science
• Richard Davies, Head of Collection Programmes
• Paul Clements, Head of Architecture and Design
• Harriet Darcel, Head of Marketing

We received 13 entries, the most we have ever received for the Staff Awards and they are listed below:

1. British Library / Qatar Foundation Partnership watermarks project
   Digitally capturing watermarks from old manuscripts and books.
   
   Nominated by Sotirios Alpanis (Head of Digital Operations, BL Qatar Project) on behalf of Heather Murphy (Conservation Team Leader, BL Qatar Project), Camillie Dekeyser-Thuet (Conservator Gulf History and Arabic Science, BL Qatar Project), Matt Lee (Senior Imaging Support Technician, BL Qatar Project) and Jordi Clopes-Masjuan (Senior Imaging Technician, BL Qatar Project).
   
   Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
2. British Library Simulator on Bitsy
   The British Library simulator allows you to walk around the public spaces of the Library, visit a Reading Room, and see the basement (almost).
   
   Nominated by Ian Cooke (Head of Contemporary British Published Collections) on behalf of Giulia Carla Rossi (Curator, Digital Publications)
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details, bitsy available here and the simulator is available here.
   
   
3. Making Data into Sound
   Inspired by an article about sonification on the programming historian website, Anne Courtney enabled a new way of experiencing catalogue records through sound.
   
   Nominated by Laura Parsons (Digitisation Workflow Administrator, BL Qatar Project) on behalf of Anne Courtney (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project)
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details 
   
   
4. Leeds Exhibition Staff Doing Digital events and projects
   In response to the pandemic British Library exhibition staff had to deliver a range of activities online, some of which were originally conceived as physical events. They also worked on commercial project commissions such as Faint Signals.
   
   Nominated by Elvie Thompson (Lead Learning Producer, BL North - Leeds) and Conrad Bodman (Head of Culture Programmes, BL Culture and Learning) on behalf of Kenn Taylor (Lead Culture Producer, BL North - Leeds).
   
   Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
5. How to make art when we're working apart
   A guide developed during lock-down to enable people to create collages using the British Library's Flickr Commons collection.
   
   By Hannah Nagle (Senior Imaging Support Technician, BL Qatar Project)
   
   Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
6. A title-level list of British, Irish, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies newspapers held by the BL
   Though the library has functions for searching the print newspaper collection, metadata was created for the newspaper titles for those who would like to get an overview of the collection or use it for statistical analysis. The data is being used by the designer of a 'history of newspapers' infographic, for the upcoming infographics exhibition to be held next year at the Library and a number of visualisations. 
   
   Nominated by Yann Ryan (Digital Newspaper Curator) on behalf of himself, Luke McKernan (Lead Curator News & Moving Image Collections), Stephen Lester (Curator Newspaper Collections) and Alan Danskin (Collection Metadata Standards Manager)
   
   Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details, dataset, and press picker developed by Living with Machines is based on this work.
   
   
7. Extracting text from Maps
   The creation and release of a dataset containing the text extracted from almost 2,000 colonial-era maps and documents, using the Google Vision API, which was enabled during the completion of a pilot course in Computing for Cultural Heritage at Birkbeck University.
   
   Nominated by Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator, Asian and African Collections, the British Library on behalf of Nick Dykes (Curator for Modern Maps Collections)
   
   Links: Longer video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details, online map, spreadsheet, included in a paper delivered at the Royal Anthropological Institute Conference 14 - 18 September 2020, ‘Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future’ – ‘From conservation to computer vision - curating the ‘War Office Archive’ of colonial-era maps held at the British Library’
   
   
8. The Unlocking Our Sound Heritage (UOSH) Artist-in-Residence at the British Library
   Staff supporting Unlocking our Sound Heritage - Artist in Residence 2019-2020: The Unearthed Odyssey research project culminating in two performances, a genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album using 19 samples from the Sound Archive, three comprehensive blogs and work with three youth groups to unpack the themes and content by AWATE (Awate Suleiman - rapper and multimedia artist, England).
   
   Nominated by Sue Davies on behalf of Chandan Mahal (Learning Projects Manager), Andrea Zarza (Curator World & Traditional Music Collections) and Amanda House (Lead Intellectual Property Manager, Unlocking Our Sound Heritage).
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details
   
   
9. Languid: Language Identification Project
   The addition of the language codes to 3,196,285 catalogue records using a combination of machine learning and human methods to enhance the records of items from the British Museum collection covering the period from the beginning of printing to the 1970s.
   
   Nominated by Alan Danskin (Collection Metadata Standards Manager) on behalf of Victoria Morris (Online Metadata Analyst, BL Collection Metadata)
   
   Links: Short video, longer video, full BL Labs awards' entry and Morris, Victoria  Automated Language Identification of Bibliographic Resources: Cataloging & Classification Quarterly: Vol 58, No 1 (tandfonline.com) , also available on the British Library's institutional repository
   
   
10. Improving the cataloguing process and quality of EAP metadata through Open Refine and writing own software
    Work that enhances the catalogue process for the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) digital archive, to improve the quality of the metadata and to make the cataloguing process more efficient.
    
    By Graham Jevon (Endangered Archives Programme Cataloguer, BL Endangered Archives Programme)
    
    Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details, GitHub and a second blog post. 
    
    
11. Hidden world of Qatar National Library - Bitsy simulator
    Game developed using BITSY, based on the Qatar National Library in Doha. Users in the gamey have to undertake tasks such as to find a manuscript in the basement and an astrolabe with other aspects of game play to create a more immersive experience which has more intimate ties to, and features many more objects and items in the collection of the Library.
    
    Nominated by Ellis Meade (Senior Imaging Technician, BL Qatar Project) on behalf himself, Serim Abboushi (Arabic & English Web Content Editor, BL Qatar Project), Heather Murphy (Conservation Team Leader, BL Qatar Project), Naomi Ortega-Raventos (Content Specialist, Archivist, BL Qatar Project) and Julia Ihnatowicz (Translation Specialist, BL Qatar Project)
    
    Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
    
    
12. Addressing Problematic Terms in our Catalogues
    Started by colleagues on the Qatar Foundation Partnership Project, the idea was inspired by a talk by Melissa Bennett about decolonising archives and how terms used in catalogue records can be problematic. This project has analysed the terms used in cataloguing including those used when translating our catalogue records into Arabic so that they can be added to our bilingual Qatar Digital Library.
    
    Nominated by Laura Parsons (Digitisation Workflow Administrator, BL Qatar Project)  and Francisca Fuentes Rettig (Curator North American Publication Collections, British Library American) on behalf of British Library Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) network. The team are: Serim Abboushi (Arabic & English Web Content Editor, BL Qatar Project), Mariam Aboelezz (Translation Support Officer, BL Qatar Project), Louis Allday (Gulf History Cataloguing Manager, BL Qatar Project), Sotirios Alpanis (Head of Digital Operations, BL Qatar Project) , John Casey (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), David Fitzpatrick (Content Specialist Archivist, BL Qatar Project), Susannah Gillard (Content Specialist, Archivist, BL Qatar Project), John Hayhurst (Content Specialist, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), Julia Ihnatowicz (Translation Specialist, BL Qatar Project), William Monk (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), Hannah Nagle (Senior Imaging Support Technician, BL Qatar Project), Noemi Ortega-Raventos (Content Specialist, Archivist, BL Qatar Project), Francis Owtram (Content Specialist, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), Curstaidh Reid (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), George Samaan (Translation Support Officer, BL Qatar Project), Tahani Shaban (Translation Specialist, BL Qatar Project), David Woodbridge (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project) and Nariman Youssef (Arabic Translation Manager, BL Qatar Project)
    
    Links: Short video and full BL Labs awards' entry.
    
    
13. COVID-19 materials supplied by British Library
    From the start of the pandemic and during lockdown, teams have worked hard to provide key materials for Covid-19 from the British Library On Demand collection to researches working on treatments, preventative measures and vaccines for the virus. Visit www.bl.uk/on-demand
    
    Nominated by Peter Chymera on behalf of Customer Services, Document Supply Managers and Retrieval Staff at the British Library
    
    Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.

The winners were announced by my colleague Jas Rai, Head of People, British Library, her slide deck is available here.

Special Commendation

• Extracting text from Maps
  The creation and release of a dataset containing the text extracted from almost 2,000 colonial-era maps and documents, using the Google Vision API, which was enabled during the completion of a pilot course in Computing for Cultural Heritage at Birkbeck University.
  
  Nominated by Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator, Asian and African Collections, the British Library on behalf of Nick Dykes (Curator for Modern Maps Collections)
  
  Links: Longer video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details, online map, spreadsheet, included in a paper delivered at the Royal Anthropological Institute Conference 14 - 18 September 2020, ‘Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future’ – ‘From conservation to computer vision - curating the ‘War Office Archive’ of colonial-era maps held at the British Library’.

• Improving the cataloguing process and quality of EAP metadata through Open Refine and writing own software
  Work that enhances the catalogue process for the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) digital archive, to improve the quality of the metadata and to make the cataloguing process more efficient.
  
  By Graham Jevon (Endangered Archives Programme Cataloguer, BL Endangered Archives Programme)
  
  Links: Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details, github and a second blog post. 

Panel comments

We received a number of entries which describe journeys of staff learning more about technology and then using what they learned to enable innovation in their work. We would like to give a special commendation to Nick and Graham, two members of staff who the panel felt were worthy exemplars of this.

Runners-up

• Making Data into Sound
  Inspired by an article about sonification on the programming historian website, Anne Courtney enabled a new way of experiencing catalogue records through sound.
  
  Nominated by Laura Parsons (Digitisation Workflow Administrator, BL Qatar Project) on behalf of Anne Courtney (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project)
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details and the simulator is available here.

Panel comments

Anne Courtney, Cataloguer of Gulf History at the British Library’s Qatar Project created a musical piece from the India Office records catalogue records. She did this by using the place names to connect with different instruments, dates in records connected to timing of the music and the how the data is related effected the interaction with the instruments.

The panel were really impressed with this very thoughtful and innovative way of discovering our collections, it was almost like leaving an acoustic memory of the people’s that these records are about.

• Languid: Language Identification Project
  The addition of the language codes to 3,196,285 catalogue records using a combination of machine learning and human methods to enhance the records of items from the British Museum collection covering the period from the beginning of printing to the 1970s.
  
  Nominated by Alan Danskin (Collection Metadata Standards Manager) on behalf of Victoria Morris (Online Metadata Analyst, BL Collection Metadata)
  
  Links: Short video, longer video, full BL Labs awards' entry and Morris, Victoria  Automated Language Identification of Bibliographic Resources: Cataloging & Classification Quarterly: Vol 58, No 1 (tandfonline.com) , also available on the British Library's institutional repository

Panel comments

Victoria Morris is an online metadata analyst in the British Library’s collection metadata team. She did some pioneering computational work using machine learning to detect missing information about the language of catalogue records.

The panel were really impressed with the innovation and the incredible impact of the work, identifying 471 languages in the records, 141 of which were not previously represented, with the addition of language codes to 3,196,285 records.

Winners

• British Library Simulator on Bitsy
  The British Library simulator allows you to walk around the public spaces of the Library, visit a Reading Room, and see the basement (almost).
  
  Nominated by nominated by Ian Cooke (Head of Contemporary British Published Collections) on behalf of Giulia Carla Rossi (Curator, Digital Publications)
  
  Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details, bitsy available here.

Panel comments

The simulator was created by Giulia in May 2020 using ‘Bitsy'. It has been viewed more than 5,000 times (with most use during the period when the Library was closed to the public). It has attracted press attention in the UK and in Europe. Subsequent attention has come from another national library in Europe, and also a student and librarian in the US, who is preparing a Fulbright application to study interactive storytelling and games in the UK.

Giulia followed up the Simulator by leading a 'Hack n Yack' session organised by the Digital Scholarship team on Bitsy for Library colleagues. A BL colleague has produced a similar simulator for the Qatar Digital Library inspired by Giulia's work.

This was a unanimous favourite with the judging panel. Thank you Giulia for such a fun project.

• Addressing Problematic Terms in our Catalogues
  Started by colleagues on the Qatar Foundation Partnership Project the idea to start the work that was inspired by a talk by Melissa Bennett about decolonising the archive and how terms used in catalogue records can be problematic. This project has analysed the terms used in cataloguing including the terms used when translating our catalogue records into Arabic so that they can be added to our bilingual Qatar Digital Library.
  
  Nominated by Laura Parsons (Digitisation Workflow Administrator, BL Qatar Project)  and Francisca Fuentes Rettig (Curator North American Publication Collections, British Library American) on behalf of British Library Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) network. Names are: Serim Abboushi (Arabic & English Web Content Editor, BL Qatar Project), Mariam Aboelezz (Translation Support Officer, BL Qatar Project), Louis Allday (Gulf History Cataloguing Manager, BL Qatar Project), Sotirios Alpanis (Head of Digital Operations, BL Qatar Project) , John Casey (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), David Fitzpatrick (Content Specialist Archivist, BL Qatar Project), Susannah Gillard (Content Specialist, Archivist, BL Qatar Project), John Hayhurst (Content Specialist, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), Julia Ihnatowicz (Translation Specialist, BL Qatar Project), William Monk (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), Hannah Nagle (Senior Imaging Support Technician, BL Qatar Project), Noemi Ortega-Raventos (Content Specialist, Archivist, BL Qatar Project), Francis Owtram (Content Specialist, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), Curstaidh Reid (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project), George Samaan (Translation Support Officer, BL Qatar Project), Tahani Shaban (Translation Specialist, BL Qatar Project), David Woodbridge (Cataloguer, Gulf History, BL Qatar Project) and Nariman Youssef (Arabic Translation Manager, BL Qatar Project)
  
  Links: Short video and full BL Labs awards' entry.

Panel comments

The second winner is from the British Library’s Qatar Foundation team. Congratulations go to: Serim Abboushi, Mariam Aboelezz, Louis Allday, Sotirios Alpanis, John Casey, David Fitzpatrick, Susannah Gillard, John Hayhurst, Julia Ihnatowicz, William Monk, Hannah Nagle, Noemi Ortega-Raventos, Francis Owtram, Curstaidh Reid, George Samaan, Tahani Shaban, David Woodbridge and Nariman Youssef  and special thanks to the BAME Staff Network.

This is incredibly important work as it is something that continues to require attention. Perhaps it’s fair to say it is now getting even more focus because of world events such as ‘Black Lives Matter’.

Congratulations to everyone, we know this work isn’t easy but it is MOST definitely needed!

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Binge-watch BL Labs 'box-sets' (YouTube Playlists)

This seasonal time in the UK often involves may of us binge watching online box sets online or on TV. If this is you, and you really want to learn more about the world of GLAM Labs, digital scholarship and the creative potential of working with our and other's digital collections and data we have organised and prepared footage from previous years' events. There are some fantastic, thought provoking and incredibly wise keynote speeches, some excellent presentations which highlight projects that are still relevant and inspiring for all of us today. You can even watch the launch of the BL Labs project almost eight years ago. 

Symposium YouTube Playlist 2019	Symposium YouTube Playlist 2018	Symposium YouTube Playlist 2017	Symposium YouTube Playlist 2016	Symposium YouTube Playlist 2015
Symposium YouTube Playlist 2014	BL Labs Launch YouTube Playlist 2013	Building Library Labs YouTube Playlist 2018	Text& Data Mining YouTube Playlist 2015	Curious Images YouTube Playlist 2014

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Conclusion and Season's Greetings

British Library digitised image from page 161 of "Poetry of the year. Passages from the poets descriptive of the seasons. With twenty-two coloured illustrations from drawings by eminent artists [Edited by Joseph Cundall.]
Taken from the British Library's Flickr Commons collection.

That's a wrap from the BL Labs team for 2020, what a challenging year it has been!

We hope you find something in this post of interest that inspires you to start or continue your journey in using the British Library's (as well as other GLAM Labs and organisations) digital collections and data for an innovative project.

Looking back at nearly 8 years of working at BL Labs I am really proud of what we have achieved, let's hope 2021 will be a great year.

Seasons greetings and a Happy New Year to all, please stay safe and have a lovely and relaxing festive period with friends and family involved if possible.

Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

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Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

Screenshots from the 10 BL Labs shortlisted entries for the Public Awards 2020

After much deliberation and intense discussion with key people from the BL Labs Advisory board and British Library we have come up with a fantastic shortlist for the BL Labs Public Awards 2020.

The official announcement of who has been awarded prizes for the Awards in each category (Research, Artistic, Educational and Community) will take place tomorrow between 1400-1700 (GMT), Tuesday 15 December 2020 at the online BL Labs Symposium 2020. We will also announce our Staff Awards there too.

There are still a few places available - so hurry and BOOK NOW to find out if the project you voted for won! Also, learn more about some of the amazing projects that were submitted this year and listen and be inspired by our fantastic range of speakers in our packed programme.

In this strange, difficult and remarkable pandemic year, we decided to do something really special.

We we want you, the public, to choose which shortlisted entry will be crowned overall the 'BL Labs People's Choice for the Public Awards 2020'. It's going to be difficult as the projects this year are so diverse and difficult to compare. Also, you only have today and tomorrow to decide (voting will close around 1615 GMT tomorrow, Tuesday 15 December 2020).

The winner will be announced near the end of the BL Labs Symposium 2020 tomorrow, Tuesday 15 December 2020, just before 1700 GMT.

How to vote for the BL Labs People's Choice for the Public Awards 2020?

It's really simple:

1. Read the descriptions below and follow the links to learn more about each entry.
2. Vote for your favourite (you can only chose one!) using our VOTING FORM which is now live.
3. You will be asked if you wish to have the results emailed to you after you have voted. If you choose this option, all you will be able to see are the number of people who have voted.
4. The form will remain open from 1100 GMT Monday 14 December to 1615 GMT Tuesday 15 December 2020 (that's just over 30 hours).
5. The winner will be announced around 1655 GMT tomorrow on 15 December 2020 near the end this year's online BL Labs Symposium 2020.

Only have 5 minutes to look through the entries and vote?

No problem! We have created a BL Labs Public Awards YouTube shortlist 2020 which contains ten 30-second promotional videos for each shortlisted entry to give you their 'essence'. It's just over 5 minutes and then you can VOTE!

You can also ownload a .zip file with all the submissions for this year's BL Labs Public Awards 2020 (all entries) if you prefer.

The shortlisted entries for the BL Labs Public Awards 2020 this year are (in alphabetical title order):

1. Afrobits
   An interactive installation of African music and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade .
   by Javier Pereda (Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design and Illustration and Researcher in the Experimental Technologies Lab, Liverpool John Moores University), Patricia Murrieta Flores (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Hub at Lancaster University), Nicholas Radburn (Lecturer in the History of the Atlantic World 1500 – 1800, Co-Editor of the Slave Voyages Research Project, Lancaster University), Lois South (History Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University) and Christian Monaghan, Graphic Design and Illustration Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University.
   
   Links: Short video, longer video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
2. Afro Hair And Its Heritage
   A celebration of Black Heritage through Black Afro Hair.
   by Roslyn Henry (self-taught surface pattern designer, from Les Belles Bêtes, France)
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details(1) and (2)
   
   
3. Asking questions with web archives – introductory notebooks for historians
   16 Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate how specific historical research questions can be explored by analysing data from web archives.
   by Tim Sherratt (Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra and founder and creator of the GLAM workbench), Andrew Jackson (Technical Lead - UK Web Archive, British Library), Alex Osborne (Technical Lead Australian Web Archive - National Library of Australia) and Ben O’Brien (Technical Lead New Zealand Web Archive - National Library of New Zealand)
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
4. Beyond the Rubric: Collaborating with the Cultural Heritage Sector in Higher Education Teaching and Research
   A project-based, research-led collaboration between the British Library and students of the Centre for Digital Humanities Research at the Australian National University.
   by Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia)
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details
   
   
5. Faint Signals
   Interactive artwork that generates an imagined Yorkshire forest, densely populated with sounds of nature from the British Library's archive.
   by the Invisible Flock team who are Ben Eaton (Technical Director), Victoria Pratt (Creative Director),  Klavs Kurpnieks (Studio Manager), Catherine Baxendale (Executive Producer), Amy Balderston (General Manager) and Simon Fletcher (Interactions Engineer).
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
6. Flickr Georeferencing completed
   Volunteer georeferencers have added coordinates to all the images of over 50,000 maps from the British Library's Flickr Commons site.
   by 'Volunteer geo-referencers' nominated by Gethen Rees, Digital Mapping Curator, British Library
   
   Links: Short video, Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
7. Inspiring computationally-driven research with the BL’s collections: a GLAM Notebooks approach
   Enabling cultural heritage institutions and (digital) humanities researchers to experiment with Collections as Data and GLAM notebooks by showcasing practical implementations from a wide range of GLAM institutions and digital collections. 
   by Gustavo Candela, Pilar Escobar, María Dolores Sáez and Manuel Marco-Such  from the Research Libraries Team, Department of Software and Computing Systems, the University of Alicante, Spain
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
8. In the Spotlight volunteers
   Since 2017, thousands of volunteers have helped bring the British Library's historic playbills collection to life through the In the Spotlight crowdsourcing project.
   by 'In the Spotlight volunteers' nominated by Mia Ridge, Digital Curator, Western Heritage Collections, British Library
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
9. Mapping the Reparto de Tierras in Michoacán, Mexico (1868 - 1929)
   Research in 19th-century Mexican sources and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based approaches underpinning the creation of an interactive web map that enables users to spatially explore the British Library's recently digitized Libros de Hijuelas collection.
   by John Erard (Undergraduate researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, USA).
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
10. Unlocking our Sound Heritage - Artist in Residence 2019-2020: The Unearthed Odyssey
    Research project culminating in two performances, a genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album using 19 samples from the Sound Archive, three comprehensive blogs and work with three youth groups to unpack the themes and content.
    by AWATE (Awate Suleiman - rapper and multimedia artist, England)
    
    Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details

What happens to the projects not shortlisted?

Though we have criteria to decide which projects should be shortlisted it was still incredibly difficult to choose which ones should be. Judging can be so subjective! Remember it's a point in time with a specific group of people in a particular mood and set of lenses. At a different time, with another group of people I am sure they would probably come up with another selection.

So if you were not chosen this year, please do not be disheartened. The whole point of the BL Labs Awards is to shine a light and showcase uses of our digital collections through innovative projects and activities. These projects have often gone on to be developed further such as someone happened to have come across it and connected with individuals involved and ended up collaborating with them. Many projects have also inspired others to develop their own using the British Library's as well as other institution's cultural heritage digitised and born digital collections.

Details of all the projects entered this year are contained in the BL Labs Digital Projects Archive.

BL Labs can promote your work through our various communication channels (if we haven't already!). Who knows where that might lead? For some of these entrants, I would definitely recommend that they re-submit next year when the projects have been developed further and have had a chance to have further impact.

So for now, a quick thank you to the following people who took the time enter (we have also provided links for those who would like to read further about these entries), we really, really appreciate it:

1. Drawings inspired by the British Library's Sound Archive of Wildlife Recordings by Viv Youell (England)
2. Curatr: A Data Interface for the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus by University College Dublin's Insight team and Centre for Cultural Analytics, Ireland
3. Reconstructing Early Circus: Entertainments at Astley’s Amphitheatre, 1768-1833 by Leith Davis, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
4. Surfacing the impact of doctoral research: working with the EThOS collection by Catherine Montgomery, Craig Stewart, Tom Roberts, Sharon Riddle and Jinjie Huang from Durham University, England
5. Baking in Better Catalogue Data by Sara Wingate Gray, University College London, England
6. The Samtla (Search And Mining Tools for Labelling Archives) holographic search and browsing interface for cultural heritage photogrammetry models by Martyn Harris (Birkbeck) and Mark Levene (University College London), England
7. Visualizing Space by Tara McDarby, United Kingdom
8. The Interpreter and You Are Not An Island by Noriko Okaku, England (2 entries)
9. Librorum: the British Library Edition by Janet Luk (Australian National University (ANU), Man-Ting Hsu (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Canberra, Australia), Billy Nam Cheng (ANU), Jingyi Lai (Haiwan Middle School (Shenzhen, China), Mengfei Liu (Access Canberra (Canberra, Australia) and Xiaohan Jiang (China Maritime Museum (Shanghai, China))
10. BL Illuminated Glyphs CAPS: Typographic System of Illuminated Manuscript Letterings by Michelle Devlin , England

I look forward to seeing some of you tomorrow at the BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020 and seasons greetings to you all, Mahendra.