An aim of The British Library is to help researchers to navigate the vast scholarly record and discover resources that are relevant to them. We engage in projects with the international research community to develop initiatives and resources to improve this process. In recent years a lot of work has been done in the area of ‘identifiers’ looking at research objects (books, journals, datasets etc.) and of people (authors, researchers, contributors, data creators etc.)

The Library is a key member and UK registration agent of the DataCite initiative which allows persistent digital object identifiers (DOIs) to be assigned to datasets and other research objects. We have worked with the UK Data Service to assign DataCite DOIs to the major economic and social surveys and datasets, and their whole data catalogue now has persistent identifiers attached to it. The ESRC have produced a handy guide for social scientists in using these DOIs in research papers. 

The Library is also involved in creating unique identifiers for researchers as part of initiatives such as ISNI, The Names Project and ORCID. These projects are aimed at eliminating ambiguity between researchers’ names and assigning a single unique identifier to an author or researcher for their whole career. If you are a researcher, author or contributor you can now register your own ORCID ID and start linking your publications to your profile through tools that have been developed with the ORCID launch partners.

This week in Belin saw the launch of ORCID and the kick off meeting for an EC financed project called ODIN: ORCID and DataCite Interoperability Network. This project involves the BL Social Sciences team working with its partners at CERN, ORCID, DataCite, Dryad, arXiv and Australian National Data Service with the aim of linking up these researcher identifiers and digital object identifiers.  The Social Science team have taken up the challenge of producing a proof of concept model linking authors and research objects in the UK social science sphere and will be looking at the use and citation of British Birth Cohort Studies and their outputs to create a model network. These studies are ideal to use in our proof of concept as there is a high rate of re-use of the data and, as the first study was created in 1946, there is a very long history of citation and data curation with many people fulfilling different roles in regards to the data. We will be contrasting our proof of concept with one that CERN are creating around citations and attribution in high energy physics and we will come together later in the project and identify commanalities across the disciplines. 

 

Documents and Birthday cards from the National Survey for Health and Development (NSHD) which is now 66 years old

Linking researchers with thier outputs and citations has huge potential to improve research resource discovery and also attribute credit to data creators, contributors, researchers as well as authors where it may have been overlooked previously. In theory you should be able to track the impact a data creator has by following the linked citations from their dataset(s) into other research objects such as journals, working papers, derived data, secondary data.....and maybe all the way into policy and legislation. This could be an important development for researchers and service providers who increasingly have to demonstrate the impact of their work to funders. It will also hopefully have the effect of researchers being more willing to make their research data available openly as the credit and citations will be visible and trackable.

To produce this proof of concept we will be working with and taking advice from the ODIN consortium partners and many others including: The Centre for Longitudinal Studies, CLOSER, UK Data Service, ISNI, The Names Project, Crossref, the GESIS data centre in Germany, users of the birth cohort studies and many others. This is a 2 year project so there will be more updates about this work on this blog as it progresses.

We are currently recruiting for a software developer to create the conceptual models and practical tools for the project, so if you have development skills and are interested in this project, then please apply on our recruitment site!

 

So what is the connection between Seville and Dundee? Heard of James Keiler? If you’ve just answered ‘marmalade’, well done! Form a team, and apply to BBC TV’s 'Only Connect'.

And in that exotic connection (the export of bitter Seville oranges to Scotland for boiling with sugar and water) may lie the origin of association football in Andalusia - indeed perhaps in the whole of Spain.

This has come to light in a rediscovered report in the Dundee Courier, dated 17 March 1890, now digitised and available through the British Newspaper Archive website (see Note below).

On 25 January 1890, a group of ex-pat British traders based in Seville decided to get together for regular football practice. After a few 5-a-side training games, they invited some friends from Huelva over for a proper match, played under FA rules. Seville won 2-0.

The Dundee Courier report is entitled ‘First Football Match in Spain’. While this may or may not have been the case (how could we know?), the revelation is in the following sentence:

After a deal of talk and a limited consumption of small beer, the Club de Football de Sevilla was duly formed and officebearers elected.

And that’s what getting Spanish football fans, especially los aficionados de Sevilla, excited. The explicit mention of a constitution means that FC Sevilla was founded in 1890, rather than 1905 as previously thought: evidence that makes Sevilla the oldest football club in Spain (Real Madrid was founded in 1902, for example). The research, undertaken by the history department of FC Sevilla, was quickly picked up by Spanish blogs (such as La Palagana Mecanica) and on Twitter, which is where we saw it.

You can read about this story in detail, and see the original newspaper article, on the official blog of the British Newspaper Archive.

So here's an example of what you can discover from online digitised material, provided that it’s fully searchable and you know what you are looking for.

Colin Wight

Note

The British Newspaper Archive is a partnership between the British Library and brightsolid online publishing to digitise up to 40 million newspaper pages from the British Library's vast collection over the next 10 years.

Read more on the BNA blog

This week the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) published an introduction to social science resources at the British Library. This website contains information about our collections, academic case studies and guides from our curators. It was compiled by our ESRC placement, historian and social science convert, Tom Hulme; he writes about his experience at the Library in this guest blog:

As part of an ESRC scholarship programme I was given the chance to spend six months in the British Library, putting together a web-based resource on materials in the Social Science collections. Shamefully, before undertaking this internship, I was quite unfamiliar with the range and depth of its holdings - my use of the Library's services was limited to inter-library loan of books and its vast online newspaper archives. Within weeks of taking up the job it became clear that these aspects of the Library were the tip of a colossal iceberg.

At first the task was quite daunting: millions of items, covering a range of social science disciplines, in a variety of different formats. While I use some social science informed methods in my research I am, above all, a historian. Knowing where to begin in this enormous field was an intimidating prospect. Quickly, and fortunately, the task became more manageable after meeting the expert curators working in the department. All had experience with collecting, cataloguing, and using the collections - some with decades of knowledge. If the primary significance of the British Library is the documents and resources it has both onsite and online, its secondary value is the expertise of the people who work there. From reading room staff to curators, the extent of familiarity with such a gargantuan amount of stuff is astounding. With their guidance I fumbled my way towards the most important and sometimes regrettably underused resources. 

Mention the British Library to most researchers and they are usually aware of its remit in collecting a copy of every book published in Britain. This sole attribute makes it vitally important to researchers. Yet dig a bit deeper and you can find a whole host of items not caught by the traditional net of legal deposit. Ephemera especially, being both transient and difficult to conserve, garnered my attention as an underused yet incredibly interesting resource. The extent of oral histories also surprised me, covering topics and periods from not just Britain but further afield as well. It was a joy to dip in and out of greatly different collections, and to try and grasp at a way that such materials could be used alongside each other.

As part of my role I also approached academics and researchers who had utilised social science at the British Library, keen to share their positive experiences. Initially this was somewhat difficult; the British Library is not always cited in footnotes, or explicitly mentioned in oral presentations. After closer investigation however, and exploitation of the Library's eager network of academic friends, I found an impressive body of widely different case studies. Most exciting to me, as a historian, was the ways in which historical materials had been analysed through the lens of social science to inform contemporary research agendas. Early modern pamphlets on intoxication gave context to contemporary debates on alcohol consumption, for example, while cookbooks were closely-read to examine social and ethnic identity. From geographers to political scientists, or sociologists and historians, there seemed to not be a discipline untouched by British Library resources.

When the internship came to an end I was sad to leave. While local archives are, and will remain, the backbone of my research, the information I discovered while working at the Library has added flesh and depth to my work.  To be surrounded by centuries of collections, presented and used in both traditional and novel ways, going to work was never a chore. I hope that this web-resource will convey some of my positive experiences, and encourage researchers to undertake new and exciting research projects using the material and human knowledge of Social Science at the British Library.

Tom Hulme is currently completing his PhD: "Civic Culture and Citizenship: the nature of urban governance in interwar Manchester and Chicago" at the University of Leicester.

The British Library is here as a resource for anyone interested in research and in social science this includes groups of 'practitioners' who have a practical day job outside of academia, but are have a need to carry out research for various reasons. We have some dedicated resources created for practitioners, such as the Social Welfare Portal and are always looking for new ways to serve these communities. We hope to hear from practitoners in different fields on this blog and find out more about the research methods and resources they are using or would like to use. Dr Helen Kara is a friend and collaborator of the Social Science team and has recently written Research and Evaluation for Busy Practitioners (Policy Press, 2012). In this guest post Helen talks about some of the issues facing practitioners.

Practitioners in the front line of public services include a wide range of roles: nurses, advice workers, probation officers, midwives, teachers, museum staff, prison officers, counsellors, social workers, and so on.  You might not think practitioners from these different groups have much in common, but there is one topic that spans the disciplines: practitioners need to do research related to their work.

This research falls into two categories: work-based research and continuous professional development (CPD) research.  Work-based research includes such tasks as service evaluations, needs assessments, audits and feasibility studies.  The need for practitioners to undertake work-based research is increasing steadily, as a result of both the demand for evidence-informed practice and the impact of budget cuts on the ability to outsource this work. CPD research has also increased as a result of the pressure on the public service workforce to become more highly qualified, often through postgraduate courses with a research element.

So practitioners not only need to know how to do their job, they also need to know how to do research.  Yet there is very little training or support for most practitioners when it comes to research methods.  Practitioners I work with, when faced with the need to conduct research, often respond, ‘We’ll do a questionnaire.’ But research involves more than just data collection, and questionnaires are not always the best way to collect data.

Research is a complex activity, yet it’s not particularly difficult, taken one stage at a time with enough thinking and planning at the outset. The first step is always to define the research questions, then work out what the best tools are to find answers to those questions.  Perhaps data doesn’t need to be collected directly; Governments and other bodies already collect a vast amount of data, most of which is available online. It’s also important to work out, at an early stage, how to prepare and analyse data; write it up, and present the findings. 

It is also essential to plan when to do each part of the research. A common problem faced by practitioners is fitting their research around a full-time job, family responsibilities, and other commitments. For these practitioners, it can feel very difficult to carve out the time needed to think through and plan; they are often impatient to start and finish actual tasks.  However, time invested at the start will save time and frustration later by helping to prevent mistakes and avoid blind alleys.  Planning can feel especially problematic for novice researchers, as it means learning about the research process – but, again, any time invested in this will pay dividends in due course. Like any other project, research is easier to conduct and manage if it’s thought through and planned out before the work begins. My book will provide a framework and some insights into how to manage this process.

 

Dr Helen Kara has been an independent social researcher and writer since 1999, and is also Associate Research Fellow at the Third Sector Research Centre, Birmingham University. Her background is in social care and the third sector, and she works with third sector organisations and social care and health partnerships. She is the author of Research and Evaluation for Busy Practitioners (Policy Press, 2012). Helen is Managing Director of We Research It.

The Launch of Research and Evaluation for Busy Practitioners is being hosted at The British Library on Thursday 18 October

If you are a practitioner and would like to share information about your research with others please contact [email protected]

Welcome to the British Library Social Science Research Blog. In this space we hope to highlight and discuss resources, research methods, events and projects that the Social Science team are involved in. We will publish posts from our curatorial team and guest posts from academics, researchers and practitioners from the many and varied social science disciplines.

Jude England, Head of Social Science, gives a short video introduction to our team and what we do

We would like to hear from our readers and the research community as a whole, so please feel free to comment on, share and discuss our posts.

Simone Bacchini writes:

With London 2012 well and truly over, it’s time to think about what to do next. The topic was addressed by my colleague Gill, last week. So forgive me if I return to it. I’m not talking about Sochi 2014 or Rio 2016. I’m not even talking of actual sport; no sweaty bodies speeding along tracks or pulling punches in front of screaming crowds. It’s people sitting at desks that I have in mid, a bit like me, now.

When we began working on the Sport and Society website, we didn’t really know how exactly it would develop. What we did know was that we hoped it would be a useful resource for people interested in looking at sport – in particular the Olympics and Paralympics – ‘through the lens of the social sciences.’

Over the past few months, we’ve added material to the website: articles written expressly for it and pieces which had already appeared elsewhere and that we were kindly allowed to use. By hosting events like the successful “Sourcing Sport” one-day conference and attending conferences hosted by other institutions, we were able to make contact with researchers based in countries as diverse as Argentina, Canada, China, and Turkey. Some of them resulted in original research now freely available on the website. This might sound a bit like we’re blowing our own trumpet (and maybe we are. But only a bit!), but that’s what we aimed to do: to facilitate research.

I don’t know if – like the organisers of London 2012 – we’ll be able to have ‘inspired a generation’ (albeit of researchers). But what we hope we’ll have achieved is to have pointed out – to some maybe for the first time – how wide the scope for researching sport is.

The sociology of sport is a subfield of sociology now in its full maturity. Journals like the Sociology of Sport Journal and the International Review for the Sociology of Sport – to name only two – regularly publish innovative research on various aspects of the social side of physical activity. Publishers like Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge – and again, I’m naming just two – have been publishing monographs and edited volumes on topics that range from the discourses of Olympism to the soon-to-be-published Routledge Handbook of London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Cyberspace has been a hub of activity too. As well as the marvellous Sport and Society website (yes, now we are blowing our own trumpet!) to the resource-rich Winning endeavours, plus countless others, the internet has been instrumental in creating and maintaining research communities.

So where to now? Well, at some point in the future the Sport and Society website will have to wrap up and be archived. It will become part and parcel of the London 2012 legacy. But there is still time. Time to be inspired to explore new research avenues or revisit old ones. There is plenty of primary material: from newspaper reports to Government documents; from oral history recordings to TV footage.

Here at the British Library we aim to continue to assist all those who have ideas they want to explore. So, as well as to your local pool or running track, the next most important journey you might make now is to one of our reading rooms. We are here to help.

 

References

 

Sociology of Sport Journal. Champaign, Ill: Human Kinetics Publishers.

Document Supply shelfmark: 8319.696830.

 

International Review for the Sociology of Sport. London: Sage.

London Reference Collection shelfmark: ZA.9.a.188 (last 12 months available in Social Sciences Reading Room, open access: SPIS Journals Display).

 

Chatziefstathiou, D. and Henry, I. P. (eds.). Discourses of Olympism: From the Sorbonne 1894 to London 2012. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.

London Reference Collection: SPIS 796.4801 CHA 12 (open access).

 
image: Bettis

Boris Johnson, in his speech outside Buckingham Palace after last Monday’s parade spoke of a ‘tear-sodden’ farewell to the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and this just about summed it up for most of us. It hardly seems possible that seven years have elapsed since the Games were awarded to London, and that all the milestones that we passed – the clearing of the Games site, the creation of the logos and mascots, the completion of the venues, the planting of the Park, the inauguration of the Mobot, and so on and so forth, have now been done and dusted. Everything we did and said: the controversies, the bright ideas, the decisions, the objections, the recommendations and the action itself are officially  ‘history’.

Athletes, coaches, policy makers, performers, volunteers, media, researchers, official bodies, schools, archives, museums and libraries - numerous people and institutions have played a role, large and small, in putting London 2012 on the map. How many meetings have been held to talk logistics? How many people have been ticking off items on their ‘to do’ lists over weeks, months and years? It’s impossible to imagine all that activity in retrospect.

So what are we left with, and what do we do next? The word ‘legacy’ has been used almost ad nauseam in connection with the event, but in some ways it is the most important factor of all when a country stages an Olympics and a Paralympics. If you don’t take legacy seriously the positive aspects of the Games can evaporate or decay, and neither of these things are what we want for GB.

As with the preparations for the Games, we are all involved in different ways with legacy, and we all have separate responsibilities to give it its best chance. At the BL we aimed to do what we could to enhance the nation’s archive of Olympics & Paralympics research material, working with LOCOG and other Games makers to collect the vast amount of publications produced by these organisations; searching out UK domain Games websites and archiving them, supporting initiatives like the cultural Olympiad, staging the Olympex exhibition and showcasing our collections through websites like Winning endeavours and Sport and society. We hope our contribution to the legacy of the Games will last for generations and be used by thousands of people wanting to find out more about what actually went on in those years of planning and performance from 2005 to 2012. Other archives like TNA will have done the same thing and will be hoping for the same things too.  So for us, the work continues, tracking down those errant publications, keeping an eye on what’s being published as the years go by.

‘What next?’ is effectively all about legacy. The IOC & the IPC will want a thorough audit done of these Games, so that lessons learned can be passed on to the next host city. The world of academia will be particularly caught up in this next phase of the London 2012 process, analysing what happened, identifying what has changed and what may change in the future. Years may elapse before firm conclusions are reached, but let’s hope that the Games legacy blossoms like the Olympic Park.

 

Simone Bacchini writes:

So the Games are over. Bye-bye London; Rio, here we come. By now, most people will agree: both the Olympics and the Paralympics have been an astounding success. They came, they won, we watched.

Although millions of tickets were sold, most of us watched the Games from the comfort of our homes. A lot has been said and written about what happened in front of TV and computer screens in Britain and across the world. London 2012 was undoubtedly a sporting triumph but as well as the Usain Bolts, Oscar Pistoriuses and Mo Farahs, the great winner of the "emperor of mega-events" was the broadcasting media.

What we watched on screens and what some of us saw at the Olympic Park was astounding but it was just the surface. To put on a good show is – among other things – to draw the spectator into an alternative world that she can enjoy, almost oblivious to all the preparation and machinery necessary to make it happen. Behind the astonishing performance of an athlete, there are hours of training as well as scientific research on aspects such as physiology, and physics. Similarly, behind every minute of broadcasting there are literally thousands of hours of planning and of researching new technologies. When we talk about the ‘legacy’ of London 2012, we ought to keep in mind that it will not only involve young people taking up sport.

Last week, here at the British Library we were given a rare opportunity to go behind the scenes of what broadcasting the Olympics has meant. And it was fascinating; the spectacle behind the spectacle. Dave Gordon, Head of Major Events at BBC Sport since 2001, gave a rare insight into all the work that made following the Olympics possible.

To begin with, it was astonishing to learn the amount of preparation that went into broadcasting London 2012. Soon after it was announced that London would bid to host the Games, the BBC began to plan what it would cover, and how. It was decided that coverage would extend beyond sporting events to include cultural ones. In a sort of game of mirrors, the Games became a catalyst to showcase BBC products and they, in turn, became occasions to focus attention onto the forthcoming Games.

Drama was enlisted to entertain viewers and inform them on Olympic and Paralympic-related issues. So, although it was Channel four that had won the rights to broadcast the Paralympics, the BBC commissioned and aired The Best of Men, a one-episode dramatisation of the origins of the modern Paralympics in the work of Dr Gutmann, at Stoke Mandeville hospital. It was Dr Guttmann’s introduction of sport into the rehabilitation programme of wounded soldiers that led directly to ‘the most successful Paralympics’ in London, this year. Similarly, Bert and Dickie – which dramatised the accomplishments of the two rowers Bert Bushnell and Dickie Burnell – was an opportunity for the public to learn more about rowing as well as the 1948 ‘austerity Olympics’. One of the most successful pre-Games events, the torch-relay – which truly gripped the Nation – made it into BBC One’s best-known soap opera: Eastenders.

But when the real show began, the BBC spared no efforts. All of its channels were enlisted, at one point or another, to fulfil the promise that every minute of every sport would be, for the first time ever, broadcast. That meant, among other things, finding commentators knowledgeable enough to assist the viewing public in following and actually understanding sports which are relative obscure.

Digital technology did not – of course – begin with the Olympics, but it was certainly used to enhance the experience. The same applies to High Definition viewing as well as Super HI-Vision (SHV). SHV has sixteen times as many pixels as High Definition; this makes a picture with 7680 pixels across by 4320 pixels down. SHV was developed by NHK, the Japanese national broadcaster. Although NHK had used the technology before, London 2012 has been the biggest operation so far. Apparently, it gave an amazing viewing experience and its use during the Olympics is likely to determine how it will develop in the future.

Learning what broadcasting the Games entailed was fascinating. To all those present, it was clear that it required a monumental effort on the part of very many people. Unlike the athletes’ their names may never be known by the general public. Their achievements, however, will be part of the legacy of London 2012 and are likely to inspire a generation too, maybe not to run on a track but just to sit behind a TV camera. And that’s legacy just the same.