25 July 2013
AHRC Big Data Research call
The AHRC has recently announced a Big Data Research call. With regards to British Library engagement the call states the following:
The British Library (BL) is interested in working with successful projects in accessing and utilising their large-scale sources of data. To enable BL to work most effectively with relevant projects, they request that applicants contact them at the earliest opportunity to discuss the details.
The BL have already made available large digital data sets through the British Library Labs initiative, which can be freely accessed at http://labs.bl.uk/.
Other material may also be available, but may involve more complex technical or licensing considerations and require some work to make this accessible to applicants. If you wish to access content not currently readily available, you should contact BL as soon as possible to assess challenges, costs, or scheduling.
The British Library has Independent Research Organisation status, and is therefore eligible to apply for funding under this call. Applicants may also include costs incurred by the British Library in making their digital content available or providing other supporting activities.
Queries should be directed to [email protected]
We expect that there will be a substantial number of approaches to the British Library to partner in proposals as well as to provide content. We therefore wish to elaborate on the text in the call to ensure that any requests for collaboration or content provision proceed smoothly.
Collaboration
There is a possibility that we will have more requests to partner than we can support. In light of this, we are introducing a transparent selection process to manage requests for partnership including a proposal review meeting during which proposal summaries will be evaluated and selected.
Important dates for collaboration proposals:
- Wednesday
31 July: Proposal summaries sent to [email protected] for review. Update 29 July 2013: Please ensure proposal summaries include the follow headings:
- Proposal category (Small or Large):
- Submitter (Your name, Department):
- Working title:
- Project outline including aims & objectives (500 words max):
- Benefit to the Library:
- British Library role (Principal Investigator/Co-Investigator/Data Provider/etc.):
- Partners:
- British Library data to be used:
- British Library resource required (agreed yet?):
- Outstanding issues, further work/discussions needed:
- Tuesday 6-Aug: Communicate results of review meeting
- Friday 6 Sep: Deadline for proposals for internal review and approval
- Thursday 12 Sep: AHRC Submission Deadline
Content provision
In some cases, content provision will be very straight forward. In others, we will request content preparation, license clearance, extraction, packaging and so on to be costed into the proposals. We therefore wish to reiterate that researchers planning to use our content in a project proposal for this call and requiring a letter of support from the British Library contact [email protected] as soon as possible, ideally not after mid to late August.