Hello all! My name is Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, and I’m the new Digital Curator for Asian and African collections at the British Library. One of the core remits of the Digital Scholarship team is to enable and encourage the reuse of the Library’s digital collections. When it comes to Asian and African collections, there are always interesting projects and initiatives going on. One is the Two Centuries of Indian Print project, which just started a second phase in March 2018 – a project with a strong Digital Humanities strand led by Digital Curator Tom Derrick. Another example is a collaborative transcription project, supporting the transcription of handwritten historical Arabic scientific works for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) research with the help of volunteers.

To give a bit of a background about myself and how I got to the Library: I’m an archaeologist and heritage professional by education and practice, with a PhD in Heritage Studies from University College London (2013). As a field archaeologist I used to record large quantities of excavation-related data – all manually, on paper. This was probably the first time I saw the potential of applying digital tools and technologies to record, manage and share archaeological data.

My first meaningful engagement with archaeological data and digital technologies started in 2005, when I joined the Israeli-Palestinian Archaeology Working Group (IPAWG) to create a database of all archaeological sites surveyed or excavated by Israel in the West Bank since its occupation in 1967, and its linking with a Geographic Information System (GIS), enabling the spatial visualisation and querying of this data for the first time. The research potential of this GIS-linked database proved so great, that I’ve decided to further explore it in a PhD dissertation. My dissertation focused on archaeological databases covering the occupied West Bank, and I was especially interested in the nature of archaeological records and the way they reflect particular research interests and heritage management priorities, as well as variability in data quality, coverage, accuracy and reliability.

Following my PhD I stayed at UCL Institute of Archaeology as a post-doctoral research associate, and participated in a project called MicroPasts, a UCL-British Museum collaboration. This project used web-based, crowdsourcing methods to allow traditional academics and other communities in archaeology to co-produce innovative open datasets. The MicroPasts crowdsourcing platform provided a great variety of projects through which people could contribute – from transcribing British Museum card catalogues, through tagging videos on the Roman Empire, to photomasking images in preparation for 3D modelling of museum objects.

With the main phase of the MicroPasts project coming to an end, I joined the British Library as Digital Curator (Polonsky Fellow) for the Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project. This role allowed me to create and implement a digital strategy for engaging, accessing and promoting a specific digitised collection, working closely with curators and the Digital Scholarship team. My work included making the collection digitally accessible (on data.bl.uk, working with British Library Labs) and encouraging open licensing, creating a website, promoting the collection in different ways, researching available digital methods to explore and exploit collections in novel ways, and implementing tools such as an online catalogue records viewer (TEI XML), OpenRefine, and 3D modelling.

Add. MS 4709 by British Library on Sketchfab

A 6-months backpacking trip to Asia unexpectedly prepared me for my new role at the Library. I was delighted to join – or re-join – the Library’s Digital Research team, this time as Digital Curator for Asian and African Collections. I find these collections especially intriguing due to their diversity, richness and uniqueness. These include mostly manuscripts, printed books, periodicals, newspapers, photographs and e-resources from Africa, the Middle East (including Qatar Digital Library), Central Asia, East Asia (including the International Dunhuang Project), South Asia, SE Asia – as well as the Visual Arts materials.

I’m very excited to join the Library’s Digital Research team work alongside Neil Fitzgerald, Nora McGregor, Mia Ridge and Stella Wisdom and learn from their rich experience. Feel free to get in touch with us via [email protected] or Twitter - @BL_AdiKS for me, or @BL_DigiSchol for the Digital Scholarship team.