29 April 2024
Recovered Pages: Digital Scholarship Training Programme
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 first page in this series is about our Digital Scholarship Training Programme, captured by the Wayback Machine on 27 September 2023.
The Digital Scholarship Training Programme
The Digital Scholarship Training Programme has been running since 2012, and creates opportunities for staff to develop necessary skills and knowledge to support emerging areas of modern scholarship.
About
This internal and bespoke staff training programme is one of the cornerstones of the Digital Curator Team’s work at the British Library. Running since 2012, it provides colleagues with the space and opportunity to delve into and explore all that digital content and new technologies have to offer in the research domain today. The Digital Curator team oversees the design and delivery of roughly 50-60 training events a year. Since its inception, well over a thousand individual staff members have come through the programme, on average attending three or more courses each and the Library has seen a steep change in its capacity to support innovative digital research.
Objectives
- Staff are familiar and conversant with the foundational concepts, methods and tools of digital scholarship.
- Staff are empowered to innovate.
- Collaborative digital initiatives flourish across subject areas within the Library as well as externally.
- Our internal capacity for training and skill-sharing in digital scholarship are a shared responsibility across the Library.
The Programme
What's it all about?
To celebrate our ten year anniversary, we created a series of video testimonials from the people behind the Training Programme - coordinators, instructors, and attendees. Click 'Watch on YouTube' to view the whole series of videos.
Nora McGregor, Digital Curator, gives a presentation all about the Digital Scholarship Training Programme - where it started, where it's going and what it hopes to accomplish.
Courses
As digital research methods have changed overtime, so too have course topics and content. Today's full course catalogue reflects this through a diversity of topics from cleaning up data, digital storytelling, to command line programming and geo-referencing.
Courses range from half-days to full-day workshops for no more than 15 attendees at a time and are taught mainly by staff members but also external trainers where necessary. Example courses include:
105 Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions
107 Data Visualisation for Cultural Heritage Collections
109 Information Integration: Mash-ups, API’s and Linked Data
Hack & Yacks
We host a monthly “Hack & Yack” to run alongside the more formal training programme. During these two-hour self-paced casual meet-ups, open to all staff, the group works through a variety of online tutorials on a particular digital topic. Example sessions include:
Digital Scholarship Reading Group
The Digital Scholarship Reading Group holds informal discussions on the first Tuesday of each month. Each month we discuss an article, conference, podcast or video related to digital scholarship. It's a great way to keep up with new ideas or reality check trends in digital scholarship (including the digital humanities). We welcome people from any department in the Library, and take suggestions for topics that are particularly relevant to diverse teams or disciplines.
Curious about what we cover? Check out this previous blog post that cover the last five years of our Reading Group.
21st Century Curatorship Talk Series
The Digital Scholarship team hosts the 21st Century Curatorship Programme (C21st), a series of professional development talks and seminars, open to all staff, providing a forum for keeping up with new developments and emerging technologies in scholarship, libraries and cultural heritage.
What’s new?
In 2019, the British Library and partners Birkbeck University and The National Archives were awarded £222,420 in funding by the Institute of Coding (IoC) to co-develop a one-year part-time postgraduate Certificate (PGCert), Computing for Cultural Heritage, as part of a £4.8 million University skills drive. The new course aims to provide working professionals, particularly across the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), with an understanding of basic programming, analytic tools and computing environments to support them in their daily work.
Further information
For more information on the Training Programme's most recent year, including our performance numbers and topics covered by the training, please see our full screen, interactive inforgraphic.
Please also see our two conference papers from Digital Humanities 2013 and Digital Humanities 2016 for more details on how the Training Programme was established. Any queries about this project can be directed to [email protected].