Digital scholarship blog

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Nominate a British Library staff member or a team that has done something exciting, innovative and cool with the British Library’s digital collections or data.

The 2019 British Library Labs Staff Award, now in its fourth year, gives recognition to current British Library staff who have created something brilliant using the Library’s digital collections or data.

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? 

You may nominate a current member of British Library staff, a team, or yourself (if you are a member of staff), for the Staff Award using this form.

The deadline for submission is 12:00 (BST), Tuesday 5 November 2019.

Nominees will be highlighted on Monday 11 November 2019 at the British Library Labs Annual Symposium where some (winners and runners-up) will also be asked to talk about their projects.

You can see the projects submitted by members of staff for the last two years' awards in our online archive, as well as blogs for last year's winners and runners-up.

The Staff Award complements the British Library Labs Awards, introduced in 2015, which recognise outstanding work that has been done in the broader community. Last year's winner focused on the brilliant work of the 'Polonsky Foundation England and France Project: Digitising and Presenting Manuscripts from the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, 700–1200'.

The runner up for the BL Labs Staff Award last year was the 'Digital Documents Harvesting and Processing Tool (DDHAPT)' which was designed to overcome the problem of finding individual known documents in the United Kingdom's Legal Deposit Web Archive.

In the public competition, last year's winners drew attention to artistic, research, teaching & learning, and commercial activities that used our digital collections.

British Library Labs is a project within the Digital Scholarship department at the British Library that supports and inspires the use of the Library's digital collections and data in exciting and innovative ways. It was previously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is now solely funded by the British Library.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].

This guest blog was written by David Zvi Kalman on behalf of the team that received the runner up award in the 2018 BL Labs Commercial category.

The bentsher is a strange book, both invisible and highly visible. It is not among the more well known Jewish books, like the prayerbook, Hebrew Bible, or haggadah. You would be hard pressed to find a general-interest bookstore selling a copy. Still, enter the house of a traditional Jew and you’d likely find at least a few, possibly a few dozen. In Orthodox communities, the bentsher is arguably the most visible book of all.

Bentshers are handbooks containing the songs and blessings, including the Grace after Meals, that are most useful for Sabbath and holiday meals, as well as larger gatherings. They are, as a rule, quite small. These days, bentshers are commonly given out as party favors at Jewish weddings and bar/bat mitzvahs, since meals at those events require them anyway. Many bentshers today have personalized covers relating the events at which they were given.

Bentshers have never gone out of print. By this I mean that printing began with the invention of the printing press and has never stopped. They are small, but they have always been useful. Seder Oneg Shabbos, the version which I designed, was released 500 years after the first bentsher was published. It is, in a sense, a Half Millennium Anniversary Special Edition.

Bentshers, like other Jewish books, could be quite ornate; some were written and illustrated by hand. Over the years, however, bentshers have become less and less interesting, largely in order to lower the unit cost. In order to make it feasible for wedding planners to order hundreds at a time, all images were stripped from the books, the books themselves became very small, and any interest in elegant typography was quickly eliminated. My grandfather, who designed custom covers for wedding bentshers, simply called the book, “the insert.” Custom prayerbooks were no different from custom matchbooks.

This particular bentsher was created with the goal of bucking this trend; I attempted to give the book the feel of the some of the Jewish books and manuscripts of the past, using the research I was able to gather a graduate student in the field of Jewish history. Doing this required a great deal of image research; for this, the British Library’s online resources were incredible valuable. Of the more than one hundred images in the book, a plurality are from the British Library’s collections.

https://data.bl.uk/hebrewmanuscripts/

https://www.bl.uk/hebrew-manuscripts

In addition to its visual element, this bentsher differs from others in two important ways. First, it contains ritual languages that is inclusive of those in the LGBTQ community, and especially for those conducting same-sex weddings. In addition, the book contains songs not just in Hebrew, but in Yiddish, as well; this was a homage to two Yiddishists who aided in creating the bentsher’s content. The bentsher was first used at their wedding.

More here: https://shabb.es/sederonegshabbos/

Watch David accepting the runner up award and talking about the Seder Oneg Shabbos Bentsher on our YouTube channel (clip runs from 5.33 to 7.26): 

David Zvi Kalman was responsible for the book’s design, including the choice of images. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, where he focuses on the relationship between Jewish history and the history of technology. Sarah Wolf is a specialist in rabbinics and is an assistant professor at the Jewish Theology Seminary of America. Joshua Schwartz is a doctoral student at New York University, where he studies Jewish mysticism. Sarah and Joshua were responsible for most of the books translations and transliterations. Yocheved and Yudis Retig are Yiddishists and were responsible for the book’s Yiddish content and translations.

Find out more about Digital Scholarship and BL Labs. If you have a project which uses British Library digital content in innovative and interesting ways, consider applying for an award this year! The 2019 BL Labs Symposium will take place on Monday 11 November at the British Library.

On Monday 12th November, 2018, the British Library hosted the sixth annual BL Labs Symposium, celebrating all things digital at the BL. This was our biggest ever symposium with the conference centre at full capacity - proof, if any were needed, of the importance of using British Library digital collections and technologies for innovative projects in the heritage sector.

The delegates were welcomed by our Chief Executive, Roly Keating, and there followed a brilliant keynote by Daniel Pett, Head of Digital and IT at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. In his talk, Dan reflected on his 3D modelling projects at the British Museum and the Fitzwilliam, and talked about the importance of experimenting with, re-imagining, and re-mixing cultural heritage digital collections in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs).

This year’s symposium had quite a focus on 3D, with a series of fascinating talks and demonstrations throughout the day by visual artists, digital curators, and pioneers of 3D photogrammetry and data visualisation technologies. The full programme is still viewable on the Eventbrite page, and videos and slides of the presentations will be uploaded in due course.

Each year, BL Labs recognises excellent work that has used the Library's digital content in five categories. The 2018 winners, runners up and honourable mentions were announced at the symposium and presented with their awards throughout the day. This year’s Award recipients were:

Research Award:

Winner: The Delius Catalogue of Works by Joanna Bullivant, Daniel Grimley, David Lewis and Kevin Page at the University of Oxford

Honourable Mention: Doctoral theses as alternative forms of knowledge: Surfacing ‘Southern’ perspectives on student engagement with internationalisation by Catherine Montgomery and a team of researchers at the University of Bath

Honourable Mention: HerStories: Sites of Suffragette Protest and Sabotage by Krista Cowman at the University of Lincoln and Rachel Williams, Tamsin Silvey, Ben Ellwood and Rosie Ryder of Historic England

Artistic Award:

Winner: Another Intelligence Sings by Amanda Baum, Rose Leahy and Rob Walker

Runner Up: Nomad by independent researcher Abira Hussein, and Sophie Dixon and Edward Silverton of Mnemoscene

Teaching & Learning Award:

Winner: Pocket Miscellanies by Jonah Coman

Runner Up: Pocahontas and After by Michael Walling, Lucy Dunkerley and John Cobb of Border Crossings

Commercial Award:

Winner: The Library Collection: Fashion Presentation at London Fashion Week, SS19 by Nabil Nayal in association with Colette Taylor of Vega Associates

Runner Up: The Seder Oneg Shabbos Bentsher by David Zvi Kalman, Print-O-Craft Press

Staff Award:

Winner: The Polonsky Foundation England and France Project: Manuscripts from the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, 700-1200 by Tuija Ainonen, Clarck Drieshen, Cristian Ispir, Alison Ray and Kate Thomas

Runner Up: The Digital Documents Harvesting and Processing Tool by Andrew Jackson, Sally Halper, Jennie Grimshaw and Nicola Bingham

The judging process is always a difficult one as there is such diversity in the kinds of projects that are up for consideration! So we wanted to also thank all the other entrants for their high quality submissions, and to encourage anyone out there who might be considering applying for a 2019 award!

We will be posting guest blogs by the award recipients over the coming months, so tune in to read more about their projects.

And finally, save the date for this year's symposium, which will be held at the British Library on Monday 11th November, 2019.

Image taken from page 203 of '[Griffith's new historical description of Cheltenham and its vicinity ... with ... engravings. L.P.]'

The BL Labs team are pleased to announce that the sixth annual British Library Labs Symposium will be held on Monday 12 November 2018, from 9:30 - 17:30 in the British Library Knowledge Centre, St Pancras. The event is free, and you must book a ticket in advance. Last year's event was a sell out, so don't miss out!

The Symposium showcases innovative and inspiring projects which use the British Library’s digital content, providing a platform for development, networking and debate in the Digital Scholarship field as well as being a focus on the creative reuse of digital collections and data in the cultural heritage sector.

We are very proud to announce that this year's keynote will be delivered by Daniel Pett, Head of Digital and IT at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

Dan's keynote will reflect on his years of experience in assessing the value, impact and importance of experimenting with, re-imagining and re-mixing cultural heritage digital collections in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. Dan will follow in the footsteps of previous prestigious BL Labs keynote speakers: Josie Fraser (2017); Melissa Terras (2016); David De Roure and George Oates (2015); Tim Hitchcock (2014); and Bill Thompson and Andrew Prescott in 2013.

Stella Wisdom (Digital Curator for Contemporary British Collections at the British Library) will give an update on some exciting and innovative projects she and other colleagues have been working on within Digital Scholarship. Mia Ridge (Digital Curator for Western Heritage Collections at the British Library) will talk about a major and ambitious data science/digital humanities project 'Living with Machines' the British Library is about to embark upon, in collaboration with the Alan Turing Institute for data science and artificial intelligence.Throughout the day, there will be several announcements and presentations from nominated and winning projects for the BL Labs Awards 2018, which recognise work that have used the British Library’s digital content in four areas: Research, Artistic, Commercial, and Educational. The closing date for the BL Labs Awards is 11 October, 2018, so it's not too late to nominate someone/a team, or enter your own project! There will also be a chance to find out who has been nominated and recognised for the British Library Staff Award 2018 which showcases the work of an outstanding individual (or team) at the British Library who has worked creatively and originally with the British Library's digital collections and data (nominations close 12 October 2018).

Adam Farquhar (Head of Digital Scholarship at the British Library) will give an update about the future of BL Labs and report on a special event held in September 2018 for invited attendees from National, State, University and Public Libraries and Institutions around the world, where they were able to share best practices in building 'labs style environments' for their institutions' digital collections and data.

There will be a 'sneak peek' of an art exhibition in development entitled 'Imaginary Cities' by the visual artist and researcher Michael Takeo Magruder. His practice  draws upon working with information systems such as live and algorithmically generated data, 3D printing and virtual reality and combining modern / traditional techniques such as gold / silver gilding and etching. Michael's exhibition will build on the work he has been doing with BL Labs over the last few years using digitised 18th and 19th century urban maps bringing analog and digital outputs together. The exhibition will be staged in the British Library's entrance hall in April and May 2019 and will be free to visit.

Finally, we have an inspiring talk lined up to round the day off (more information about this will be announced soon), and - as is our tradition - the symposium will conclude with a reception at which delegates and staff can mingle and network over a drink and nibbles.

So book your place for the Symposium today and we look forward to seeing new faces and meeting old friends again!

Image taken from page 99 of 'Festival of Song: a series of Evenings with the Poets. Prepared by the author of “Salad for the Solitary” ... (F. Saunders). With ... pictures by Members of the National Academy of Design. Engraved by Bobbett and Hooper'

For any further information, please contact [email protected]

Posted by Mahendra Mahey and Eleanor Cooper (BL Labs Team)

Now that British Summer Time has officially arrived, and with it some warmer weather, British Library Labs are hitting the road again with a series of events in Universities around the UK. The aim of these half-day roadshows is to inspire people to think about using the library's digitised collections and datasets in their research, art works, sound installations, apps, businesses... you name it!

A digitised copy of a manuscript is a very convenient medium to work on, especially if you are unable to visit the library in person and order an original item up to a reading room. But there are so many other uses for digitised items! Come along to one of the BL Labs Roadshows at a University department near you and find out more about the methods used by researchers in Digital Scholarship, from data-mining and crowd sourcing to optical character recognition for transcribing the words from an imaged page into searchable text. 

At each of the roadshow events, there will be speakers from the host institution describing some of the research projects they have already completed using digitised materials, as well as members of the British Library who will be able to talk with you about proposed research plans involving digitised resources. 

The locations of this year's roadshows are: 

Mon 9th April - BL Labs Roadshow 2018 (Open University) - internal event

Mon 26th March - BL Labs Roadshow 2018 (CityLIS) - internal event

Thu 12th April - BL Labs Roadshow 2018 (University of Bristol & Cardiff Digital Cultures Network)

Tue 24th April - BL Labs Roadshow 2018 (UCL)

Wed 25th April - BL Labs Roadshow 2018 (University of Kent)

Wed 2nd May - BL Labs Roadshow 2018 (University of Edinburgh)

Tue 15th May - BL Labs Roadshow 2018 (University of Wolverhampton)

Wed 16th May - BL Labs Roadshow 2018 (University of Lincoln)

Tue 5th June - BL Labs Roadshow 2018 (University of Leeds)

 
See a full programme and book your place using the Eventbrite page for each event.

If you want to discover more about the Digital Collections, and Digital Scholarship at the British Library, follow us on Twitter @BL_Labs, read our Blog Posts, and get in touch with BL Labs if you have some burning research questions!

With six months to go before the submission deadline, we would like to announce the 2018 British Library Labs Awards!

The BL Labs Awards are a way of formally recognising outstanding and innovative work that has been created using the British Library’s digital collections and data.

Have you been working on a project that uses digitised material from the British Library's collections? If so, we'd like to encourage you to enter that project for an award in one of our categories.

This year, BL Labs is awarding prizes for a winner and a runner up in four key areas:

• Research - A project or activity which shows the development of new knowledge, research methods, or tools.
• Commercial - An activity that delivers or develops commercial value in the context of new products, tools, or services that build on, incorporate, or enhance the Library's digital content.
• Artistic - An artistic or creative endeavour which inspires, stimulates, amazes and provokes.
• Teaching / Learning - Quality learning experiences created for learners of any age and ability that use the Library's digital content.

BL Labs Awards 2018 Winners (Top-Left- Research Award Winner – A large-scale comparison of world music corpora with computational tools , Top-Right (Commercial Award Winner – Movable Type: The Card Game), Bottom-Left(Artistic Award Winner – Imaginary Cities) and Bottom-Right (Teaching / Learning Award Winner – Vittoria’s World of Stories)

There is also a Staff award which recognises a project completed by a staff member or team, with the winner and runner up being announced at the Symposium along with the other award winners.

The closing date for entering your work for the 2018 round of BL Labs Awards is midnight BST on Thursday 11^th October (2018). Please submit your entry and/or help us spread the word to all interested and relevant parties over the next few months. This will ensure we have another year of fantastic digital-based projects highlighted by the Awards!

Read more about the Awards (FAQs, Terms & Conditions etc), practice your application with this text version, and then submit your entry online!

The entries will be shortlisted after the submission deadline (11/10/2018) has passed, and selected shortlisted entrants will be notified via email by midnight BST on Friday 26th October 2018. 

A prize of £500 will be awarded to the winner and £100 to the runner up in each of the Awards categories at the BL Labs Symposium on 12^th November 2018 at the British Library, St Pancras, London.

The talent of the BL Labs Awards winners and runners up from the last three years has resulted in a remarkable and varied collection of innovative projects. You can read about some of last year's Awards winners and runners up in our other blogs, links below:

• Research category Award (2017) winner: 'A large-scale comparison of world music corpora with computational tools', by Maria Panteli, Emmanouil Benetos and Simon Dixon. Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London
• Research category Award (2017) runner up: 'Samtla' by Dr Martyn Harris, Prof Dan Levene, Prof Mark Levene and Dr Dell Zhang
• Commercial Award (2017) winner: 'Movable Type: The Card Game' by Robin O'Keeffe
• Artistic Award (2017) winner: 'Imaginary Cities' by Michael Takeo Magruder
• Artistic Award (2017) runner up: 'Face Swap', by Tristan Roddis and Cogapp
• Teaching and Learning (2017) winner: 'Vittoria's World of Stories' by the pupils and staff of Vittoria Primary School, Islington
• Teaching and Learning (2017) runner up: 'Git Lit' by Jonathan Reeve
• Staff Award (2017) winner: 'Two Centuries of Indian Print' by Layli Uddin, Priyanka Basu, Tom Derrick, Megan O’Looney, Alia Carter, Nur Sobers khan, Laurence Roger and Nora McGregor
• Staff Award (2017) runner up: 'Putting Collection metadata on the map: Picturing Canada', by Philip Hatfield and Joan Francis

To act as a source of inspiration for future awards entrants, all entries submitted for awards in previous years can be browsed in our online Awards archive.

For any further information about BL Labs or our Awards, please contact us at [email protected].

Movable Type is a tabletop word game, and something of a love letter to classic books and authors, made completely of custom playing cards. While the game’s appearance might remind you of Scrabble, it has some tricks up its sleeve to give it a much more modern and dynamic feel.

Figure 1: Movable Type Card Game

The initial idea for Movable Type was born around two years ago. I had been making games for some years and knew I wanted to do something with a word game. My main objective was to have a game that was very interactive, easy to grasp, and tactical, while also being very quick to play. As much as I love word games, some of them have a tendency to outstay their welcome. 

The central mechanism in Movable Type is called card-drafting. This method allows players to pick their letter cards each round – this does away with the large amounts of luck you find in many classic word games, and instead shifts attention onto the tactical decisions of the players. It also means that rules are kept very simple and that players can take their turns simultaneously, creating a much more dynamic play environment.

Movable Type - The Cards

The prototype for Movable Type was only a few weeks old when I settled on the art style I was going to use in the final product. I’ve been a long-time fan of the British Library Flickr account, which lets users browse through images from public domain books. Once I had spotted the large collection of initial capitals, I was sold!

Movable Type - Illustrated Letters

My wife, Tiffany Moon, is a graphic designer by trade. She helped clean up the images and present these beautiful pieces of art in a colourful new fashion, appropriate for a retail product. I also wanted portraits of some of my favourite authors to be in the game, so I commissioned Alisdair Wood to create woodcut-style images of ten classic, influential and diverse literary figures. Without those initial capital images taken from the British Library collection and used to direct the game’s overall style, Movable Type would likely not look half as impressive and definitely wouldn’t resonate with me and many players like the current style does.

Movable Type - Illustrated Famous People

I launched Movable Type on the crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, last year. Upon its release, it won the Imirt Irish Game Award for Best Analog Game and second runner-up for Game of the Year. It received good reception at several public events and sold out of its initial print run, so I decided that a second edition of the game was in order. That bigger and better second edition is funding on Kickstarter and should be in some select retail stores by mid to late 2018 (fingers crossed!).

Movable Type receiving the Commercial Category BL Lab Award, was a huge boon for the reputation of the game and myself as a game designer. Furthermore, it was a genuine honour to be at the British Library for this event and able to share my product with the audience there.

If this blog post has stimulated your interest in working with the British Library's digital collections, start a project and enter it for one of the BL Labs 2018 Awards! Join us on 12 November 2018 for the BL Labs annual Symposium at the British Library.

Posted by BL Labs on behalf of Robin David O’Keeffe

The British Library has recently run a fashion design competition using our digital collections to inspire a new generation of fashion designers. In partnership with the British Fashion Council and fashion house Teatum Jones, students from universities across the UK were invited to create a fashion portfolio which tells an inspirational story inspired by the British Library’s Flickr Collection.

The Flickr Commons Collection contains over 1 million images ‘snipped’ from around 65,000 digitised books largely from the 19th Century. This collection is ideal for creative researchers and has already inspired artists and designers.

This competition challenged students’ creativity and story-telling through design and research skills. Working to a brief set by the Library and Teatum Jones, students were given free rein to find inspiration from across the Library’s collections, ranging from South American costumes to aviation.

To open the competition and welcome to students to the Library we held a Fashion Research Masterclass as part of our postgraduate open day programme in October 2017. The day featured talks from experts across the Library and an inspirational Show and Tell focusing on variety of collections that could inspire fashion research and design.

The competition judging took place in January 2018, with 8 finalists from across the UK presenting their portfolios to a panel of specialists from the fashion sector including Paul Baptiste (Accessories Buying Manager, Fenwick), Catherine Teatum and Rob Jones (Creative Directors, Teatum Jones), Judith Rosser-Davies (British Fashion Council) and Mahendra Mahey (British Library Labs). Unfortunately we could only have one winner and we are delighted to announce Alanna Hilton from Edinburgh College of Art as our winner.

Alanna’s collection ‘Unlabelled’ has designs “that reject labelling [and] where consumers of all ages, sizes, ethnicities and genders can find beautiful clothes”. For winning the competition, Alanna received a financial prize from the British Fashion Council and membership of the British Library membership scheme. All of the submissions were incredibly strong, and we were very pleased to see the students all taking such different design routes, inspired by our collections.

The Library will continue to explore how we facilitate creative research process, as well as link it to business support provided by our Business and IP Centre. Our work with the fashion students highlighted the real variety in the ways researchers access our collections, find inspiration and use the library.

We are continuing to work with the British Fashion Council, exploring how to better reach this part of the research community and we will have an update from our winning designer later in the year. The project is also grateful to Innovate UK for their support.

This post is by Edmund Connolly from the British Library's Higher Education & Cultural Engagement department, he is on twitter as @Ed_Connolly.