Digital scholarship blog

All good things must come to an end, no I’m not talking about the collapse of a favourite high street chain store beginning with W, but the final few weeks of our Digital Storytelling exhibition, which closes on the 15^th October 2023. If you haven’t seen it yet, then this is your last chance to book!

Digital Storytelling showcases eleven different born digital works, including interactive narratives that respond to user input, reading experiences personalised by data feeds, and immersive multimedia story worlds developed through audience participation. From thought provoking autobiographical hypertexts to data journalism, uncanny ghost stories to weather poetry, steampunk literary adaptation to quirky Elizabethan medical comedy. 

If you want to hear more about this exhibition, Digital Curator Stella Wisdom will be giving two talks later this week. The first of these will be in-person on Thursday evening, 5^th October, in Richmond Lending Library for the Richmond Reads season of events, celebrating the joys and benefits of reading. The second will be held online on Friday morning, 6^th October, for the DARIAH-EU autumn 2023 Friday Frontiers series.

We are also delighted to share that there is a chapter about interactive digital books written by Giulia Carla Rossi, Curator for Digital Publications, in The Book by Design, which was recently launched by our colleagues in British Library Publishing. Giulia’s chapter discusses innovative Editions at Play publications, including Seed by Joanna Walsh and Breathe by Kate Pullinger, which are both currently displayed in Digital Storytelling.

Before the Digital Storytelling exhibition closes, we'd love you to join us for a party on the evening of Friday 13th October. For one night only, transmedia storyteller Yomi Ayeni will transform the British Library into the Clockwork Watch story world for an immersive steampunk late event.

Genre-bending DJ Sacha Dieu will be spinning the best in Balkan Gypsy, Electro Swing, and Global Beats. Professor Elemental will perform live for us, and we really hope he’ll sing I Love Libraries! You'll also be able to view the Digital Storytelling exhibition, and there will be quieter areas to explore 19^th Century London in Minecraft, play board games including Great Scott! The Game of Mad Invention with games librarian Marion Tessier, and to discover poetry with the Itinerant Poetry Librarian.

If you plan to party with us, book your ticket here.

Summer may be over, but there is much to look forward to this autumn, including our Late at the Library: Digital Steampunk event on Friday 13^th October 2023, where we invite you to immerse yourself in the Clockwork Watch story world, party with chap hop maestro Professor Elemental and explore 19th-century London in Minecraft. If these kind of shenanigans sound right up your street, then book tickets here and join us!

Clockwork Watch by Yomi Ayeni is currently showcased in the British Library’s Digital Storytelling exhibition, which is open until 15 October 2023. Set in a retro-futurist steampunk Victorian England, Clockwork Watch is a participatory story that includes multiple voices and perspectives on themes relating to empire, colonialism, exploitation and resistance, which is told across a range of formats, including a series of graphic novels (there is an overview of these titles here), immersive theatre, role play, and an online newspaper the London Gazette.

Steampunk Illustration by Brett Walsh

For the evening of Friday 13^th October, the British Library will transform into the story world of the next part of the Clockwork Watch narrative. Featuring an auction of the last few remaining properties on Peak B, and the opening of bids for Peak C, new housing developments situated on floating islands hovering over the British Channel. Leggett and Scarper, the estate agents managing these properties, will also be inviting inventors or anyone with a solution to problems plaguing these floating islands, to submit their plans for a chance to win a Golden Ticket to one of the new homes on Peak C.

© Clockwork Watch / Graham Leggett 2023

Attendees will be able to explore the streets of Sherlock Holmes’ London in Minecraft created by Blockworks and Lancaster University, visit the Night Market, have a photograph taken with authentic Victorian Dark Box photography, or a portrait drawn by artist Dr Geof, and that’s before the auction begins. But be warned, buying your way into this real estate dreamworld is not straightforward – this night is a golden opportunity for the Clockwork Watch underbelly of pickpockets, rogues and vagabonds.

Dressing up and joining in is heartily encouraged. To prepare for this event, we suggest reading the Clockwork Watch graphic novels, you can order these online, or purchase the first two ominbus editions from the British Library’s onsite shop. Also check out the London Gazette website and this special British Library edition of the newspaper. We hope to see you there!

© Clockwork Watch

Are you working in Galleries-Libraries-Archives-Museums (GLAM) and cultural heritage organisations as research support and research-active staff? Are you interested in developing knowledge and skills in open scholarship? Would you like to establish good practices, share your experience with others and collaborate? If your answer is yes to one or more of these questions, we invite you to join the Cultural Heritage Open Scholarship Network (CHOSN).

Initiated by the British Library’s Research Infrastructure Services built on the experience of and positive responses received from the open scholarship training programme, which was run earlier this year. CHOSN is a community of practice for research support and research-active staff who work in GLAMs, organisations interested in developing and sharing open scholarship knowledge and skills, organising events, and supporting each other in this area. 

GLAMs demonstrate a significant amount of research showcases, but we may find ourselves with inadequate resources to make that research openly available, gain relevant open scholarship skills to make it happen, or even identify what forms research in these environments. CHOSN aims to provide a platform to create synergy for those aiming for good practice in open scholarship.

This network can be of interest to anyone who is facilitating, enabling, supporting research activities in GLAM organisations. They include but are not limited to research support staff, research-active staff, librarians, curatorial teams, IT specialists, copyright officers and so on. Anyone interested in the areas of open scholarship and works in cultural heritage organisations are welcome.

Join us in the Cultural Heritage Open Scholarship Network (CHOSN) to;

• explore research activities, roles in GLAMs and make them visible,
• develop knowledge and skills in open scholarship,
• carry out capacity development activities to learn and grow, and
• create a community of practice to collaborate and support each other.

We have set up a JISC mailing list to start communication with the network, you can join by signing up here. We will shortly organise an online meeting to kick off the network plans, explore how to move forward and to collectively discuss what we would like to do next. This will all be communicated via the CHOSN mailing list.

If you have any questions about CHOSN, we are happy to hear from you at [email protected].

This year we will be continuing our collaboration with the British Fashion Council running our annual student research competition, which encourages fashion students to use the British Library collections in creating their fashion designs. Once again, we will start the collaboration with a fashion show produced by a leading designer. This year we are delighted to be working with Priya Ahluwalia. Earlier this year Priya worked with the Business and IP centre, contributing to the Inspiring Entrepreneurs’ International Women’s Day event, which discussed how we can best embrace and encourage diversity and inclusion in business.

On 15 September during London Fashion Week Priya will showcase her SS24 collection at the British Library. Following the show, Priya will lead this year’s student competition, focusing on the importance of research in design process. As a part of this competition students across the UK will create fashion portfolios inspired by the Library’s unique collections.

The previous collaborations with the British Fashion Council involved a range of exciting designers such as Nabil El Nayal, Phoebe English, Supriya Lele and Charles Jeffrey.

Phoebe English’s fashion installation at the British Library in 2021

The previous student work utilised the riches of the Library’s digital and physical collections, with the Flickr collection being especially popular with students. However, the inspiration came from many different directions - from art books, photographs and maps to the reading room bags.

This year’s student competition will be launched in October 2023.

From the winning portfolio of Mihai Popesku, Middlesex University student, who used the Library collections to research traditional Romanian dress

Update: there's been some great coverage in the fashion press (and social media), including this Vogue article that begins 'Priya Ahluwalia’s show purposefully took place at the British Library. More than just a venue, it tied into the theme of her work: bringing forgotten or untold stories about talented people to attention'.

The short version: crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is an exciting field, rich in opportunities for collaborative, interdisciplinary research and practice. It includes online volunteering, citizen science, citizen history, digital public participation, community co-production, and, increasingly, human computation and other systems that will change how participants relate to digital cultural heritage. New technologies like image labelling, text transcription and natural language processing, plus trends in organisations and societies at large mean constantly changing challenges (and potential). Our white paper is an attempt to make recommendations for funders, organisations and practitioners in the near and distant future. You can let us know what we got right, and what we could improve by commenting on Recommendations, Challenges and Opportunities for the Future of Crowdsourcing in Cultural Heritage: a White Paper.

Engineer Karen Leadlay in Analog Computer Lab, 1964, SDASM Archives

The longer version: The Collective Wisdom project was funded by an AHRC networking grant to bring experts from the UK and the US together to document the state of the art in designing, managing and integrating crowdsourcing activities, and to look ahead to future challenges and unresolved issues that could be addressed by larger, longer-term collaboration on methods for digitally-enabled participation.

Our open access Collective Wisdom Handbook: perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is the first outcome of the project, our expert workshops were a second.

Mia (me) and Sam Blickhan launched our White Paper for comment on pubpub at the Digital Humanities 2023 conference in Graz, Austria, in July this year, with Meghan Ferriter attending remotely. Our short paper abstract and DH2023 slides are online at Zenodo

So - what's the future of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage? Head on over to Recommendations, Challenges and Opportunities for the Future of Crowdsourcing in Cultural Heritage: a White Paper and let us know what you think! You've got until the end of September…

You can also read our earlier post on 'community review' for a sense of the feedback we're after - in short, what resonates, what needs tweaking, what examples could we include?

To whet your appetite, here's a preview of our five recommendations. (To find out why we make those recommendations, you'll have to read the White Paper):

• Infrastructure: Platforms need sustainability. Funding should not always be tied to novelty, but should also support the maintenance, uptake and reuse of well-used tools.
• Evidencing and Evaluation: Help create an evaluation toolkit for cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects; provide ‘recipes’ for measuring different kinds of success. Shift thinking about value from output/scale/product to include impact on participants' and community well-being.
• Skills and Competencies: Help create a self-guided skills inventory assessment resource, tool, or worksheet to support skills assessment, and develop workshops to support their integrity and adoption.
• Communities of Practice: Fund informal meetups, low-cost conferences, peer review panels, and other opportunities for creating and extending community. They should have an international reach, e.g. beyond the UK-US limitations of the initial Collective Wisdom project funding.
• Incorporating Emergent Technologies and Methods: Fund educational resources and workshops to help the field understand opportunities, and anticipate the consequences of proposed technologies.

What have we missed? Which points do you want to boost? (For example, we discovered how many of our points apply to digital scholarship projects in general). You can '+1' on points that resonate with you, suggest changes to wording, ask questions, provide examples and references, or (constructively, please) challenge our arguments. Our funding only supported participants from the UK and US, so we're very keen to hear from folk from the rest of the world.

The British Library has been a leading contributor to IIIF, the International Image Interoperability Framework, and the Universal Viewer for many years. We're about to take the next step in this work - and you can join us!

In this post, Dr Mia Ridge, product owner for the Universal Viewer (UV) 2015-18, and Dr Rossitza Atanassova, UV business owner 2019-2023, share some background information on how new posts advertised for a UV product team will help shape the future of the Viewer at the Library and contribute to international work on the UV, IIIF standards and activities.

Detail from Add MS 74236 'The Sherborne Missal' displayed in the Universal Viewer

 The creation of a Universal Viewer product team is part of wider infrastructure changes at the British Library, and marks a shift from contributing via specific UV development projects to thinking of the Viewer as a product. We'll continue to work with the Open Collective while focusing on Library-specific issues to support other activities across the organisation. 

Staff across the Library have contributed to the development of the Universal Viewer, including curators, digitisation teams and technology staff. Staff engage through bespoke training delivered by the IIIF Consortium, participation at IIIF workshops and conferences and experimentation with new tools, such as the digital storytelling tool Exhibit, to engage wide audiences. Other Library work with IIIF includes a collaboration with Zooniverse to enable items to be imported to Zooniverse via IIIF manifests, making crowdsourcing more accessible to organisations with IIIF items. Most recently with funding from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation we updated the UV to play audio from the British Library sound collections. 

Over half a million items from the British Library's collections are already available via the Universal Viewer, and that number grows all the time. Work on the UV has already let us retire around 35 other image viewers, a significant reduction in maintenance overheads and creating a more consistent experience for our readers.

However, there's a lot more to do! User expectations change as people use other document and media viewers, whether that's other IIIF tools like Mirador or the latest commercial streaming video platforms. We also need to work on some technical debt, ensure accessibility standards are met, improve infrastructure, and consolidate services for the benefits to users. Future challenges include enhancing UV capabilities to display annotations, formats such as newspapers, and complex objects such as 3D.

British Library Universal Viewer displaying Add MS 12278

 If you'd like to work in collaboration with an international open source community on a viewer that will reach millions of users around the world, one of these jobs may be for you!

Product Owner (job reference R00000196)

Ensure the strategic vision, development, and success of the project. Your primary goal will be to understand user needs, prioritise features and enhancements, and collaborate with the development team and community to deliver a high-quality open source product. 

Research Software Engineer (2 posts) (job reference R00000197)

Help identify requirements, and design and implement online interfaces to showcase our collections, help answer research questions, and support application of novel methods across team activities.

Senior Test Engineer (job reference R00000198)

Help devise requirements, develop high quality test cases, and support application of novel methods across team activities

To apply please visit the British Library recruitment site.  Applications close on 25 September 2023. Interview dates are listed in the job ads. Any questions? Drop us a line at [email protected].

This blog post was originally published on Wikimedia’s community blog, Diff, by Satdeep Gill (WMF) and Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert (Digital Curator for Asian and African Collections, British Library)

The British Library has joined hands with the Wikimedia Foundation to support the Wikisource Loves Manuscripts (WiLMa) project, sharing 76 Javanese manuscripts, including what is probably the largest Javanese manuscript in the world, digitised as part of the Yogyakarta Digitisation Project. The manuscripts, which are now held in the British Library, were taken from the Kraton (Palace) of Yogyakarta following a British attack in June 1812. The British Library’s digitisation project was funded by Mr. S P Lohia and included conservation, photography, quality assurance and publication on the Library’s Digitised Manuscripts website, and the presentation of complete sets of digital images to the Governor of Yogyakarta Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono X, the National Library of Indonesia, and the Library and Archives Board of Yogyakarta.

3D model of Menak Amir Hamza (British Library Add MS 12309), probably the largest Javanese manuscript in the world

For the WiLMa project, the scanned images, representing more than 30,000 pages, were merged into pdfs and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ilham Nurwansah, Wikimedian-in-Residence at PPIM and User:Bennylin from the Indonesian community. The manuscripts are now available on Wikimedia Commons in the Category:British Library manuscripts from Yogyakarta Digitisation Project.

“Never before has a library of Javanese manuscripts of such importance been made available to the internet, especially for easy access to the almost 100 million Javanese people worldwide.”

User:Bennylin said about the British Library donation

As a global movement, Wikimedia is able to connect the Library with communities of origin, who can use the digitised manuscripts to revitalise their language online. As such, we have a history of collaboration with the Wikimedia community, hosting Wikimedians-in-Residence and working with the Wikisource community. In 2021, we collaborated with the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group to organise two Wikisource competitions (in Spring and Autumn). Forty rare Bengali books, digitised as a part of the Two Centuries of Indian Print project, were made available on Wikisource. The Bengali Wikisource community has corrected more than 5,000 pages of text, which were OCRed as part of the project.

“As part of our global engagement with Wikimedia communities, we were thrilled to engage in a partnership with the Bengali Wikisource community for the proofreading of rare and unique books digitised as part of the Two Centuries of Indian Print project. We extend our gratitude towards the community’s unwavering commitment and the enthusiasm of its members, which have greatly enhanced the accessibility of these historic gems for readers and researchers.”

Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator, British Library

The developing Javanese Wikisource community has already started using the newly digitised Javanese manuscripts in their project, and has plans ranging from transliteration and translation, to recording the content being sung, as originally intended. (Recording of Ki Sujarwo Joko Prehatin, singing (menembang) the texts of Javanese manuscripts, at the British Library, 12 March 2019; recording by Mariska Adamson).

Screenshot of a Javanese manuscript being used for training an HTR model using Transkribus

The Library’s collaboration with the Javanese community started earlier this year, when the Wikisource community included three manuscripts from the Library’s Henry D. Ginsburg Legacy Digitisation Projects in the list of focus texts for a Wikisource competition. Parts of these three long manuscripts were proofread by the community during the competition and now they are being used to create a Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) model for the Javanese script using Transkribus, as part of our ongoing WiLMa initiative.

Stay tuned for further updates about WiLMa Learning Partners Network!

Contents

Introduction

Share Family and National Bibliographies

       What is a National bibliography?

       BNB in the Share Family

Benefits

Future developments

Beta service

Further information

Introduction

The British National Bibliography (BNB), first published in January 1950, is a weekly listing of new books and journals published or distributed in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.  Over the last seventy-three years, the BNB has adapted to changing customer needs by embracing new technologies, from cards in the 1950s to mark-up languages for data exchange in the 1970s and CD-ROM in the 1980s. The BNB now provides online access to details of over 5 million publications and forthcoming titles, ranging in scope from computer science to history, from novels to textbooks.

1. Examples of British National Bibliography records, April 19th 2023. Please click the image to see it in full size & detail.

In 2011, the Library launched the Linked Open Data BNB.  At that time, linked data was an emerging technology using Web protocols to link data sets, as envisaged in Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s concept of a Semantic Web^[1].  Our initial foray into linked data was successful from a technical perspective. We were able to convert BNB data held in Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) format into linked data structures and make it available in a variety of schemas under an open licence.  Nevertheless, we lacked the capacity to re-model our data in order to realise the potential of linked data.  As the technology matured, we began to look around for partners with whom we could collaborate to take BNB forward.

As described in my September 2020 blogpost, British Library Joins Share-VDE Linked Data Community, the British Library joined the Share Community (now the Share Family) to develop our linked data service. The Share Linked Data Environment is “a global family built on collaboration that brings libraries, archives and museums together with a common goal and joins their knowledge in an ever-widening network of inter-connected bibliographic data.” (Share Family, 2022).

Share Family and National Bibliographies

“The Share Family is a suite of innovative tools and services, developed and driven by libraries, for libraries, in an international collaborative, consortial effort. Share-VDE enables the discovery of knowledge to increase user engagement with library and cultural heritage collections.”^[2]

2. Share family components^[3]. Please click the image to see it in full size & detail.

The Share Family has supported us through the transition from our traditional MARC data to linked open data.  We provided a full copy of the British National Bibliography to the Share team for identification and clustering of entities, e.g. works, publications, persons. Working with colleagues from other institutions on Share-VDE working groups we contribute to the development of the underlying data structures and the presentation of data.  This collaborative approach has enabled delivery of the British National Bibliography as the first institutional tenant of the Share Family National Bibliographies Portal. 

What is a National bibliography?

“National bibliographies are a permanent record of the cultural and intellectual output of a nation or country, which is witnessed by its publishing output. They gather the bibliographic information of current publications to preserve and provide ongoing access to this record.”

IFLA Bibliography Section

The IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) Register of national bibliographies contains 52 entries, ranging from Andorra to Vietnam.  National bibliographies vary in scope, but each provides insights into the intellectual and cultural history of society, literature and publishing.  The Share Family National Bibliographies Portal offers the potential for clustering and searching multiple national bibliographies on a single platform.

BNB in the Share Family

3. Screenshot BNB home screen. Please click the image to see it in full size & detail.

The British Library is proud that the British National Bibliography is the first tenant selected for the Share Family National Bibliographies Portal.

BNB is now available to explore in Beta: https://bl.natbib-lod.org. You can search for publications, original works and people, as illustrated by these examples:

You can use the national bibliography to search for a specific publication, such as a large print edition of the novel Small island by Andrea Levy.

4. Screenshot: Bibliographic description of large print edition of Small Island by Andrea Levy. Please click the image to see it in full size & detail.

You can also find original works inspired by earlier works:

5. Screenshot: Results set for publication of the work, Small island by Helen Edmundso. Please click the image to see it in full size & detail.

Alternatively, you can search for works by a specific author… 

6. Screenshot: Original works by Douglas Adams. Please click the image to see it in full size & detail.

…or about a specific person

7. Screenshot: Original works about Douglas Adams. Please click the image to see it in full size & detail.

…or by organization

8. Screenshot: Results set for BBC. Please click the image to see it in full size & detail.

Benefits

What benefit do we expect to gain from this collaboration?

• We profit from practical experience our collaborators have gained through other linked data initiatives
• We gain access to a state of the art, extensible infrastructure designed for library data
• We gain a new channel for dissemination of the BNB, in aggregation with other national bibliographies

We are able to re-tool our metadata for the 21^st Century:

• Our data will be remodelled and clustered making it more compatible with current data models, including the IFLA Library Reference Model, RDA: Resource Description and Access, and Bibframe
• Our data will be enriched with URIs that will make it more effective in linked data environments
• The entity-centred view of the British National Bibliography offers new perspectives for researchers

Future developments

Conversion of the BNB and publication in the National Bibliographies Portal is only the beginning. 

• The BNB data from the Cluster Knowledge base will also be published in the triple store
• Original records will be available to the British Library as Bibframe 2.0, for dissemination or reuse as linked data
• Users will be provided with access to the data via data dumps and a SPARQL endpoint
• Our MARC records will be enriched with original Share URIs and URIs from external sources
• Other national bibliographies will join BNB in the national bibliographies portal

The British National Bibliography represents only a fraction of the Library’s data.   You can explore the British Library’s collection through our catalogue, which we plan to contribute to Share-VDE in future.

Beta service

The British National Bibliography in the Share Family is being made available in Beta. The service is still being tested. The interface and the functionality are subject to change and may not work for everyone.  You can tell us what you think about the service or report problems by contacting [email protected].

Further information:

British National Bibliography https://bnb.bl.uk  

Share VDE http://www.share-family.org/

Share Family wiki https://wiki.share-vde.org/wiki/Main_Page

Share VDE Virtual Discovery Environment in linked open data https://svde.org/

National Bibliographies in Linked Open Data https://natbib-lod.org

British National Bibliography Linked Open Data Portal https://bl.natbib-lod.org

Footnotes

[1]  Berners-Lee, Tim; James Hendler; Ora Lassila (May 17, 2001). "The Semantic Web". Appeared in: Scientific American. (284(5):34-43 (May 2001). 

[2] Share-VDE: supporting the creation, management and discovery of linked open data for libraries: executive summary. Share-VDE Executive Committee. December 7^th, 2022. Share-VDE Website (viewed 19^th June 2023)

[3] Share Family – Linked data ecosystem. How does it work?  http://www.share-family.org/  (viewed on 23^rd June 2023)