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 second page in this series is a case study on the impact of our Digital Scholarship Training Programme, captured by the Wayback Machine on 3 October 2023.
Graham Jevon: A Digital Transformation Story
'The Digital Scholarship Training Programme has introduced me to new software, opened my eyes to digital opportunities, provided inspiration for me to improve, and helped me attain new skills'
Key points
Graham Jevon has been an active participant in the Digital Scholarship Training Programme
Through gaining digital skills he has been able to build software to automate tricky processes
Graham went on to become a Coleridge Fellowship scholar, putting these digital skills to good use!
Find out more on what Graham has been up to on his Staff Profile
Did you know? 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.
The Digital Scholarship Training Programme
Since joining the library in 2018, the Digital Scholarship Training Programme has been integral to the trajectory of both my personal development and the working practices within my team.
The very first training course I attended at the library was the introduction to OpenRefine. The key thing that I took away from this course was not necessarily the skills to use the software, but simply understanding OpenRefine’s functionality and the possibilities the software offered for my team. This inspired me to spend time after the session devising a workflow that enhanced our cataloguing efficiency and accuracy, enabling me to create more detailed and accurate metadata in less time. With OpenRefine I created a semi-automated workflow that required the kind of logical thinking associated with computer programming, but without the need to understand a computer programming language.
Computing for Cultural Heritage
The use of this kind of logical thinking and the introduction to writing computational expressions within OpenRefine sparked an interest in me to learn a computing language such as Python. I started a free online Python introduction, but without much context to the course my attention quickly waned. When the Digital Scholarship Computing for Cultural Heritage course was announced I therefore jumped at the chance to apply.
I went into the Computing for Cultural Heritage course hoping to learn skills that would enable me to solve cataloguing and administrative problems, skills that would help me process data in spreadsheets more efficiently and accurately. I had one particular problem in mind and I was able to address this problem in the project module of the course. For the project we had to design a software program. I created a program (known as ReG), which automatically generates structured catalogue references for archival collections. I was extremely pleased with the outcome of this project and this piece of software is something that my team now use in our day-to-day activities. An error-prone task that could take hours or days to complete manually in Excel now takes just a few seconds and is always 100% accurate.
This in itself was a great outcome of the course that met my hopes at the outset. But this course did so much more. I came away from the course with a completely new set of data science skills that I could build on and apply in other areas. For example, I recently created another piece of software that helps my team survey any digitisation data that we receive, to help us spot any errors or problems that need fixing.
The British Library Coleridge Research Fellowship
The data science skills were particularly instrumental in enabling me to apply successfully for the British Library’s Coleridge research fellowship. This research fellowship is partly a personal development scheme and it enabled me the opportunity to put my new data science skills into practice in a research environment (rather than simply using them in a cataloguing context). My previous academic research experience was based on traditional analogue methods. But for the Coleridge project I used crowdsourcing to extract data for analysis from two collections of newspapers.
The third and final Computing for Cultural Heritage module focussed on machine learning and I was able to apply these skills directly to the crowdsourcing project Agents of Enslavement. The first crowdsourcing task, for example, asked the public to draw rectangles around four specific types of newspaper advertisement. To help ensure that no adverts were missed and to account for individual errors, each image was classified by five different people. I therefore had to aggregate the results. Thanks to the new data science skills I had learned, I was able to write a Python script that used machine learning algorithms to aggregate 92,000 total rectangles drawn by the public into an aggregated dataset of 25,000 unique newspaper advertisements.
The OpenRefine and Computing for Cultural Heritage course are just two of the many digital scholarship training sessions that I have attended. But they perfectly illustrate the value of the Digital Scholarship Training Programme, which has introduced me to new software, opened my eyes to digital opportunities, provided inspiration for me to improve, and helped me attain new skills that I have been able to put into practice both for the benefit of myself and my team.
A post by Dr Gethin Rees, Lead Curator, Digital Mapping...
I have recently started a community fellowship working with geographical data from the Sloane Lab project. The project is titled A Generous Approach to Web Mapping Sloane’s Collections and deals with the collection of Hans Sloane, amassed in the eighteenth century and a foundation collection for the British Museum and subsequently the Natural History Museum and the British Library. The aim of the fellowship is to create interactive maps that enable users to view the global breadth of Sloane’s collections, to discover collection items and to click through to their web pages. The Sloane Lab project, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Towards a National collection programme, has created the Sloane Lab knowledge base (SLKB), a rich and interconnected knowledge graph of this vast collection. My fellowship seeks to link and visualise digital representations of British Museum and British Library objects in the SLKB and I will be guided by project researchers, Andreas Vlachidis and Daniele Metilli from University College, London.
Figure 1. Bust of Hans Sloane in the British Library.
The first stage of the fellowship is to use data science methods to extract place names from the records of Sloane’s collections that exist in the catalogues today. These records will then be aligned with a gazetteer, a list of places and associated data, such as World Historical Gazetteer (https://whgazetteer.org/). Such alignment results in obtaining coordinates in the form of latitude and longitude. These coordinates mean the places can be displayed on a map, and the fellowship will draw on Peripleo web map software to do this (https://github.com/britishlibrary/peripleo).
Figure 2 Web map using Web Mercator projection, from the Georeferencer.
The fellowship also aims to critically evaluate the use of mapping technologies (eg Google Maps Embed API, MapBoxGL, Leaflet) to present cultural heritage collections on the web. One area that I will examine is the use of the Web Mercator projection as a standard option for presenting humanities data using web maps. A map projection is a method of representing part of the surface of the earth on a plane (flat) surface. The transformation from a sphere or similar to a flat representation always introduces distortion. There are innumerable projections or ways to make this transformation and each is suited to different purposes, with strengths and weaknesses. Web maps are predominantly used for navigation and the Web Mercator projection is well suited to this purpose as it preserves angles.
Figure 3 Map of the world based on Mercator projection including indicatrices to visualise local distortions to area. By Justin Kunimune. Source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mercator_with_Tissot%27s_Indicatrices_of_Distortion.svg Used under CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.
However, this does not necessarily mean it is the right projection for presenting humanities data. Indeed, it is unsuitable for the aims and scope of Sloane Lab, first, due to well-documented visual compromises —such as the inflation of landmasses like Europe at the expense of, for example, Africa and the Caribbean— that not only hamper visual analysis but also recreate and reinforce global inequities and injustices. Second, the Mercator projection has a history, entangled with processes like colonialism, empire and slavery that also shaped Hans Sloane’s collections. The fellowship therefore examines the use of other projections, such as those that preserve distance and area, to represent contested collections and collecting practices in interactive maps like Leaflet or Open Layers. Geography is intimately connected with identity and thus digital maps offer powerful opportunities for presenting cultural heritage collections. The fellowship examines how reinvention of a commonly used visualisation form can foster thought-provoking engagement with Sloane’s collections and hopefully be applied to visualise the geography of heritage more widely.
Figure 4 Map of the world based on Albers equal-area projection including indicatrices to visualise local distortions to area. By Justin Kunimune. Source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albers_with_Tissot%27s_Indicatrices_of_Distortion.svg Used under CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.
One of the things we wanted to do was run a series of three Wikithons, each celebrating a different aspect of the collection: in this case, the role of women; the ways in which censorship impacted creativity for Black theatre makers and the political surveillance of Black creatives. Alongside these Wikithons, we are developing a Wikibase structure to enable users to search the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays index cards from anywhere in the world. A blog on this work is forthcoming.
What transpired from our Wikithon dream was a series of three excellent events, interactions and collaborative work with a number of exceptional researchers and historians, all mixed in with a year of administrative tumult as we felt the impact of numerous strikes (academic and transport), the Royal funeral and the ongoing implications of the pandemic.
This was an important learning opportunity for us to examine the role and impact of Wikithons, and consider different methods of delivery and engagement, tying into bigger conversations happening around Wikipedia on an international scale. It was a year in three Wikithons!
Our first event took place in March 2022. Having only just gotten over the dreaded Covid myself, the long-term impact of the pandemic was sorely felt: we were just out of some winter restrictions, and we felt it was best to hold this event as an online session, due to the uncertainty of the months ahead. Further to this, we had to look at dates that would not interrupt or clash with the ongoing University and College Union strikes. Once we had this in hand, we were ready to open the (virtual) doors to Black Theatre and the Archive: Making Women Visible, 1900-1950.
We were lucky to have speakers from the Library, Alexander Lock and Laura Walker, to talk about and contextualise the materials, while Kate herself offered a thematic and political overview of the importance of the work we were to embark upon. Despite the strikes, the pandemic and the demands of early 2022, 9 editors added over 1600 words, 21 references and 84 total edits. Changes made on this day have now been viewed over 25000 times. For a small batch of changes, that is a significant impact! Articles edited included Elisabeth Welch, Anna Lucasta and Edric Connor. I was grateful to Stuart Prior and Dr Francesca Allfrey for the training support at this event, and to Heather Pascall from the News Reference Team who offered her expertise on the day. The British Newspaper Archive also gave us access to their online resource for this event, which was both generous and very helpful.
Image of Pauline Henriques, BBC UK Government, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Event Two (November 2022)
After a summer of political upheaval, a royal funeral and further transport strikes, we finally made it to Leeds Playhouse on the 7th of November 2022. As luck would have it, there was a train strike running that day, but as most of our participants were local to Leeds, there was thankfully very little impact on our numbers. Leeds Playhouse was the perfect home for this Wikithon: Furnace Producer Rio Matchett was a fantastic ambassador for the venue, and made sure we were fed and watered in style. Hope Miyoba was there to support me in training both sessions and I am so grateful to her for her support, particularly as my laptop wasn’t working!
We took over the Playhouse for the full day, running Wikithon sessions in the morning and afternoon, with a lunchtime talk by Joe Williams of Heritage Corner Leeds which was attended by morning and afternoon attendees, as well as some members of the public. Joe’s talk on Sankofa Yorkshire was a brilliant overview of Black creativity in the Leeds area throughout history, and informed a lot of our conversation around the politics and practicalities of Wiki editing in an equitable way. Articles edited included Una Marson, a central figure in Kate’s research and the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays.
It was fantastic to be in person again, and to meet the excellent community of creatives at Leeds Playhouse. Joe’s talk was inspirational and the questions it provoked regarding the way in which the Wikimedia guidelines for notability can negatively impact the prevalence of Black creatives on Wiki were a much needed point of discussion.
Our arrival at the iconic National Archives building at Kew was long awaited and months in the planning. Drs Jo Pugh and Kevin Searle were exceptionally helpful and supportive as we planned our way to the ‘Black Theater Making and Surveillance’ event in January 2023. We were delighted to be in the building, and even happier to welcome Perry Blankson of the Young Historians Project to present his work on The Secret War on Black Power in Britain and the Caribbean. Gathering in a central space in the Archives, Dr Searle curated an amazing selection of archival materials for participants to view and utilise, including documents from the Information Research Department.
Some of the documents on display at Kew, image by the author
Our conversations on this day turned towards the idea of Wiki notability and the use of primary sources in establishing authority on Wikipedia in particular. I was grateful once again to Stuart Prior and Dr Francesca Allfrey for their support and training assistance, and moreover for the thoughtful and important conversations we fostered around the ways in which the politics of the present day can cloud and impact what happens on Wiki and how events and politics can be reported. A truly breathtaking moment was when Dr Searle and his colleagues allowed us to look at the Windrush manifest, a material reminder of a significant and hugely important moment in modern Britain. It was wonderful, also, to welcome Dr Cara Rodway, Head of Research Development and Philip Abraham, Deputy Head of the Eccles Centre, to join us in seeing this final event in the Wikithon series.
Despite a year of unforeseeable events, disruption and obstacles, I am immensely proud of what this series of Wikithons achieved, bringing aspects of modern society into direct conversation with our literary archives, asking questions about race, equality and diversity in Britain. We were lucky to work with creative practitioners and speakers like Joe Williams and Perry Blankson, and to be afforded the chance to really think about what it is to edit Wiki, and to try to improve the world in this way. It has allowed me to think more deeply about the wider Wiki conversations around how best to engage with and train new Wiki editors, and how to look at collections in new and impactful ways. I am very grateful to the American Trust for the British Library and the Eccles Centre for American studies for their support in achieving this work.
This blogpost is by Dr Lucy Hinnie, Wikimedian in Residence, British Library. She is on Twitter @BL_Wikimedian.
Following on from last week’s post, have you signed up for our Wikithon already? If you are interested in Black theatre history and making women visible, and want to learn how to edit Wikipedia, please do join us online, on Monday 28th March, from 10am to 1.30pm BST, over Zoom.
Remember the first step is to book your place here, via Eventbrite.
Finding Sources in The British Newspaper Archive
We are grateful to the British Newspaper Archive and Findmypast for granting our participants access to their resources on the day of the event. If you’d like to learn more about this Archive beforehand, there are some handy guides to how to do this below.
I used a quick British Newspaper Archive Search to look for information on Una Marson, a playwright and artist whose work is very important in the timeframe of this Wikithon (1900-1950). As you can see, there were over 1000 results. I was able to view images of Una at gallery openings, art exhibitions and read all about her work.
Findmypast focuses more on legal records of people, living and dead. It’s a dream website for genealogists and those interested in social history. They’ve recently uploaded the results of the 1921 census, so there is a lot of material about people’s lives in the early 20th century.
The Wikipedia Logo, Nohat (concept by Paullusmagnus), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Once you have done that, or if you already have a Wikipedia account, please join our event dashboard and go through the introductory exercises, which cover:
Wikipedia Essentials
Editing Basics
Evaluating Articles and Sources
Contributing Images and Media Files
Sandboxes and Mainspace
Sources and Citations
Plagiarism
These are all short exercises that will help familiarise you with Wikipedia and its processes. Don’t have time to do them? We get it, and that’s totally fine - we’ll cover the basics on the day too!
You may want to verify your Wikipedia account - this function exists to make sure that people are contributing responsibly to Wikipedia. The easiest and swiftest way to verify your account is to do 10 small edits. You could do this by correcting typos or adding in missing dates. However, another way to do this is to find articles where citations are needed, and add them via Citation Hunt. For further information on adding citations, watching this video may be useful.
Happier with an asynchronous approach?
If you cannot join the Zoom event on Monday 28th March, but would like to contribute, please do check out and sign up to our dashboard. The online dashboard training exercises will be an excellent starting point. From there, all of your edits and contributions will be registered, and you can be proud of yourself for making the world of Wikipedia a better place, in your own time.
Digital Curator Dr Mia Ridge writes, In case you need a break from whatever combination of weather, people and news is around you, here are some ways you can entertain yourself (or the kids!) while helping make collections of the British Library more findable, or help researchers understand our past. You might even learn something or make new discoveries along the way!
Mia Ridge writes: Living with Machines is a collaboration between the British Library and the Alan Turing Institute with partner universities. Help us understand the 'machine age' through the eyes of ordinary people who lived through it. Our refreshed task builds on our previous work, and includes fresh newspaper titles, such as the Cotton Factory Times.
Launched in July this year, Agents of Enslavement? is a research project which explores the ways in which colonial newspapers in the Caribbean facilitated and challenged the practice of slavery. One goal is to create a database of enslaved people identified within these newspapers. This benefits people researching their family history as well as those who simply want to understand more about the lives of enslaved people and their acts of resistance.
Dr. Gethin Rees writes: The community have now georeferenced 93% of 1277 maps that were added from our War Office Archive back in July (as mentioned in our previous newsletter).
Some of the remaining maps are quite tricky to georeference and so if there is a perplexing map that you would like some guidance with do get in contact with myself and our curator for modern mapping by emailing [email protected] and we will try to help. Please do look forward to some exciting news maps being released on the platform in 2022!
Posted by Mahendra Mahey, former Manager of British Library Labs or "BL Labs" for short
[estimated reading time of around 15 minutes]
This is is my last day working as manager of BL Labs, and also my final posting on the Digital Scholarship blog. I thought I would take this chance to reflect on my journey of almost 9 years in helping to set up, maintain and enabling BL Labs to become a permanent fixture at the British Library (BL).
BL Labs was the first digital Lab in a national library, anywhere in the world, that gets people to experiment with its cultural heritage digital collections and data. There are now several Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum Labs or 'GLAM Labs' for short around the world, with an active community which I helped build, from 2018.
I am really proud I was there from the beginning to implement the original proposal which was written by several colleagues, but especially Adam Farquhar, former head of Digital Scholarship at the British Library (BL). The project was at first generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation through four rounds of funding as well as support from the BL. In April 2021, the project became a permanently funded fixture, helped very much by my new manager Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education and Science.
The great news is that BL Labs is going to stay after I have left. The position of leading the Lab will soon be advertised. Hopefully, someone will get a chance to work with my helpful and supportive colleague Technical Lead of Labs, Dr Filipe Bento, bright, talented and very hard working Maja and other great colleagues in Digital Research and wider at the BL.
The beginnings, the BL and me!
I met Adam Farquhar and Aly Conteh (Former Head of Digital Research at the BL) in December 2012. They must have liked something about me because I started working on the project in January 2013, though I officially started in March 2013 to launch BL Labs.
I must admit, I had always felt a bit intimidated by the BL. My first visit was in the early 1980s before the St Pancras site was opened (in 1997) as a Psychology student. I remember coming up from Wolverhampton on the train to get a research paper about "Serotonin Pathways in Rats when sleeping" by Lidov, feeling nervous and excited at the same time. It felt like a place for 'really intelligent educated people' and for those who were one for the intellectual elites in society. It also felt for me a bit like it represented the British empire and its troubled history of colonialism, especially some of the collections which made me feel uncomfortable as to why they were there in the first place.
I remember thinking that the BL probably wasn't a place for some like me, a child of Indian Punjabi immigrants from humble beginnings who came to England in the 1960s. Actually, I felt like an imposter and not worthy of being there.
Nearly 9 years later, I can say I learned to respect and even cherish what was inside it, especially the incredible collections, though I also became more confident about expressing stronger views about the decolonisation of some of these. I became very fond of some of the people who work or use it, there are some really good kind-hearted souls at the BL. However, I never completely lost that 'imposter and being an outsider' feeling.
What I remember at that time, going for my interview, was having this thought, what will happen if I got the position and 'What would be the one thing I would try and change?'. It came easily to me, namely that I would try and get more new people through the doors literally or virtually by connecting them to the BL's collections (especially the digital). New people like me, who may have never set foot, or had been motivated to step into the building before. This has been one of the most important reasons for me to get up in the morning and go to work at BL Labs.
So what have been my highlights? Let's have a very quick pass through!
BL Labs Launch and Advisory Board
I launched BL Labs in March 2013, one week after I had started. It was at the launch event organised by my wonderfully supportive and innovative colleague, Digital Curator Stella Wisdom. I distinctly remember in the afternoon session (which I did alone), I had to present my 'ideas' of how I might launch the first BL Labs competition where we would be trying to get pioneering researchers to work with the BL's digital collections.
God it was a tough crowd! They asked pretty difficult questions, questions I myself was asking too which I still didn't know the answer too either.
My first gut feeling overall after the event was, this is going to be hard work. This feeling and reality remained a constant throughout my time at BL Labs.
In early May 2013, we launched the competition, which was a really quick and stressful turnaround as I had only officially started in mid March (one and a half months). I remember worrying as to whether anyone would even enter! All the final entries were pretty much submitted a few minutes before the deadline. I remember being alone that evening on deadline day near to midnight waiting by my laptop, thinking what happens if no one enters, it's going to be disaster and I will lose my job. Luckily that didn't happen, in the end, we received 26 entries.
I am a firm believer that we can help make our own luck, but sometimes luck can be quite random! Perhaps BL Labs had a bit of both!
After that, I never really looked back! BL Labs developed its own kind of pattern and momentum each year:
hunting around the BL for digital collections to make into datasets and make available
helping to make more digital collections openly licensed
having hundreds of conversations with people interested in connecting with the BL's digital collections in the BL and outside
working with some people more intensively to carry out experiments
developing ideas further into prototype projects
telling the world of successes and failures in person, meetings, events and social media
launching a competition and awards in April or May
roadshows before and after with invitations to speak at events around the world
the summer working with competition winners
late October/November the international symposium showcased things from the year
'Nothing interesting happens in the office' - Roadshows, Presentations, Workshops and Symposia!
One of the highlights of BL Labs was to go out to universities and other places to explain what the BL is and what BL Labs does. This ended up with me pretty much seeing the world (North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and giving virtual talks in South America and Africa).
My greatest challenge in BL Labs was always to get people to truly and passionately 'connect' with the BL's digital collections and data in order to come up with cool ideas of what to actually do with them. What I learned from my very first trip was that telling people what you have is great, they definitely need to know what you have! However, once you do that, the hard work really begins as you often need to guide and inspire many of them, help and support them to use the collections creatively and meaningfully. It was also important to understand the back story of the digital collection and learn about the institutional culture of the BL if people also wanted to work with BL colleagues. For me and the researchers involved, inspirational engagement with digital collections required a lot of intellectual effort and emotional intelligence. Often this means asking the uncomfortable questions about research such as 'Why are we doing this?', 'What is the benefit to society in doing this?', 'Who cares?', 'How can computation help?' and 'Why is it necessary to even use computation?'.
Making those connections between people and data does feel like magic when it really works. It's incredibly exciting, suddenly everyone has goose bumps and is energised. This feeling, I will take away with me, it's the essence of my work at BL Labs!
A full list of over 200 presentations, roadshows, events and 9 annual symposia can be found here.
Competitions, Awards and Projects
Another significant way BL Labs has tried to connect people with data has been through Competitions (tell us what you would like to do, and we will choose an idea and work collaboratively with you on it to make it a reality), Awards (show us what you have already done) and Projects (collaborative working).
At the last count, we have supported and / or highlighted over 450 projects in research, artistic, entrepreneurial, educational, community based, activist and public categories most through competitions, awards and project collaborations.
We also set up awards for British Library Staff which has been a wonderful way to highlight the fantastic work our staff do with digital collections and give them the recognition they deserve. I have noticed over the years that the number of staff who have been working on digital projects has increased significantly. Sometimes this was with the help of BL Labs but often because of the significant Digital Scholarship Training Programme, run by my Digital Curator colleagues in Digital Research for staff to understand that the BL isn't just about physical things but digital items too.
Browse through our project archive to get inspiration of the various projects BL Labs has been involved in or highlighted.
Putting the digital collections 'where the light is' - British Library platforms and others
When I started at BL Labs it was clear that we needed to make a fundamental decision about how we saw digital collections. Quite early on, we decided we should treat collections as data to harness the power of computational tools to work with each collection, especially for research purposes. Each collection should have a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI) so researchers can cite them in publications. Any new datasets generated from them will also have DOIs, allowing us to understand the ecosystem through DOIs of what happens to data when you get it out there for people to use.
However, BL Labs has not stopped there! We always believed that it's important to put our digital collections where others are likely to discover them (we can't assume that researchers will want to come to BL platforms), 'where the light is' so to speak. We were very open and able to put them on other platforms such as Flickr and Wikimedia Commons, not forgetting that we still needed to do the hard work to connect data to people after they have discovered them, if they needed that support.
Our greatest success by far was placing 1 million largely undescribed images that were digitally snipped from 65,000 digitised public domain books from the 19th Century on Flickr Commons in 2013. The number of images on the platform have grown since then by another 50 to 60 thousand from collections elsewhere in the BL. There has been significant interaction from the public to generate crowdsourced tags to help to make it easier to find the specific images. The number of views we have had have reached over a staggering 2 billion over this time. There have also been an incredible array of projects which have used the images, from artistic use to using machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify them. It's my favourite collection, probably because there are no restrictions in using it.
Read the most popular blog post the BL has ever published by my former BL Labs colleague, the brilliant and inspirational Ben O'Steen, a million first steps and the 'Mechanical Curator' which describes how we told the world why and how we had put 1 million images online for anyone to use freely.
It is wonderful to know that George Oates, the founder of Flickr Commons and still a BL Labs Advisory Board member, has been involved in the creation of the Flickr Foundation which was announced a few days ago! Long live Flickr Commons! We loved it because it also offered a computational way to access the collections, critical for powerful and efficient computational experiments, through its Application Programming Interface (API).
I loved working with artists, its my passion! They are so creative and often not restricted by academic thinking, see the work of Mario Klingemann for example! You can browse through our archives for various artistic projects that used the BL's digital collections, it's inspiring.
I was also involved in the first British Library Fashion Student Competition won by Alanna Hilton, held at the BL which used the BL's Flickr Commons collection as inspiration for the students to design new fashion ranges. It was organised by my colleague Maja Maricevic, the British Fashion Colleges Council and Teatum Jones who were great fun to work with. I am really pleased to say that Maja has gone on from strength to strength working with the fashion industry and continues to run the competition to this day.
I am really proud of helping to create the international GLAM Labs community with over 250 members, established in 2018 and still active today. I affectionately call them the GLAM Labbers, and I often ask people to explore their inner 'Labber' when I give presentations. What is a Labber? It's the experimental and playful part of us we all had as children and unfortunately many have lost when becoming an adult. It's the ability to be fearless, having the audacity and perhaps even naivety to try crazy things even if they are likely to fail! Unfortunately society values success more than it does failure. In my opinion, we need to recognise, respect and revere those that have the courage to try but failed. That courage to experiment should be honoured and embraced and should become the bedrock of our educational systems from the very outset.
Two years ago, many of us Labbers 'ate our own dog food' or 'practised what we preached' when me and 15 other colleagues came together for 5 days to produce a book through a booksprint, probably the most rewarding professional experience of my life. The book is about how to set up, maintain, sustain and even close a GLAM Lab and is called 'Open a GLAM Lab'. It is available as public domain content and I encourage you to read it.
Online drop-in goodbye - today!
I organised a 30 minute ‘online farewell drop-in’ on Wednesday 29 September 2021, 1330 BST (London), 1430 (Paris, Amsterdam), 2200 (Adelaide), 0830 (New York) on my very last day at the British Library. It was heart-warming that the session was 'maxed out' at one point with participants from all over the world. I honestly didn't expect over 100 colleagues to show up. I guess when you leave an organisation you get to find out who you actually made an impact on, who shows up, and who tells you, otherwise you may never know.
Those that know me well know that I would have much rather had a farewell do ‘in person’, over a pint and praying for the ‘chip god’ to deliver a huge portion of chips with salt/vinegar and tomato sauce’ magically and mysteriously to the table. The pub would have been Mc'Glynns (http://www.mcglynnsfreehouse.com/) near the British Library in London. I wonder who the chip god was? I never found out ;)
The answer to who the chip god was is in text following this sentence on white on white text...you will be very shocked to know who it was!- s
Spoiler alert it was me after all, my alter ego
Mahendra's online farewell to BL Labs, Wednesday 29 September, 1330 BST, 2021. Left: Flowers and wine from the GLAM Labbers arrived in Tallinn, 20 mins before the meeting! Right: Some of the participants of the online farewell
Leave a message of good will to see me off on my voyage!
It would be wonderful if you would like to leave me your good wishes, comments, memories, thoughts, scans of handwritten messages, pictures, photographs etc. on the following Google doc:
I will leave it open for a week or so after I have left. Reading positive sincere heartfelt messages from colleagues and collaborators over the years have already lifted my spirits. For me it provides evidence that you perhaps did actually make a difference to somone's life. I will definitely be re-reading them during the cold dark Baltic nights in Tallinn.
I would love to hear from you and find out what you are doing, or if you prefer, you can email me, the details are at the end of this post.
BL Labs Sailor and Captain Signing Off!
It's been a blast and lots of fun! Of course there is a tinge of sadness in leaving! For me, it's also been intellectually and emotionally challenging as well as exhausting, with many ‘highs’ and a few ‘lows’ or choppy waters, some professional and others personal.
I have learned so much about myself and there are so many things I am really really proud of. There are other things of course I wish I had done better. Most of all, I learned to embrace failure, my best teacher!
I think I did meet my original wish of wanting to help to open up the BL to as many new people who perhaps would have never engaged in the Library before. That was either by using digital collections and data for cool projects and/or simply walking through the doors of the BL in London or Boston Spa and having a look around and being inspired to do something because of it.
I wish the person who takes over my position lots of success! My only piece of advice is if you care, you will be fine!
Anyhow, what a time this has been for us all on this planet? I have definitely struggled at times. I, like many others, have lost loved ones and thought deeply about life and it's true meaning. I have also managed to find the courage to know what’s important and act accordingly, even if that has been a bit terrifying and difficult at times. Leaving the BL for example was not an easy decision for me, and I wish perhaps things had turned out differently, but I know I am doing the right thing for me, my future and my loved ones.
Though there have been a few dark times for me both professionally and personally, I hope you will be happy to know that I have also found peace and happiness too. I am in a really good place.
I would like to thank former alumni of BL Labs, Ben O'Steen - Technical Lead for BL Labs from 2013 to 2018, Hana Lewis (2016 - 2018) and Eleanor Cooper (2018-2019) both BL Labs Project Officers and many other people I worked through BL Labs and wider in the Library and outside it in my journey.
Where I am off to and what am I doing?
My professional plans are 'evolving', but one thing is certain, I will be moving country!
To Estonia to be precise!
I plan to live, settle down with my family and work there. I was never a fan of Brexit, and this way I get to stay a European.
I would like to finish with this final sweet video created by writer and filmaker Ling Low and her team in 2016, entitled 'Hey there Young Sailor' which they all made as volunteers for the Malaysian band, the 'Impatient Sisters'. It won the BL Labs Artistic Award in 2016. I had the pleasure and honour of meeting Ling over a lovely lunch in Kuala Lumpa, Malaysia, where I had also given a talk at the National Library about my work and looked for remanants of my grandfather who had settled there many years ago.
I wish all of you well, and if you are interested in keeping in touch with me, working with me or just saying hello, you can contact me via my personal email address: [email protected] or follow my progress on my personal website.
Happy journeys through this short life to all of you!
On Friday 17th September 2012, I was delighted to participate in a conference panel for the National Libraries Now Conference. I had worked to assemble a veritable dream team of Wikimedia and library talent, to talk about Wikimedia Residencies from a four-nation perspective.
Joining me on the panel were Stella Wisdom (British Library), Jason Evans (National Library of Wales), Rebecca O’Neill (Wikimedia Community Ireland) and Ruth Small (Digital Productions Operator, National Library of Scotland). Stuart Prior (Programme Coordinator, Wikimedia UK) kindly agreed to be our chair. We pre-recorded presentations that were circulated to participants, so that our time on the 17th could be devoted to questions and discussion.
Going over my notes now, the best way to try to reflect the discussion is to look at some of the questions asked and the responses garnered. Please bear in mind that some remarks may be out of chronological order!
How do you think working with Wikimedia helps your institution’s strategic goals?
We reflected as a group on the move from WikiPedians in Residence to WikiMedians in residence [emphasis my own] and how this shows a shift in institutional thinking towards the potential of larger Wikimedia projects, and the use of platforms such as Commons, Wikisource and WikiBase.
Jason spoke about the way that fewer onsite footfall numbers at NLW, because of its physical location, enhance the importance of digital work and online outreach. He also spoke about the need for training, promotion and contribution through Wikimedia platforms as being just as valuable, if not more so, than the total number of views gained.
It might not be digital, but it is a beauty! Ian Capper, via Wikimedia Commons.
The National Library of Scotland is in the heart of Edinburgh, so does not face the same issues with footfall, however, as Ruth pointed out, a key strategic goal of the Library is to reach people, and digitising is not the end of the road. Engagement with collections like the NLS Data Foundry is crucial, and the groundbreaking Scottish Chapbooks project run by the NLS was born out of the pandemic, showing a new imagining of institutional goals.
How do you incorporate Wikimedia work into your ‘normal’ work?
It was agreed that the inclusion of Wiki in job descriptions could help change at an institutional level, while Rebecca pointed out that the inclusion of Wiki activity as an outreach activity in funding applications is often a good way forward for inclusion of this work as part of major research projects. Again, advocacy and emphasis on the ease with which Wiki work can be undertaken was a key focal point, showing colleagues that their interests and our tools can align well.
How do you implement elements of quality control to what is ultimately crowdsourced work?
Jason suggested that we start to think about ‘context’ control: we can upload content and edit and amend details from the beginning, however how we contextualise this material and the activity of Wiki engagement is crucial. There is a high level of quality in curation already, and often Wiki datasets will link back to other repositories such as Flickr or institutional catalogues.
The classic counterpoint of ‘anyone can edit’ and ‘everyone can edit’ came to the fore here: as was rightly pointed out, the early 00s impression of Wikipedia as a free-for-all is largely outdated. In fact, expectations are often inverted, as the enthusiastic and diligent Wiki community are quick to act upon misinformation or inaccuracies. We spoke about the beauty of the process in Wikimedia whereby information picks up value and enriched data along the way, an active evolution of resources.
The WIkipedia landing page: anyone can edit!
What about decolonisation and Wikimedia?
Decolonisation is a huge question for Wikimedia: movements around the world are examining what we can do to better serve the larger cause of anti-racist practice. For the British Library, I spoke about the work we have done on the India Office Records in offering a template for content warnings and working with the input of our colleagues to make this as robust of a model as we can.
Rebecca’s experience of working in Ireland was incredibly insightful: she shared with us the experience of working with Irish material that is shaped by colonial ideas of what Ireland is, and how the culture has formed. Despite being a white, European, primarily English-speaking nation, the influence of colonialism is still felt.
The use of Wikimedia as a tool for breaking down barriers is vital, as each of our speakers illustrated. Jason spoke about the digital repatriation of items, and gave an example of the Red Book of Hergest, held by Jesus College Oxford (MS 111) and now available through Wikimedia Commons. Though this kind of action cannot always stand in place of physical repatriation, the move towards collaboration is notable and important.
'The Irish Frankenstein', a piece of anti-Irish propaganda from 1882. John Tenniel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
An hour was simply not enough! National Libraries Now was an incredibly important experience for me, at this point in my residency. I was particularly delighted with the dedication and enthusiasm of my co-panelists, and hope that we were able to shed some light on the Wikimedian-in-Residence role for those attending.
BL/QFP Project celebrates two million images on the Qatar Digital Library and the creative ways we have used them.
This week we are celebrating a milestone achievement of two million images digitised and uploaded to the Qatar Digital Library (QDL). In addition to this bilingual, digital archive, the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership Project (BL/QFP Project) has also inspired creative and innovative pursuits. The material on the QDL is available to use and reuse, which allows for a wide variety of responses. Over the last few years, our Project’s diverse team has explored and demonstrated a multitude of ways to engage with these digital materials, including events, artwork, coding, and analysis.
The BL/QFP Project’s staff are skilled, experienced, and dedicated. They include cataloguers, historians, archivists, imaging specialists, conservators, translators, editors, and administrative support. This means that in one team (ordinarily housed in one office) we have a diverse pool of people, which has inspired some amazing interactions and ideas. Our skills range from photography, graphic design, and technology, to linguistics, history, and data analysis. By sharing and combining these talents, we have been able to engage with the digital material and resources in remarkable ways. We have all enjoyed learning about new areas, sharing skills and knowledge, engaging with fascinating materials, finding new ways of doing things, and collaborating with a range of people, such as the BL BAME Network and other partners.
Some of the work produced outside of our core deliverables is displayed below.
Hack Days
Hack Days are an opportunity to use innovative techniques to explore and respond to BL collections. The first BL/QFP Imaging Hack Day was held in October 2018, and led to an array of varied responses from our Imaging Team who used their skills to "hack" the QDL. Subsequent Hack Days have incorporated diverse topics, formats, collections, and participants. They are also award winning: the concept led by the Imaging Team won the British Library Labs Staff Award in 2019.
Figure 1: Poster for Hack Day created using images from manuscripts on the QDL
Figure 2: Astrolabe created by Darran Murray (Digitisation Studio Manager) using Or 2411
Figure 3: Example of images created to respond to the weaponry on the walls by Hannah Nagle (Senior Imaging Support Technician)
Figure 4: Social media banner created by Rebecca Harris (Senior Imaging Technician) for International Women’s Day
Figure 5: Imaging contrast showing insect damage to manuscript, ‘Four treatises on Astronomy’ (Or 8415), created by Renata Kaminska (Digitisation Studio Manager)
Figure 6: Behind the scenes visualisations including conservation treatment, created by Sotirios Alpanis (former Head of Digital Operations) and Jordi Clopes-Masjuan (Senior Imaging Technician)
Figure 7: Visual narratives made by combining digital images by Melanie Taylor (Senior Imaging Support Technician)
Figure 9: Exquisite Corpse image created by collaging material from different images, including manuscripts from the QDL as well as BL Flickr and Instagram. By Morgane Lirette (Conservator (Books), Conservation), Tan Wang-Ward (Project Manager, Lotus Sutra Manuscripts Digitisation), Matthew Lee (Imaging Support Technician), Darran Murray (Digitisation Studio Manager), Noemi Ortega-Raventos (Content Specialist, Archivist). Exquisite Corpse: Head part 1 (QDL), Head part 2 (QDL), Head part 3 (QDL), Head part 4 (QDL) Head part 5 (QDL), torso (Flickr), legs (Flickr), feet (Instagram)
Cyanotype Workshops
Matt Lee (Senior Imaging Support Technician), Daniel Loveday (Senior Imaging Technician) and the Imaging Team
Members of the Imaging team have since gone on to develop cyanotype workshops. The photographic printing process of cyanotype uses chemicals and ultraviolet light to create a copy of an image. The team led experiments on the process at one of the Project’s Staff Away Days. After its success, the concept was developed further and workshops were delivered to students at the Camberwell College of Arts. Images from manuscripts on the QDL were used to create cyanotype collages like those displayed below.
Figure 10: Cyanotype created using collage of images from the QDL, by Matt Lee (Senior Imaging Support Technician)
Figure 11: Cyanotype created using collage of images from the QDL, by Louis Allday (Gulf History Cataloguing Manager)
Watermarks Project
Jordi Clopes-Masjuan (Senior Imaging Technician), Camille Dekeyser (Conservator), Matt Lee (Senior Imaging Support Technician), Heather Murphy (Conservation Team Leader)
The Watermarks Project is an ongoing collaboration between the Conservation and Imaging Teams. Together they have sought to examine and display watermarks found in our collection items. Starting with the physical items, and figuring out how best to capture them, they have experimented with ways to display the watermarks digitally. The process requires many forms of expertise, but the results facilitate the study and appreciation of the designs.
Figure 12: Studio setup for capturing the watermarks
Figure 13: Gif image showing traditional and translucid view with watermark highlighted by digital tracing.
Addressing Problematic Terms in our Catalogues and Translations Project
Serim Abboushi (Arabic & English Web Content Editor), Mariam Aboelezz (Translation Support Officer), Louis Allday (Gulf History Cataloguing Manager), Sotirios Alpanis (former Head of Digital Operations), John Casey (Cataloguer, Gulf History), David Fitzpatrick (Content Specialist, Archivist), Susannah Gillard (Content Specialist, Archivist), John Hayhurst (Content Specialist, Gulf History), Julia Ihnatowicz (Translation Specialist), William Monk (Cataloguer, Gulf History), Hannah Nagle (Senior Imaging Support Technician), Noemi Ortega-Raventos (Content Specialist, Archivist), Francis Owtram (Content Specialist, Gulf History), Curstaidh Reid (Cataloguer, Gulf History), George Samaan (Translation Support Officer), Tahani Shaban (Translation Specialist), David Woodbridge (Cataloguer, Gulf History), Nariman Youssef (Arabic Translation Manager) and special thanks to the BL BAME Staff Network.
The Addressing Problematic Terms in our Catalogues and Translations Project was joint winner of the 2020 BL Labs Staff Award. It is an ongoing, highly collaborative project inspired by a talk given by Dr Melissa Bennett about decolonising the archive and how to deal with problematic terms found in archive items. Using existing translation tools and a custom-built python script, the group has been analysing terms that appear in the original language of the documents, and assessing how best to address them in both English and Arabic. This work enables the project to treat problematic terms sensitively and to contextualise them in our catalogue descriptions and translations.
We have also made the most of the Covid-19 restrictions and working from home, to share and learn skills such as coding, Arabic language, and photography. For example, through the Project’s ‘Code Club’, many of us have learnt about python and have written scripts to streamline our tasks. Furthermore, codes to explore the collections have also had creative outputs, such as Anne Courtney’s project “Making data into sound” (Runner-up, BL Labs Staff Awards, 2020).
The Project’s extraordinary collaborative work demonstrates some of the exciting and innovative ways to engage with library and archival collections. It also makes clear the wider benefits of digitisation and providing free online access to fully bilingual catalogued resources.
You can read about some of our projects in more detail in the blog posts below:
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