One of the highlights of our Digital Storytelling exhibition last year was hosting the 2023 MIX conference at the British Library in collaboration with Bath Spa University and the MyWorld programme, which explores the future of creative technology innovation.

MIX is an established forum for the discussion and celebration of writing and technology, bringing together researchers, writers, technologists and practitioners from around the world.  Many of the topics covered are relevant to work in the British Library as part of our research into collecting, curating and preserving interactive digital works and emerging formats.

As a new year draws near, we are looking forward to upcoming events. MIX will be back in Bath at the Locksbrook Campus on Wednesday 2 July 2025 and their call for submissions  is currently open until early February. Organisers are looking for proposals for 15 minute papers/presentations or 5 minute lightening talks from technologists, artists, writers and poets, academic researchers and independent scholars, on the following themes:

• Issues of trust and truth in digital writing
• The use of generative AI tools by authors, poets and screenwriters
• Debates around AI and ethics for creative practitioners
• Emerging immersive storytelling practices

MIX 2025 will investigate the intersection between these themes, including the challenges and opportunities for interactive and locative works, poetry film, screenwriting and writing for games, as well as digital preservation, archiving, enhanced curation and storytelling with AI. Conference organisers are also welcoming papers and presentations on the innovative use of AI tools in creative writing pedagogy. Deadline for submissions is 5pm GMT on Monday 10 February 2025, if you have any enquiries email [email protected].

As part of the programme, New York Times bestselling writer and publisher Michael Bhaskar, currently working for Microsoft AI and co-author of the book The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma, will appear in conversation.

To whet your appetite ahead of the next MIX you may want to check out the Writing with Technologies webinar series presented by My World with Bath Spa University’s Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries and the Narrative and Emerging Technologies Lab. This series examines AI’s emerging influence across writing and publishing in various fields through talks from writers, creators, academics, publishing professionals and AI experts. The next webinar will be on Wednesday 22nd January 2025, 2-3pm GMT discussing AI And Creative Expression, book your free place here.

How do you collaborate on a piece of software with a community of users and developers distributed around the world? Lanie and Saira from the British Library’s Universal Viewer team share their recent experience with a ‘community sprint’... 

Back in July, digital agency Cogapp tested the current version of the Universal Viewer (UV) against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 and came up with a list of suggestions to enhance compliance.  

As accessibility is a top priority, the UV Steering Group decided to host a community sprint - an event focused on tackling these suggestions while boosting engagement and fostering collaboration. Sprints are typically internal, but the community sprint was open to anyone from the broader open-source community.

18 participants from 6 organisations teamed up to make the Universal Viewer more accessible - true collaboration in action!

The sprint took place for two weeks in October. Everyone brought unique skills and perspectives, making it a true community effort.

Software engineers worked on development tasks, such as improving screen reader compatibility, fixing keyboard navigation problems, and enhancing element visibility. Testing engineers ensured functionality, and non-technical participants assisted with planning, translations and management.

The group had different levels of experience, which made it important to provide a supportive environment for learning and collaboration.  

The project board at the end of the Sprint - not every issue was finished, but the sprint was still a success with over 30 issues completed in two weeks.

Some of those involved shared their thoughts on the sprint: 

Bruce Herman - Development Team Lead, British Library: 'It was a great opportunity to collaborate with other development teams in the BL and the UV Community.'

Demian Katz - Director of Library Technology, Villanova University: 'As a long-time member of the Universal Viewer community, it was really exciting to see so many new people working together effectively to improve the project.'

Sara Weale - Head of Web Design & Development, Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru - National Library of Wales: 'Taking part in this accessibility sprint was an exciting and rewarding experience. As Scrum Master, I had the privilege of facilitating the inception, daily stand-ups, and retrospective sessions, helping to keep the team focused and collaborative throughout. It was fantastic to see web developers from the National Library of Wales working alongside the British Library, Falvey Library (Villanova University), and other members of the Universal Viewer Steering Group.

This sprint marked the first time an international, cross-community team came together in this way, and the sense of shared purpose and camaraderie was truly inspiring. Some of the key lessons I took away from the sprint was the need for more precise task estimation, as well as the value of longer sprints to allow for deeper problem-solving. Despite these challenges, the fortnight was defined by excellent communication and a strong collective commitment to addressing accessibility issues.

Seeing the team come together so quickly and effectively highlighted the power of collaboration to drive meaningful progress, ultimately enhancing the Universal Viewer for a more inclusive future.'

BL Test Engineers: 

Damian Burke: 'Having worked on UV for a number of years, this was my first community sprint. What stood out for me was the level of collaboration and goodwill from everyone on the team. How quickly we formed into a working agile team was impressive. From a UV tester's perspective, I learned a lot from using new tools like Vercel and exploring GitHub's advanced functionality.'

Alex Rostron: 'It was nice to collaborate and work with skilled people from all around the world to get a good number of tickets over the line.'

Danny Taylor: 'I think what I liked most was how organised the sprints were. It was great to be involved in my first BL retrospective.'

A Miro board was used for Sprint planning and the retrospective – a review meeting after the Sprint where we determined what went well and what we would improve for next time.

Experience from the sprint helped us to organise a further sprint within the UV Steering Group for admin-related work, aimed at improving documentation to ensure clearer processes and better support for contributors. Looking ahead, we're planning to release UV 4.1.0 in the new year, incorporating the enhancements we've made - we’ll share another update when the release candidate is ready for review.

Building on the success of the community sprint, we're excited to make these collaborative efforts a key part of our strategic roadmap. Join us and help shape the future of UV!

Research Software Engineer James Misson writes...

On the 4^th and 5^th of September the Digital Humanities Congress was held in Sheffield, where the University of Sheffield continues to affirm its reputation as a hub for all things DH. The conference was a testament to the wide scope of DH methods, as well as researchers' abilities to adopt cutting edge technology to further our knowledge of human culture.

A common theme that emerged between papers was the application of machine learning to historical linguistics. Kate Wild, from the Oxford English Dictionary, shared the initial stages of the Oxford Corpus of Historical English, which will unite a vast amount of linguistic data spanning from the fifteenth century to the present day. The equally impressive Ansund project was presented by Mark Faulkner and Elisabetta Magnanti — a comprehensive corpus of Old English texts enriched from their manuscript sources by computer vision.

Keynote lectures were given by Melissa Terras and Simon Mahony, whose extensive experience gave them ideal vantage points from which to survey the Digital Humanities and the twists and turns it has taken since the beginnings of their careers. Likewise, Paola Marchionni and Peter Findlay (formerly of the British Library) presented the history of Jisc, elucidating its critical role within research institutes.

Conversations beyond the lecture hall were instructive for the Digital Scholarship team, especially for the BL’s recovery following the cyberattack last year. It was clear that the English Short Title Catalogue is a crucial resource for many scholars in attendance, not only as a finding aid but also as a dataset — encouraging to know, as the library works towards getting the ESTC back online. This is especially true of Fred Schurink’s research on the importation of early continental books to early modern England, which is an innovative contribution to the burgeoning field of Bibliographic Data Science. We look forward to learning more about this field at Dr Schurink’s upcoming workshop at the John Ryland’s Library in Manchester.

Digital Curator Mia Ridge writes...

While the British Library works to recover from the October 2023 cyber-attack, we're putting some information from our currently inaccessible website into an easily readable and shareable format. This blog post is based on a page captured by the Wayback Machine in September 2023.

Crowdsourcing at the British Library

Example of a crowdsourcing task

For the British Library, crowdsourcing is an engaging form of online volunteering supported by digital tools that manage tasks such as transcription, classification and geolocation that make our collections more discoverable.

The British Library has run several popular crowdsourcing projects in the past, including the Georeferencer, for geolocating historical maps, and In the Spotlight, for transcribing important information about historical playbills. We also integrated crowdsourcing activities into our flagship AI / data science project, Living with Machines.

• Agents of Enslavement uses 18th/19th century newspapers to research slavery in Barbados and create a database of enslaved people.
• Living with Machines, which is mostly based on research questions around nineteenth century newspapers

Crowdsourcing Projects at the British Library

• Living with Machines (2019-2023) created innovative crowdsourced tasks, including tasks that asked the public to closely read historical newspaper articles to determine how specific words were used.
• Agents of Enslavement (2021-2022) used 18th/19th century newspapers to research slavery in Barbados and create a database of enslaved people.
• In the Spotlight (2017-2021) was a crowdsourcing project from the British Library that aimed to make digitised historical playbills more discoverable, while also encouraging people to closely engage with this otherwise less accessible collection of ephemera.
• Canadian wildlife: notes from the field (2021), a project where volunteers transcribed handwritten field notes that accompany recordings of a wildlife collection within the sound archive.
• Convert a Card (2015) was a series of crowdsourcing projects aimed to convert scanned catalogue cards in Asian and African languages into electronic records. The project template can be found and used on GitHub.
• Georeferencer (2012 - present) enabled volunteers to create geospatial data from digitised versions of print maps by adding control points to the old and modern maps.
• Pin-a-Tale (2012) asked people to map literary texts to British places.

Research Projects

The Living with Machines project included a large component of crowdsourcing research through practice, led by Digital Curator Mia Ridge.

Mia was also the Principle Investigator on the AHRC-funded Collective Wisdom project, which worked with a large group of co-authors to produce a book, The Collective Wisdom Handbook: perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, through two 'book sprints' in 2021:

This book is written for crowdsourcing practitioners who work in cultural institutions, as well as those who wish to gain experience with crowdsourcing. It provides both practical tips, grounded in lessons often learned the hard way, and inspiration from research across a range of disciplines. Case studies and perspectives based on our experience are woven throughout the book, complemented by information drawn from research literature and practice within the field.

More Information

Our crowdsourcing projects were designed to produce data that can be used in discovery systems (such as online catalogues and our item viewer) through enjoyable tasks that give volunteers an opportunity to explore digitised collections.

Each project involves teams across the Library to supply digitised images for crowdsourcing and ensure that the results are processed and ingested into various systems. Enhancing metadata through crowdsourcing is considered in the British Library's Collection Metadata Strategy.

We previously posted on twitter @LibCrowds and currently post occasionally on Mastodon https://glammr.us/@libcrowds and via our newsletter.

Past editions of our newsletter are available online.

Hello everyone! I am Dr Valentina Vavassori, the new Digital Curator for Optical Character Recognition/Handwritten Text Recognition at the British Library.

I am part of the Heritage Made Digital Team, which is responsible for developing and overseeing the digitisation workflow at the Library. I am also an unofficial member of the Digital Research Team, where I promote the reuse and access to the Library’s collections.

My role has both an operational component (integrating and developing OCR and HTR in the digitisation workflow) and a research and engagement component (supporting OCR/HTR projects in the Library). I really enjoy these two sides of my role, as I have a background as a researcher and as a cultural heritage professional.

I joined the British Library from The National Archives, London, where I worked as a Digital Scholarship Researcher in the Digital Research Team. I worked on projects involving data visualisation, OCR/HTR, data modelling, and user experience.

Before that, I completed a PhD in Digital Humanities at King’s College London, focusing on chatbots and augmented reality in museums and their impact on users and museum narratives. Part of my thesis explored how to use these narratives using spatial humanities methods such as GIS. During my PhD, I also collaborated on various digital research projects with institutions like The National Gallery, London, and the Museum of London.

However, I originally trained as an art historian. I studied art history in Italy and worked for a few years in museums. During my job, I realised the potential of developing digital experiences for visitors and the significant impact digitisation can have on research and enjoyment in cultural heritage. I was so interested in the opportunities, that I co-founded a start-up which developed a heritage geolocation app for tourists.

Joining the Library has been an amazing opportunity. I am really looking forward to learning from my colleagues and exploring all the potential collaborations within and outside the Library.

Today the global Wikidata community is celebrating its 12th birthday! Wikidata originally went live on the 29th October 2012, back when Andrew Gray was the British Library’s first Wikipedian in Residence and since then it has massively expanded.  

Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines, which acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia and Wikisource. Wikidata content is available under a free license (CC0), exported using standard formats (JSON & RDF), and can be interlinked to other open data sets on the linked data web.

Over the past year Wikidata passed the incredible milestone of 2 Billion edits, making it the most edited Wikimedia project of all time. However, this growth has created Wikidata Query Service stability challenges and scaling issues. To address these, the development team have been working on several projects including splitting the data in the Query Service and releasing the multiple languages code to be able to handle the current size of Wikidata better.

Map of Wikidata’s geographic coverage as of October 2024

Another major focus during the past year has been promoting Wikidata reuse. To make it easier to access Wikidata’s data there is a new REST API. Plus developers who build with Wikidata’s data now have access to a Wikidata developer portal, which holds important information and provides inspiration about what is possible with Wikidata’s data.

The international library community actively engages with Wikidata. In 2019 the IFLA Wikidata Working Group was formed to explore the integration of Wikidata and Wikibase with library systems, and alignment of the Wikidata ontology with library metadata formats such as BIBFRAME, RDA, and MARC. There is also the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group, who hold Affinity Group Calls and Wikidata Working Hours throughout the year.

If you are new to Wikidata and want to learn more, there are many resources available, including this Zine about Wikidata, created by our recent Wikimedian in Residence Dr Lucy Hinnie, and these videos:

• An introduction to Wikidata by Jason Evans and Aaron Morris
• The global knowledge base: open data about everything by Martin Poulter
• Creating and enriching linked data with Wikidata by Jason Evans

You may also want to check out the online Bibliography of Wikidata, which lists books, academic conference presentations and peer-reviewed papers, which focus on Wikidata as their subject.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom.

This blog post is by Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator for Asian and African Collections, British Library. She's on Mastodon as @[email protected]. 

The British Library’s vast Southeast Asian collection includes manuscripts, periodicals and printed books in the languages of the countries of maritime Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines and East Timor, as well as on the mainland, from Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma) and Vietnam.

The display of literary manuscripts from Southeast Asia outside of the Asian and African Studies Reading Room in St Pancras (photo by Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert)

Several languages and scripts from the mainland were the focus of recent development work commissioned by the Library and done on the script conversion platform Aksharamukha. These include Shan, Khmer, Khuen, and northern Thai and Lao Dhamma (Dhamma, or Tham, meaning ‘scripture’, is the script that several languages are written in).

These and other Southeast Asian languages and scripts pose multiple challenges to us and our users. Collection items in languages using non-romanised scripts are mainly catalogued (and therefore searched by users) using romanised text. For some language groups, users need to search the catalogue by typing in the transliteration of title and/or author using the Library of Congress (LoC) romanisation rules.

Items’ metadata text converted using the LoC romanisation scheme is often unintuitive, and therefore poses a barrier for users, hindering discovery and access to our collections via the online catalogues. In addition, curatorial and acquisition staff spend a significant amount of time manually converting scripts, a slow process which is prone to errors. Other libraries worldwide holding Southeast Asian collections and using the LoC romanisation scheme face the same issues.

Excerpt from the Library of Congress romanisation scheme for Khmer

Having faced these issues with Burmese language, last year we commissioned development work to the open-access platform Aksharamukha, which enables the conversion between various scripts, supporting 121 scripts and 21 romanisation methods. Vinodh Rajan, Aksharamukha’s developer, perfectly combines language and writing systems knowledge with computer science and coding skills. He added the LoC romanisation system to the platform’s Burmese script transliteration functionality (read about this in my previous post).

The results were outstanding – readers could copy and paste transliterated text into the Library's catalogue search box to check if we have items of interest. This has also greatly enhanced cataloguing and acquisition processes by enabling the creation of acquisition records and minimal records. In addition, our Metadata team updated all of our Burmese catalogue records (ca. 20,000) to include Burmese script, alongside transliteration (side note: these updated records are still unavailable to our readers due to the cyber-attack on the Library last year, but they will become accessible in the future).

The time was ripe to expand our collaboration with Vinodh and Aksharamukha. Maria Kekki, Curator for Burmese Collections, has been hosting this past year a Chevening Fellow from Myanmar, Myo Thant Linn. Myo was tasked with cataloguing manuscripts and printed books in Shan and Khuen – but found the romanisation aspect of this work to be very challenging to do manually. In order to facilitate Myo’s work and maximise the benefit from his fellowship, we needed to have a LoC romanisation functionality available. Aksharamukha was the right place for this – this free, open source, online tool is available to our curators, cataloguers, acquisition staff, and metadata team to use.

Former Chevening Fellow Myo Thant Linn reciting from a Shan manuscript in the Asian and African Studies Reading Room, September 2024 (photo by Jana Igunma)

In addition to Maria and Myo’s requirements, Jana Igunma, Ginsburg Curator for Thai, Lao and Cambodian Collections, noted that adding Khmer to Aksharamukha would be immensely helpful for cataloguing our Khmer backlog and assist with new acquisitions. Northern Thai and Lao Dhamma scripts would be mostly useful to catalogue new acquisitions for print material, and add original scripts to manuscript records. The automation of LoC transliteration could be very cost-effective, by saving many cataloguing, acquisitions and metadata team’s hours. Khmer is a great example – it has the most extensive alphabet in the world (74 letters), and its romanisation is extremely complicated and time consuming!

First three leaves with text in a long format palm leaf bundle (សាស្ត្រាស្លឹករឹត/sāstrā slẏk rẏt) containing part of the Buddhist cosmology (សាស្ត្រាត្រៃភូមិ/Sāstrā Traibhūmi) in Khmer script, 18th or 19th century. Acquired by the British Museum from Edwards Goutier, Paris, on 6 December 1895. British Library, Or 5003, ff. 9-11

It was required, therefore, to enhance Aksharamukha’s script conversion functionality with these additional scripts. This could generally be done by referring to existing LoC conversion tables, while taking into account any permutations of diacritics or character variations. However, it definitely has not been as simple as that!

For example, the presence of diacritics instigated a discussion between internal and external colleagues on the use of precomposed vs. decomposed formats in Unicode, when romanising original script. LoC systems use two types of coding schemata, MARC 21 and MARC 8. The former allows for precomposed diacritic characters, and the latter does not – it allows for decomposed format. In order to enable both these schemata, Vinodh included both MARC 8 and MARC 21 as input and output formats in the conversion functionality.

Another component, implemented for Burmese in the previous development round, but also needed for Khmer and Shan transliterations, is word spacing. Vinodh implemented word separation in this round as well – although this would always remain something that the cataloguer would need to check and adjust. Note that this is not enabled by default – you would have to select it (under ‘input’ – see image below).

Screenshot from Aksharamukha, showcasing Khmer word segmentation option

It is heartening to know that enhancing Aksharamukha has been making a difference. Internally, Myo had been a keen user of the Shan romanisation functionality (though Khuen romanisation is still work-in-progress); and Jana has been using the Khmer transliteration too. Jana found it particularly useful to use Aksharamukha’s option to upload a photo of the title page, which is then automatically OCRed and romanised. This saved precious time otherwise spent on typing Khmer!

It should be mentioned that, when it comes to cataloguing Khmer language books at the British Library, both original Khmer script and romanised metadata are being included in catalogue records. Aksharamukha helps to speed up the process of cataloguing and eliminates typing errors. However, capitalisation and in some instances word separation and final consonants need to be adjusted manually by the cataloguer. Therefore, it is necessary that the cataloguer has a good knowledge of the language.

On the left: photo of a title page of a Khmer language textbook for Grade 9, recently acquired by the British Library; on the right: conversion of original Khmer text from the title page into LoC romanisation standard using Aksharamukha

The conversion tool for Tham (Lanna) and Tham (Lao) works best for texts in Pali language, according to its LoC romanisation table. If Aksharamukha is used for works in northern Thai language in Tham (Lanna) script, or Lao language in Tham (Lao) script, cataloguer intervention is always required as there is no LoC romanisation standard for northern Thai and Lao languages in Tham scripts. Such publications are rare, and an interim solution that has been adopted by various libraries is to convert Tham scripts to modern Thai or Lao scripts, and then to romanise them according to the LoC romanisation standards for these languages.

Other libraries have been enjoying the benefits of the new developments to Aksharamukha. Conversations with colleagues from the Library of Congress revealed that present and past commissioned developments on Aksharamukha had a positive impact on their operations. LoC has been developing a transliteration tool called ScriptShifter. Aksharamukha’s Burmese and Khmer functionalities are already integrated into this tool, which can convert over ninety non-Latin scripts into Latin script following the LoC/ALA guidelines. The British Library funding Aksharamukha to make several Southeast Asian languages and scripts available in LoC romanisation has already been useful!

If you have feedback or encounter any bugs, please feel free to raise an issue on GitHub. And, if you’re interested in other scripts romanised using LoC schemas, Aksharamukha has a complete list of the ones that it supports. Happy conversions!

Attending memoQfest 2024 as a translator was an enriching and insightful experience. Held from 13 to 14 June in Budapest, Hungary, the event stood out as a hub for language professionals and translation technology enthusiasts. 

Streetviews of Budapest, near the venue for memoQfest 2024. Captured by the author

A Well-Structured Agenda 

The conference had a well-structured agenda with over 50 speakers, including two keynotes, who brought valuable insights into the world of translation.  

Jay Marciano, President of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA), delivered his highly anticipated presentation on understanding generative AI and large language models (LLMs). While he acknowledged their significant potential, Marciano expressed only cautious optimism on their future in the industry, stressing the need for a deeper understanding of the limitations. As he laid out, machines can translate faster but the quality of their output depends greatly on the quality of the training data, especially in certain domains or for specific clients. He believes that translators’ role will evolve so that they will become more involved with data curation, than with translation itself, to improve the quality of machine output. 

Dr Mike Dillinger, the former Technical Lead for Knowledge Graphs in the AI Division at LinkedIn, and now a technical advisor and consultant, also delved into the challenges and opportunities presented by AI-generated content in his keynote speech, The Next 'New Normal' for Language Services.  Dillinger holds a nuanced perspective on the intersection of AI, machine translation (MT), and knowledge graphs. As he explained, knowledge graphs can be designed to integrate, organize, and provide context for large volumes of data. They are particularly valuable because they go beyond simple data storage, embedding rich relationships and context. They can therefore make it easier for AI systems to process complex information, enhancing tasks like natural language processing, recommendation engines, and semantic search.  

Dillinger therefore advocated for the integration of knowledge graphs with AI, arguing that high-quality, context-rich data is crucial for improving the reliability and effectiveness of AI systems. Knowledge graphs can significantly enhance the capabilities of LLMs by grounding language in concrete concepts and real-world knowledge, thereby addressing some of the current limitations of AI and LLMs. He concluded that, while LLMs have made significant strides, they often lack true understanding of the text and context. 

Enhancing Translation Technology for BLQFP 

The event also offered hands-on demonstrations of memoQ's latest features and updates such as significant improvements to the In-country Review tool (ICR), a new filter for Markdown files, and enhanced spellcheck.  

Interior of the Pesti Vigado, Budapest's second largest concert hall, and venue for the memoQfest Gala dinner

As a participant, I was keen to explore how some of these features could be used to enhance translation processes at the British Library. For example, could machine translation (MT) be used to translate catalogue records? Over the last twelve years, the translation team of the British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership project has built up a massive translation memory (TM) – a bilingual repository of all our previous translations. A machine could be trained on our terminology and style, using this TM and our other bilingual resources, such as our vast and growing term base (TB). With appropriate data curation, MT could be a cost-effective and efficient way to maximise our translation operations. 

There are challenges, however. For example, before it can be used to train a machine, our TM would need to be edited and cleaned, removing repetitive and inappropriate content. We would need to choose the most appropriate translations, while maintaining proper alignment between segments. The same applies to our TB, which would need to be curated. Some of these data curation tasks cannot be pursued at this time, as we remain without access to much of our data following the cyberattack incident. Moreover, these careful preparatory steps would not suffice, as any machine output would still need to be post-edited by skilled human translators. As both the conference’s keynote speakers agreed, it is not yet a simple matter of letting the machines do the work. 

 This blog post is by Musa Alkhalifa Alsulaiman, Arabic Translator, British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership.