Digital scholarship blog

Digital Curator Mia Ridge writes... I was invited to chair a session on 'AI and the digital humanities' at CILIP's 2024 conference with Ciaran Talbot (Associate Director AI & Ideas Adoption, University of Manchester Library) and Glen Robson (IIIF Technical Co-ordinator, International Image Interoperability Framework Consortium). Here's a quick post with some reflections on themes in the presentations and the audience Q&A.

CILIP's photo of our session

I presented a brief overview of some of the natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision methods in the Living with Machines project. That project and other work at the British Library showed that researchers can create innovative Digital Humanities methods and improve collections data with current AI / machine learning tools. But is there a gap between 'utilities' and 'cutting edge research' that AI can't (yet) fill for libraries?

AI (machine learning) makes library, museum and archive collections more accessible in two key ways. Firstly, more and better metadata and links across collections can make individual items more discoverable (e.g. identifying places mentioned in text; visual search to find similar images). Secondly, thinking of 'collections as data' and sharing datasets for research lets others find insights and inspiration.

Some of the value in AI might lie in the marketing power of the term - we've had the technical ability to view collections across silos for some time, but the institutional will might have lagged behind. Identifying the real gaps that AI can meet is hard, cross-institutional work - you need to understand what time-consuming work could be automated with ML/AI. Ciaran's talk gave a sense of the collaborative, co-creative effort required to understand actual processes and real problems and devise ways to optimise them. An 'anarchy' phase might be part of that process, and a roadmap can help set a shared vision as you work out where AI tools will actually save time or just create more but different work.

Glen gave some great examples of how IIIF can help organisations and researchers, and how AI tools might work with IIIF collections. He highlighted the intellectual property questions that 'open access' collections being mined for AI models raises, and pointed people to HaveIBeenTrained to see if their collections have been scraped.

I was struck by the delicate balance between maintaining trust and secure provenance while also supporting creative and playful uses of AI in collections. Labelling generative AI images and texts is vital. Detecting subtle errors and structural biases requires effort and expertise. As a sector, we need to keep learning, talking and collaborating to understand what generative AI means for users and collection holders.

The first question from the audience was about the environmental impact of AI. I was able to say that our work-in-progress principles for AI at the British Library ask people to consider the environmental impact of AI (not just its carbon footprint, but also water usage and rare minerals mining) in balance with other questions of public value for proposed experiments and projects. Ciaran said that Manchester have appointed a sustainability manager, which is probably something we'll see more of in future. There was a question about what employers are looking for in library and informatics students; about where to go for information and inspiration about AI in libraries (AI4LAM is a good start); and about how to update people's perceptions of libraries and the skills of library professionals.

Thanks to everyone at CILIP for all the work they put into the conference, and the fantastic AV team working in the keynote room at the Birmingham Hilton Metropole.

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]. 

Sustainability has become a core value at the British Library, driven by our staff-led Sustainability Group and bolstered by the addition of a dedicated Sustainability Manager nearly a year ago. As part of our ongoing commitment to environmental responsibility, we have been exploring various initiatives to reduce our environmental footprint. One such initiative is our engagement with the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition (DHCC), a collaborative and cross-institutional effort focused on understanding and minimising the environmental impact of digital humanities research.

Discovering the DHCC and its toolkit

The Digital Humanities Climate Coalition (DHCC) has been on my radar for some time, primarily due to their exemplary work in promoting sustainable digital practices. The DHCC toolkit, in particular, has proven to be an invaluable resource. Designed to help individuals and organisations make more environmentally conscious digital choices, the toolkit offers practical guidance for building sustainable digital humanities projects. It encourages researchers to adopt climate-responsible practices and supports those who may lack the practical knowledge to devise greener initiatives.

The toolkit is comprehensive, providing tips on the planning and management of research infrastructure and data. It aims to empower researchers to make climate-friendly technological decisions, thereby fostering a culture of sustainability within the digital humanities community.

My primary goal in leveraging the DHCC toolkit is to raise awareness about the environmental impact of digital work and technology use. By doing so, I hope to empower Library staff to make informed decisions that contribute to our sustainability goals. The toolkit’s insights are crucial for anyone involved in digital research, offering both strategic guidance and practical tips for minimising ecological footprints.

Planning a workshop at the British Library

With the support of our Research Development team, I organised a one-day workshop at the British Library, inviting Professor James Baker, Director of Digital Humanities at the University of Southampton and a member of the DHCC, to lead the event. The workshop was designed to introduce the DHCC toolkit and provide guidance on implementing best practices in research projects. The in-person, full-day workshop was held on 5 February 2024.

Workshop highlights

The workshop featured four key sessions:

Session 1: Introductions and Framing: We began with an overview of the DHCC and its work within the GLAM sector, followed by an introduction to sustainability at the British Library, the roles that libraries play in reducing carbon footprint and awareness raising, the Green Libraries Campaign (of which the British Library was a founding partner), and perspectives on digital humanities and the use of computational methods.

CILIP’s Green Libraries Campaign banner

Session 2: Toolkit Overview: Prof Baker introduced the DHCC toolkit, highlighting its main components and practical applications, focusing on grant writing (e.g. recommendations on designing research projects, including Data Management Plans), and working practices (guidance on reducing energy consumption in day-to-day working life, e.g. communication and shared working, travel, and publishing and preserving data). The session included responses from relevant Library teams, on topics such as research project design, data management and our shared research repository.

DHCC Information, Measurement and Practice Action Group. (2022). A Researcher Guide to Writing a Climate Justice Oriented Data Management Plan (v0.6). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6451499

Session 3: Advocacy and Influencing: This session focused on strategies for advocating for sustainable practices within one's organisation and influencing others to adopt these practices. We covered the Library’s staff-led Sustainability Group and its activities, after which participants were then asked to consider the actions that could be taken at the Library and beyond, taking into account the types of people that might be influenced (senior leaders, colleagues, peers in wider networks/community).

Session 4: Feedback and Next Steps: Participants discussed their takeaways from the workshop and identified actionable steps they could implement in their work. This session included conversations on ways to translate workshop learnings into concrete next steps, and generated light ‘commitments’ for the next week, month and year. One fun way to set oneself a yearly reminder is to schedule an eco-friendly e-card to send to yourself in a year!

Post-workshop follow-up

Three months after the workshop had taken place, we conducted a follow-up survey to gauge its impact. The survey included a mix of agree/disagree statements (see chart below) and optional long-form questions to capture more detailed feedback. While we had only a few responses, survey results were constructive and positive. Participants appreciated the practical insights and reported better awareness of sustainable practices in their digital work.

Participants’ agree/disagree ratings for a series of statements about the DHCC workshop’s impact

Judging from responses to the set of statements above, at least several participants have embedded toolkit recommendations, made specific changes in their work, shared knowledge and influenced their wider networks. We got additional details on these actions in responses to the open-ended questions that followed.

What did staff members say?

Here are some comments made in relation to making changes and embedding the DHCC toolkit’s recommendation:

“Changes made to working policy and practice to order vegetarian options as standard for events.”

“I have referenced the toolkit in a chapter submitted for a monograph, in relation to my BL/university research.”

“I have discussed the toolkit's recommendations with colleagues re the projects I am currently working on. We agreed which parts of the projects were most carbon intensive and discussed ways to mitigate that.”

“I recommended a workshop on the toolkit to my [research] funding body.”

“Have engaged more with small impacts - less email traffic, fewer attachments, fewer images.”

A couple of comments were made with regard to challenges or barriers to change making. One was about colleagues being reluctant to decrease flying, or travel in general, as a way to reduce one’s carbon footprint. The second point referred to an uncertainty on how to influence internal discussions on software development infrastructure – highlighting the challenge of finding the right path to the right people.

An interesting comment was made in relation to raising environmental concerns and advocating the Toolkit:

“Shared the toolkit with wider professional network at an event at which environmentally conscious and sustainable practices were raised without prompting. Toolkit was well received with expressions of relief that others are thinking along these lines and taking practical steps to help progress the agenda.”

And finally, an excellent point about the energy-intensive use of ChatGPT (or other LLMs), which was covered at the workshop:

“The thing that has stayed with me is what was said about water consumption needed to cool the supercomputers - how every time you run one of those Chat GPT (or equivalent) queries it is the equivalent of throwing a litre of water out the window, and that Microsoft's water use has gone up 30%. I've now been saying this every time someone tells me to use one of these GPT searches. To be honest it has put me off using them completely.”

In summary

The DHCC workshop at the British Library was a great success, underscoring the importance of sustainability in digital humanities, digital projects and digital working. By leveraging the DHCC toolkit, we have taken important steps toward making our digital practices more environmentally responsible, and spreading the word across internal and external networks. Moving forward, we will continue to build on this momentum, fostering a culture of sustainability and empowering our staff to make informed, climate-friendly decisions.

Thank you to workshop contributors, organisers and helpers:

James Baker, Joely Fake, Maja Maricevic, Catherine Ross, Andy Rackley, Jez Cope, Jenny Basford, Graeme Bentley, Stephen White, Bianca Miranda Cardoso, Sarah Kirk-Browne, Andrea Deri, and Deirdre Sullivan.

This is a joint blog post by Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives, Harry Lloyd, Research Software Engineer, and Rossitza Atanassova, Digital Curator.

This year’s Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic countries conference took place at the University of Iceland School of Education in Reykjavik. It was the eight conference which was established in 2016, but the first time it was held in Iceland. The theme for the conference was “From Experimentation to Experience: Lessons Learned from the Intersections between Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage”. There were pre-conference workshops from May 27-29 with the main conference starting on the afternoon of May 29 and finishing on May 31. In her excellent opening keynote Sally Chambers, Head of Research Infrastructure Services at the British Library, discussed the complex research and innovation data space for cultural heritage. Three British Library colleagues report highlights of their conference experience in this blog post.

Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives, Contemporary British & Irish Publications.

I presented in the Born Digital session held on May 28. There were four presentations in this session and three were related to web archiving and one related to Twitter (X) data. I co-presented ‘Understanding the Challenges for the Use of Web Archives in Academic Research’. This presentation examined the challenges for the use of web archives in academic research through a synthesis of the findings from two research studies that were published through the WARCnet research network. There was lots of discussion after the presentation on how web archives could be used as a research data management tool to help manage online citations in academic publications.

Helena presenting in the born-digital archives session

The conference programme was very strong and there were many takeaways that relate to my role. One strong theme was ‘collections as data’. At the UK Web Archive we have just started to publish some of our inactive curated collections as data. So these discussions were very useful. One highlight was the ‘Panel: Publication and reuse of digital collections: A GLAM Labs approach’. What stood out for me in this session was the checklist for publishing collections as data. It was very reassuring to see that we had pretty much everything covered for the release of the UK Web Archive datasets.

Rossitza and I were kindly offered a tour of the National and University Library of Iceland by Kristinn Sigurðsson, Head of Digital Projects and Development. We enjoyed meeting curatorial staff from the Special Collections who showed us some of the historical maps of Iceland that have been digitised. We also visited the digitisation studio to see how they process periodicals, and spoke to staff involved with web archiving. Thank you to Kristinn and his colleagues for this opportunity to learn about the library’s collections and digital services.

Rossitza and Helena outside the National and University Library of Iceland

The National and University Library of Iceland

Harry Lloyd, Research Software Engineer, Digital Research.

DHNB2024 was a rich conference from my perspective as a research software engineer. Sally Chambers’ opening keynote on Wednesday afternoon demonstrated an extraordinary grasp of the landscape of digital cultural heritage across the EU. By this point there had already been a day and a half of workshops, including a session Rossitza and I presented on Catalogues as Data. 

I spent the first half using a Jupyter notebook to explain how we extracted entries from an OCR’d version of the catalogue of the British Library’s collection of 15th century books. We used an explainable algorithm rather than a ‘black-box’ machine learning one, so we walked through the steps involved and discussed where it worked well and where it could be improved. You can follow along by clicking the ‘launch notebook’ button in the ReadMe here. 

Harry explaining text recognition results during the workshop

Handing over to Rossitza in the second half to discuss her corpus linguistic analysis worked really well by giving attendees a feel for the complete workflow. This really showed in some great conversations we had with attendees over the following days about tricky problems like where to store the ‘true’ results of OCR. 

A few highlights from the rest of the conference were Clelia LaMonica’s work using Latin large language model to analyse kinship in texts from Medieval Burgundy. Large language models trained on historic texts are important as the majority are trained on modern material and struggle with historical language. Jørgen Burchardt presented some refreshingly quantitative work on bias across a digitised newspaper collection, very reminiscent of work by Kaspar Beelen. Overall it was a productive few days, and I very much enjoyed my time in Reykjavik.

Rossitza Atanassova, Digital Curator, Digital Research.

This was my second DHNB conference and I was looking forward to reconnecting with the community of researchers and cultural heritage practitioners, some of whom I had met at DHNB2019 in Copenhagen. Apart from the informal discussions with attendees, I contributed to DHNB2024 in two main ways.

As already mentioned, Harry and I delivered a pre-conference workshop showcasing some processes and methodology we use for working with printed catalogues as data. In the session we used the corpus tool AntConc to perform computational analysis of the descriptions for the British Library’s collection of books published in the 15th century. You can find out more about the project here and reuse the workshop materials published on Zenodo here.

I also joined the pre-conference meeting of the international GLAM Labs Community held at the National and University Library of Iceland. This was the first in-person meeting of the community in five years and was a productive session during which we brainstormed ‘100 ideas for the GLAM Labs Community’. Afterwards we had a sneak peak of the archive of the National Theatre of Iceland which is being catalogued and digitised.

The main hall of the Library.

The DHNB community is so welcoming and supportive, and attracts many early career digital humanists. I was particularly interested to hear from doctoral students researching the use of AI with digitised archives, and using NLP methods with historical collections. One of the projects that stood out for me was Johannes Widegren’s PhD research into the ethical use of AI to enable access and discovery of Sami cultural heritage, and to develop library and archival practice. 

I was also interested in presentations that discussed workflows for creating Named Entity Recognition resources for historical archives and I plan to try out the open-source Label Studio tool that I learned about. And of course, the poster session is always a highlight and I enjoyed finding out about a range of projects, including computational analysis of Scandinavian runic-texts, digital reconstruction of Gothenburg’s 1923 Jubilee exhibition, and training large language models to track semantic variation in climate change vocabulary in Danish news articles.

The poster presentations session chaired by Olga Holownia

We are grateful to all DHNB24 organisers for the warm welcome and a great conference experience, with special thanks to the inspirational and indefatigable Olga Holownia! 

Digital Curator Mia Ridge with an update... Last year we posted about the British Library building a dedicated product team to work on the Universal Viewer (an item viewer that can display images, audio, video and even 3D versions of digitised and born-digital library collections), based on the IIIF standard for interoperable images and other media. We're now delighted to introduce the team. I asked them to write a brief note of introduction, mentioning what they've been working on or like about the UV and IIIF. They'll be at the IIIF conference in LA next week, so do say hi if you spot them. 

We'd also love to hear from people interested in improving the Universal Viewer's UX in line with current expectations - more below!

Meet the Universal Viewer Product Team

Erin Burnand, Product Owner: I am responsible for developing the product's vision, goal and strategy, and work with stakeholders to ensure we get the best possible product. I have over 20 years experience working in GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums), most recently working in the British Library's Collection Metadata Authority Control team.

I love the way IIIF presents so many opportunities to be creative with our collections, and how imaginative the community are - I am looking forward to exploring these ideas to engage with our audiences as British Library services begin to be restored.

Lanie Okorodudu, Senior Test Engineer: I joined the British Library in March this year and have been working on testing the functionality of IIIF and UV implementations, new features, bug fixes and updates to ensure they meet our high quality standards. I appreciate the robust and flexible framework packed with features that IIIF offers as these are necessary for efficient testing and validation of digital content delivery systems. 

James Misson: I am a Research Software Engineer with an academic background in the digital humanities and book history, currently working on improving developer documentation for the Universal Viewer to facilitate contributions from the community. I enjoy how generous and open the IIIF community is with sharing knowledge and expertise.

Saira Akhter, Research Software Engineer: I joined the Library as part of the Universal Viewer product team back in November. I’ve been working on enhancing the settings dialogue by adding new options and fixing bugs to improve compatibility with various file formats. I like that the UV code is configurable, which allows for flexibility and easy adaptation across different institutions. 

Erin, Lanie, James and Saira

Say Hi at the IIIF conference!

The team will be hosting a Universal Viewer 'live' community call at the 2024 IIIF conference in Los Angeles. Join them at the Kerckhoff Coffee House at 10 - 11.30am on Thursday June 6th where they'll update on recent team activities including work on the user experience of transcribed text (a collaboration with the Swedish National Archive) and improving documentation to make it easier for newcomers to UV to participate in the community. 

What are they working on?

In addition to their comments above, the team have spent some time working through practical questions with the UV Open Collective - the process for pull requests, testing, documentation, and developing and sharing our roadmap. 

We've also been talking to folks at Riksarkivet (the Swedish National Archives), as they're working on implementing a search function within transcriptions displayed on the viewer. If you're involved in the IIIF or UV community you might have seen our call for inspiration for 'UV IIIF transcription search design': Have you seen any notable versions of IIIF viewers that display and / or search transcribed (or translated, etc) text? Please add a screenshot and notes to a new slide on our working doc UV IIIF transcription search UX - and thank you to people who've already shared some links and ideas!

V&A visit

The V&A Museum's Digital Media team have been doing interesting things with IIIF for a number of years, so we organised a meetup between the British Library's UV team and V&A digital folk working with IIIF once our team was complete. In April we went over to the V&A to share our experiences and discuss potential ways to collaborate, like sharing documentation for getting started with the UV. Our thanks to Richard Palmer for hosting, Hussain Ali, Luca Carini and Meaghan Curry for sharing their work and ideas.

The British Library and V&A teams on the grass in the V&A's South Kensington courtyard

How can you help?

We - particularly Mia, Erin and Lanie - are keen to work on the viewer's usability (UX) and accessibility. What features are missing compared to other viewers? What tweaks can we make to the spatial grouping and labels for different functions to make them clearer and more consistent? You can get in touch via [email protected], or post on the IIIF or Universal Viewer Slacks (join the Universal Viewer Slack; join the IIIF Slack).

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.

https://britishlibrary.oldmapsonline.org/api/v1/density

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. 

This blog post is by Harry Lloyd, Research Software Engineer in the Digital Research team, British Library. You can sometimes find him at the Rose and Crown in Kentish Town.

Last week Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert delved into the invaluable work that she and others have done on the Convert-a-Card project since 2015. In this post, I’m going to pick up where she left off, and describe how we’ve been automating parts of the workflow. When I joined the British Library in February, Victoria Morris and former colleague Giorgia Tolfo had prototyped programmatically extracting entities from transcribed catalogue cards and searching by title and author in the OCLC WorldCat database for any close matches. I have been building on this work, and addressing the last yellow rectangle below: “Curator disambiguation and resolution”. Namely how curators choose between OCLC results and develop a MARC record fit for ingest into British Library systems.

The Convert-a-Card workflow at the start of 2023

Entity Extraction

We’re currently working with the digitised images from two drawers of cards, one Urdu and one Chinese. Adi and Giorgia used a layout model on Transkribus to successfully tag different entities on the Urdu cards. The transcribed XML output then had ‘title’, ‘shelfmark’ and ‘author’ tags for the relevant text, making them easy to extract.

Card with layout model and resulting XML for an Urdu card, showing the `structure {type:title;}` parameter on line one

The same method didn’t work for the Chinese cards, possibly because the cards are less consistently structured. There is, however, consistency in the vertical order of entities on the card: shelfmark comes above title comes above author. This meant I could reuse some code we developed for Rossitza Atanassova’s Incunabula project, which reliably retrieved title and author (and occasionally an ISBN).

Chinese cards. Although the layouts are variable, shelfmark is reliably the first line, with title and author following.

Querying OCLC WorldCat

With the title and author for each card, we were set-up to query WorldCat, but how to do this when there are over two thousand cards in these two drawers alone? Victoria and Giorgia made impressive progress combining Python wrappers for the Z39.50 protocol (PyZ3950) and MARC format (Pymarc). With their prototype, a lot of googling of ASN.1, BER and Z39.50, and a couple of quiet weeks drifting through the web of references between the two packages, I built something that could turn a table of titles and authors for the Chinese cards into a list of MARC records. I had also brushed up on enough UTF-8 to fix why none of the Chinese characters were encoded correctly.

For all that I enjoyed trawling through it, Z39.50 is, in the words of a 1999 tutorial, “rather hard to penetrate” and nearly 35 years old. PyZ39.50, the Python wrapper, hasn’t been maintained for two years, and making any changes to the code is a painstaking process. While Z39.50 remains widely used for transferring information between libraries, that doesn’t mean there aren’t better ways of doing things, and in the name of modernity OCLC offer a suite of APIs for their services. Crucially there are endpoints on their Metadata API that allow search and retrieval of records in MARCXML format. As the British Library maintains a cataloguing subscription to OCLC, we have access to the APIs, so all that’s needed is a call to the OCLC OAuth Server, a search on the Metadata API using title and author, then retrieval of the MARCXML for any results. This is very straightforward in Python, and with the Requests package and about ten lines of code we can have our MARCXML matches.

Selecting Matches

At all stages of the project we’ve needed someone to select the best match for a card from WorldCat search results. This responsibility currently lies with curators and cataloguers from the relevant collection area. With that audience in mind, I needed a way to present MARC data from WorldCat so curators could compare the MARC fields for different matches. The solution needed to let a cataloguer choose a card, show the card and a table with the MARC fields for each WorldCat result, and ideally provide filters so curators could use domain knowledge to filter out bad results. I put out a call on the cross-government data science network, and a colleague in the 10DS data science team suggested Streamlit.

Streamlit is a Python package that allows fast development of web apps without needing to be a web app developer (which is handy as I’m not one). Adding Streamlit commands to the script that processes WorldCat MARC records into a dataframe quickly turned it into a functioning web app. The app reads in a dataframe of the cards in one drawer and their potential worldcat matches, and presents it as a table of cards to choose from. You then see the image of the card you’re working on and a MARC field table for the relevant WorldCat matches. This side-by-side view makes it easy to scan across a particular MARC field, and exclude matches that have, for example, the wrong physical dimensions. There’s a filter for cataloguing language, sort options for things like number of subject access fields and total number of fields, and the ability to remove bad matches from view. Once the cataloguer has chosen a match they can save a match to the original dataframe, or note that there were no good matches, or only a partial match.

Screenshot from the Streamlit Convert-a-Card web app, showing the card and the MARC table curators use to choose between matches. As the cataloguers are familiar with MARC, providing the raw fields is the easiest way to choose between matches.

After some very positive initial feedback, we sat down with the Chinese curators and had them test the app out. That led to a fun, interactive, user experience focussed feedback session, and a whole host of GitHub issues on the repository for bugs and design suggestions. Behind the scenes discussion on where to host the app and data are ongoing and not straightforward, but this has been a deeply easy product to prototype, and I’m optimistic it will provide a light weight, gentle learning curve complement to full deriving software like Aleph (the Library’s main cataloguing system).

Next Steps

The project currently uses a range of technologies in  Transkribus, the OCLC APIs, and Streamlit, and tying these together has in itself been a success. Going forwards, we have the possibility of extracting non-English text from the cards to look forward to, and the richer list of entities this would make available. Working with the OCLC APIs has been a learning curve, and they’re not working perfectly yet, but they represent a relatively accessible option compared to Z39.50. And my hope for the Streamlit app is that it will be a useful tool beyond the project for wherever someone wants to use Worldcat to help derive records from minimal information. We still have challenges in terms of design, data storage, and hosting to overcome, but these discussions should have their own benefits in making future development easier. The goal for automation part of the project is a smooth flow of data from Transkribus, through OCLC and on to the curators, and while it’s not perfect, we’re definitely getting there.

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.

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].

It’s been more than eight years, in June 2015, since the British Library launched its crowdsourcing platform, LibCrowds, with the aim of enhancing access to our collections. The first project series on LibCrowds was called Convert-a-Card, followed by the ever-so-popular In the Spotlight project. The aim of Convert-a-Card was to convert print card catalogues from the Library’s Asian and African Collections into electronic records, for inclusion in our online catalogue Explore.

A significant portion of the Library's extensive historical collections was acquired well before the advent of standard computer-based cataloguing. Consequently, even though the Library's online catalogue offers public access to tens of millions of records, numerous crucial research materials remain discoverable solely through searching the traditional physical card catalogues. The physical cards provide essential information for each book, such as title, author, physical description (dimensions, number of pages, images, etc.), subject and a “shelfmark” – a reference to the item’s location. This information still constitutes the basic set of data to produce e-records in libraries and archives.

Card Catalogue Cabinets in the British Library’s Asian & African Studies Reading Room © Jon Ellis

The initial focus of Convert-a-Card was the Library’s card catalogues for Chinese, Indonesian and Urdu books – you can read more about this here and here. Scanned catalogue cards were uploaded to Flickr (and later to our Research Repository), grouped by the physical drawer in which they were originally located. Several of these digitised drawers became projects on LibCrowds.

Crowdsourcing Retroconversion

Convert-a-Card on LibCrowds included two tasks:

1. Task 1 – Search for a WorldCat record match: contributors were asked to look at a digitised card and search the OCLC WorldCat database based on some of the metadata elements printed on it (e.g. title, author, publication date), to see if a record for the book already exists in some form online. If found, they select the matching record.
2. Task 2 – Transcribe the shelfmark: if a match was found, contributors then transcribed the Library's unique shelfmark as printed on the card.

Online volunteers worked on Pinyin (Chinese), Indonesian and Urdu records, mainly between 2015 and 2019. Their valuable contributions resulted in lists of new records which were then ingested into the Library's Explore catalogue – making these items so much more discoverable to our users. For cards only partially matched with online records, curators and cataloguers had a special area on the LibCrowds platform through which they could address some of the discrepancies in partial matches and resolve them.

An example of an Urdu catalogue card

After much consideration, we have decided to sunset LibCrowds. However, you can see a good snapshot of it thanks to the UK Web Archive (with thanks to Mia Ridge and Filipe Bento for archiving it), or access its GitHub pages – originally set up and maintained by LibCrowds creator Alex Mendes. We have been using mainly Zooniverse for crowdsourcing projects (see for example Living with Machines projects), and you can see here some references to these and other crowdsourcing initiatives. Sunsetting LibCrowds provided us with the opportunity to rethink Convert-a-Card and consider alternative, innovative ways to automate or semi-automate the retroconversion of these valuable catalogue cards.

Text Recognition

As a first step, we were looking to automate the retrieval of text from the digitised cards using OCR/Machine Learning. As mentioned, this text includes shelfmark, title, author, place and date of publication, and other information. If extracted accurately enough, this text could be used for WorldCat lookup, as well as for enhancement of existing records. In most cases, the text was typewritten in English, often with additional information, or translation, handwritten in other languages. To start with, we’ve decided to focus only on the typewritten English – with the aspiration to address other scripts and languages in the future.

Last year, we ran some comparative testing with ABBYY FineReader Server (the software generally used for in-house OCR) and Transkribus, to see how accurately they perform this task. We trialled a set of cards with two different versions of ABBYY, and three different models for typewritten Latin scripts in Transkribus (Model IDs 29418, 36202, and 25849). Assessment was done by visually comparing the original text with the OCRed text, examining mainly the key areas of text which are important for this initiative, i.e. the shelfmark, author’s name and book title. For the purpose of automatically recognising the typewritten English on the catalogue cards, Transkribus Model 29418 performed better than the others – and more accurately than ABBYY’s recognition.

An example of a Pinyin card in Transkribus, showing segmentation and transcription

Using that as a base model, we incrementally trained a bespoke model to recognise the text on our Pinyin cards. We’ve also normalised the resulting text, for example removing spaces in the shelfmark, or excluding unnecessary bits of data. This model currently extracts the English text only, with a Character Error Rate (CER) of 1.8%. With more training data, we plan on extending this model to other types of catalogue cards – but for now we are testing this workflow with our Chinese cards.

Entities Extraction

Extracting meaningful entities from the OCRed text is our next step, and there are different ways to do that. One such method – if already using Transkribus for text extraction – is training and applying a bespoke P2PaLA layout analysis model. Such model could identify text regions, improve automated segmentation of the cards, and help retrieve specific regions for further tasks. Former colleague Giorgia Tolfo tested this with our Urdu cards, with good results. Trying to replicate this for our Chinese cards was not as successful – perhaps due to the fact that they are less consistent in structure.

Another possible method is by using regular expressions in a programming language. Research Software Engineer (RSE) Harry Lloyd created a Jupyter notebook with Python code to do just that: take the PAGE XML files produced by Transkribus, parse the XML, and extract the title, author and shelfmark from the text. This works exceptionally well, and in the future we’ll expand entity recognition and extraction to other types of data appearing on the cards. But for now, this information suffices to query OCLC WorldCat and see if a matching record exists.

One of the 26 drawers of Chinese (Pinyin) card catalogues © Jon Ellis

Matching Cards to WorldCat Records

Entities extracted from the catalogue cards can now be used to search and retrieve potentially matching records from the OCLC WorldCat database. Pulling out WorldCat records matched with our card records would help us create new records to go into our cataloguing system Aleph, as well as enrich existing Aleph records with additional information. Previously done by volunteers, we aim to automate this process as much as possible.

Querying WorldCat was initially done using the z39.50 protocol – the same one originally used in LibCrowds. This is a client-server communications protocol designed to support the search and retrieval of information in a distributed network environment. With an excellent start by Victoria Morris and Giorgia Tolfo, who developed a prototype that uses PyZ3950 and PyMARC to query WorldCat, Harry built upon this, refined the code, and tested it successfully for data search and retrieval. Moving forward, we are likely to use the OCLC API for this – which should be a lot more straightforward!

Curator/Cataloguer Disambiguation

Getting potential matches from WorldCat is brilliant, but we would like to have an easy way for curators and cataloguers to make the final decision on the ideal match – which WorldCat record would be the best one as a basis to create a new catalogue record on our system. For this purpose, Harry is currently working on a web application based on Streamlit – an open source Python library that enables the building and sharing of web apps. Staff members will be able to use this app by viewing suggested matches, and selecting the most suitable ones.

I’ll leave it up to Harry to tell you about this work – so stay tuned for a follow-up blog post very soon!