'In the Spotlight' is a crowdsourcing project from the British Library that aims to make digitised historical playbills more discoverable, while also encouraging people to closely engage with this otherwise less accessible collection. Digital Curator Dr Mia Ridge writes...
If you follow our @LibCrowds account on twitter, you might have noticed that we've been working on refreshed versions of our In the Spotlight tasks on Zooniverse. That's part of a small project to enable the use of IIIF manifests on Zooniverse - in everyday language, it means that many, many more digitised items can form the basis of crowdsourcing tasks in the Zooniverse Project Builder, and In the Spotlight is the first project to use this new feature. Along with colleagues in Printed Heritage and BL Labs, I've been looking at our original Pybossa-based LibCrowds site to plan a 'graceful ending' for first phase of the project on LibCrowds.com.
The survey was designed to help us understand who In the Spotlight participants were, and to help us prioritise work on the project. The 22 question survey was based on earlier surveys run by the Galaxy Zoo and Art UK Tagger projects, to allow comparison with other crowdsourcing projects, and to contribute to our understanding of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage more broadly. It was open to anyone who had contributed to the British Library's In the Spotlight project for historical playbills. The survey was distributed to LibCrowds newsletter subscribers, on the LibCrowds community forum and on social media.
Some headline findings from our survey include:
Respondents were most likely to be a woman with a Masters degree, in full-time employment, in London or Southeast UK, who contributes in a break between other tasks or 'whenever they have spare time'.
76% of respondents were motivated by contributing to historical or performance research
Responses to the question 'What was it about this project which caused you to spend more time than intended on it?':
Easy to do
It's so entertaining
Every time an entry is completed you are presented with another item which is interesting and
illuminating which provides a continuous temptation regarding what you might discover next
simplicity
A bit of competitiveness about the top ten contributors but also about contributing something useful
I just got carried away with the fun
It's so easy to complete
Easy to want to do just a few more
Addiction
Felt I could get through more tasks
Just getting engrossed
It can be a bit addictive!
It's so easy to do that it's very easy to get carried away.
interested in the [material]
The summary report contains more rich detail, so go check it out!
Detail of the front page of libcrowds.com; Crowdsourcing projects from the British Library. 2,969 Volunteers. 265,648 Contributions. 175 Projects
Digitisation has become one of the key tasks for the curatorial roles within the British Library. This is supported by two main pillars: the accessibility of the collection items to everybody around the world and the preservation of unique and sometimes, very fragile, items. Digitisation involves many different teams and workflow stages including retrieval, conservation, curatorial management, copyright assessment, imaging, workflow management, quality control, and the final publication to online platforms.
The Heritage Made Digital (HMD) team works across the Library to assist with digitisation projects. An excellent example of the collaborative nature of the relationship between the HMD and International Dunhuang Project (IDP) teams is the quality control (QC) of the Lotus Sutra Project’s digital files. It is crucial that images meet the quality standards of the digital process. As a Digitisation Officer in HMD, I am in charge of QC for the Lotus Sutra Manuscripts Digitisation Project, which is currently conserving and digitising nearly 800 Chinese Lotus Sutra manuscripts to make them freely available on the IDP website. The manuscripts were acquired by Sir Aurel Stein after they were discovered in a hidden cave in Dunhuang, China in 1900. They are thought to have been sealed there at the beginning of the 11th century. They are now part of the Stein Collection at the British Library and, together with the international partners of the IDP, we are working to make them available digitally.
The majority of the Lotus Sutra manuscripts are scrolls and, after they have been treated by our dedicated Digitisation Conservators, our expert Senior Imaging Technician Isabelle does an outstanding job of imaging the fragile manuscripts. My job is then to prepare the images for publication online. This includes checking that they have the correct technical metadata such as image resolution and colour profile, are an accurate visual representation of the physical object and that the text can be clearly read and interpreted by researchers. After nearly 1000 years in a cave, it would be a shame to make the manuscripts accessible to the public for the first time only to be obscured by a blurry image or a wayward piece of fluff!
With the scrolls measuring up to 13 metres long, most are too long to be imaged in one go. They are instead shot in individual panels, which our Senior Imaging Technicians digitally “stitch” together to form one big image. This gives online viewers a sense of the physical scroll as a whole, in a way that would not be possible in real life for those scrolls that are more than two panels in length unless you have a really big table and a lot of specially trained people to help you roll it out.
Or.8210/S.1530: individual panels
Or.8210/S.1530: stitched image
This post-processing can create issues, however. Sometimes an error in the stitching process can cause a scroll to appear warped or wonky. In the stitched image for Or.8210/S.6711, the ruled lines across the top of the scroll appeared wavy and misaligned. But when I compared this with the images of the individual panels, I could see that the lines on the scroll itself were straight and unbroken. It is important that the digital images faithfully represent the physical object as far as possible; we don’t want anyone thinking these flaws are in the physical item and writing a research paper about ‘Wonky lines on Buddhist Lotus Sutra scrolls in the British Library’. Therefore, I asked the Senior Imaging Technician to restitch the images together: no more wonky lines. However, we accept that the stitched images cannot be completely accurate digital surrogates, as they are created by the Imaging Technician to represent the item as it would be seen if it were to be unrolled fully.
Or.8210/S.6711: distortion from stitching. The ruled line across the top of the scroll is bowed and misaligned
Similarly, our Senior Imaging Technician applies ‘digital black’ to make the image background a uniform colour. This is to hide any dust or uneven background and ensure the object is clear. If this is accidentally overused, it can make it appear that a chunk has been cut out of the scroll. Luckily this is easy to spot and correct, since we retain the unedited TIFFs and RAW files to work from.
Or.8210/S.3661, panel 8: overuse of digital black when filling in tear in scroll
Sometimes the scrolls are wonky, or dirty or incomplete. They are hundreds of years old, and this is where it can become tricky to work out whether there is an issue with the images or the scroll itself. The stains, tears and dirt shown in the images below are part of the scrolls and their material history. They give clues to how the manuscripts were made, stored, and used. This is all of interest to researchers and we want to make sure to preserve and display these features in the digital versions. The best part of my job is finding interesting things like this. The fourth image below shows a fossilised insect covering the text of the scroll!
Black stains: Or.8210/S.2814, panel 9
Torn and fragmentary panel: Or.8210/S.1669, panel 1
Insect droppings obscuring the text: Or.8210/S.2043, panel 1
We want to minimise the handling of the scrolls as much as possible, so we will only reshoot an image if it is absolutely necessary. For example, I would ask a Senior Imaging Technician to reshoot an image if debris is covering the text and makes it unreadable - but only after inspecting the scroll to ensure it can be safely removed and is not stuck to the surface. However, if some debris such as a small piece of fluff, paper or hair, appears on the scroll’s surface but is not obscuring any text, then I would not ask for a reshoot. If it does not affect the readability of the text, or any potential future OCR (Optical Character Recognition) or handwriting analysis, it is not worth the risk of damage that could be caused by extra handling.
Reshoot: Or.8210/S.6501: debris over text / No reshoot: Or.8210/S.4599: debris not covering text.
These are a few examples of the things to which the HMD Digitisation Officers pay close attention during QC. Only through this careful process, can we ensure that the digital images accurately reflect the physicality of the scrolls and represent their original features. By developing a QC process that applies the best techniques and procedures, working to defined standards and guidelines, we succeed in making these incredible items accessible to the world.
Read more about Lotus Sutra Project here: IDP Blog
CONNECTED: Connecting trusted Arts and Humanities data repositories is a newly funded activity, supported by AHRC. It is led by the British Library, with the Archaeology Data Service and the Oxford Text Archive as co-investigators, and is supported by consultants from MoreBrains Cooperative.The CONNECTED team believes that improving discovery and curation of heritage and emergent content types in the arts and humanities will increase the impact of cultural resources, and enhance equity. Great work is already being done on discovery services for the sector, so we decided to look upstream, and focus on facilitating repository and archive deposit.
The UK boasts a dynamic institutional repository environment in the HE sector, as well as a range of subject- or field-specific repositories. With a distributed repository landscape now firmly established, challenges and inefficiencies still remain that reduce its impact. These include issues around discovery and access, but also questions around interoperability, the relationship of specialised vs general infrastructures, and potential duplication of effort from an author/depositor perspective. Greater coherence and interoperability will effectively unite different trusted repository services to form a resilient distributed data service, which can grow over time as new individual services are required and developed. Alongside the other projects funded as part of ‘Scoping future data services for the arts and humanities’, CONNECTED will help to deliver this unified network.
As practice in the creative arts becomes more digital and the digital humanities continue to thrive, the diversity of ways in which this research is expressed continues to grow. Researchers are increasingly able to combine artefacts, documents, and materials in new and innovative ways; practice-based research in the arts is creating a diverse range of (often complex) outputs, creating new curation and discovery needs; and heritage collections often contain artefacts with large amounts of annotation and commentary amassed over years or centuries, across multiple formats, and with rich contextual information. This expansion is already exposing the limitations of our current information systems, with the potential for vital context and provenance to become invisible. Without additional, careful, future-proofing, the risks of information loss and limits on access will only expand. In addition, metadata creation, deposit, preservation, and discovery strategies should, therefore, be tailored to meet the very different needs of the arts and humanities.
A number of initiatives are aimed at improving interoperability between metadata sources in ways that are more oriented towards the needs of the arts and humanities. Drawing these together with the insights to be gained from the abilities (and limitations) of bibliographic and data-centric metadata and discovery systems, will help to generate robust services in the complex, evolving landscape of arts and humanities research and creation.
The CONNECTED project will assemble experts, practitioners, and researchers to map current gaps in the content curation and discovery ecosystem and weave together the strengths and potentials of a range of platforms, standards, and technologies in the service of the arts and humanities community. Our activities will run until the end of May, and will comprise three phases:
Phase 1 - Discovery
We will focus on repository or archive deposit as a foundation for the discovery and preservation of diverse outputs, and also as a way to help capture the connections between those objects and the commentary, annotation, and other associated artefacts.
A data service for the arts and humanities must be developed with researcher needs as a priority, so the project team will engage in a series of semi-structured interviews with a variety of stakeholders including researchers, librarians, curators, and information technologists. The interviews will explore the following ideas:
What do researchers need when engaging in discovery of both heritage materials and new outputs?
Are there specific needs that relate to different types of content or use-cases? For example, research involving multimedia or structured information processing at scale?
What can the current infrastructure support, and where are the gaps between what we have and what we need?
What are the feasible technical approaches to transform information discovery?
Phase 2 - Data service programme scoping and planning
The findings from phase 1 will be synthesised using a commercial product strategy approach known as a canvas analysis. Based on the initial impressions from the semi-structured interviews, it is likely that an agile, product, or value proposition canvas will be used to synthesise the findings and structure thinking so that a coherent and robust strategy can be developed. Outputs from the strategy canvas exercise will then be applied to a fully costed and scoped product roadmap and budget for a national data deposit service for the arts and humanities.
Phase 3 - Scoping a unified archiving solution
Building on the partnerships and conversations from the previous phases, the feasibility of a unified ‘deposit switchboard’ will be explored. The purpose of such a switchboard is to enable researchers, curators, and creators to easily deposit items in the most appropriate repository or archive in their field for the object type they are uploading. Using insights gained from the landscaping interviews in phase 1, the team will identify potential pathways to developing a routing service for channelling content to the most appropriate home.
We will conclude with a virtual community workshop to explore the challenges and desirability of the switchboard approach, with a special focus on the benefits this could bring to the uploader of new content and resources.
This is an ambitious project, through which we hope to deliver:
A fully costed and scoped technical and organisational roadmap to build the required components and framework for the National Collection
Improved usage of resources in the wider GLAM and institutional network, including of course the Archaeology Data Service, The British Library's Shared Research Repository, and the Oxford Text Archive
Steps towards a truly community-governed data infrastructure for the arts and humanities as part of the National Collection
As a result of this work, access to UK cultural heritage and outputs will be accelerated and simplified, the impact of the arts and humanities will be enhanced, and we will help the community to consolidate the UK's position as a global leader in digital humanities and infrastructure.
This post is from Rachael Kotarski (@RachPK), Principal Investigator for CONNECTED, and Josh Brown from MoreBrains.
Every year the British Library host a range of PhD placement scheme projects. If you are interested in applying for one of these, the 2022 opportunities are advertised here. There are currently 15 projects available across Library departments, all starting from June 2022 onwards and ending before March 2023. If you would like to work with born digital collections, you may want to read last week’s Digital Scholarship blog post about two projects on enhanced curation, hybrid archives and emerging formats. However, if you are interested in Caribbean diasporic networks and want to experiment creating network analysis visualisations, then read on to find out more about the “Mapping Caribbean Diasporic Networks through correspondence (2022-ACQ-CDN)” project.
This is an exciting opportunity to be involved with the preliminary stages of a project to map the Caribbean Diasporic Network evident in the ‘Special Correspondence’ files of the Andrew Salkey Archive. This placement will be based in the Contemporary Literary and Creative Archives team at the British Library with support from Digital Scholarship colleagues. The successful candidate will be given access to a selection of correspondence files to create an item level dataset and explore the content of letters from the likes of Edward Kamau Brathwaite, C.L.R. James, and Samuel Selvon.
Photograph of Andrew Salkey, from the Andrew Salkey Archive, Deposit 10310. With kind permission of Jason Salkey.
The main outcome envisaged for this placement is to develop a dataset, using a sample of ten files, linking the data and mapping the correspondent’s names, location they were writing from, and dates of the correspondence in a spreadsheet. The placement student will also learn how to use the Gephi Open Graph Visualisation Platform to create a visual representation of this network, associating individuals with each other and mapping their movement across the world between the 1950s and 1990s.
Gephi is open-source software for visualising and analysing networks, they provide a step-by-step guide to getting started, with the first step to upload a spreadsheet detailing your ‘nodes’ and ‘edges’. To show an example of how Gephi can be used, We've included an example below, which was created by previous British Library research placement student Sarah FitzGerald from the University of Sussex, using data from the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) to create a Gephi visualisation of all EAP applications received between 2004 and 2017.
Network visualisation of EAP Applications created by Sarah FitzGerald
In this visualisation the size of each country relates to the number of applications it features in, as country of archive, country of applicant, or both. The colours show related groups. Each line shows the direction and frequency of application. The line always travels in a clockwise direction from country of applicant to country of archive, the thicker the line the more applications. Where the country of applicant and country of archive are the same the line becomes a loop. If you want to read more about the other visualisations that Sarah created during her project, please check out these two blog posts:
We hope this new PhD placement will offer the successful candidate the opportunity to develop their specialist knowledge through access to the extensive correspondence series in the Andrew Salkey archive, and to undertake practical research in a curatorial context by improving the accessibility of linked metadata for this collection material. This project is a vital building block in improving the Library’s engagement with this material and exploring the ways it can be accessed by a wider audience.
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!
Engagement with cultural heritage collections and the research impact beyond mainstream metrics in arts and humanities
Open and Engaged, the British Library’s annual event in Open Access Week, took place virtually on 25 October. The theme of the conference was Understanding the Impact of Open in the Arts and Humanities beyond the University as you may see in a previous blog post.
The slides and the video recordings together with their transcripts are now available through the British Library’s Research Repository. This blog post will give you a flavour of the talks and the sessions in a nutshell.
Two main sessions formed the programme of the conference; one was on increasing the engagement with cultural heritage collections and the other one was on measuring and evaluating impact of open resources beyond journal articles.
British Library and Piazza by Paul Grundy
Session One: Increasing Engagement with Cultural Heritage Collections
The first session was opened with a talk from Brigitte Vézina from Creative Commons (CC). It was about how CC supports GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) in embracing open access and unlocking universal access to knowledge and culture. Brigitte introduced CC’s Open GLAM programme which is a coordinated global effort to help GLAMs make the content they steward openly available and reusable for the public good.
The British Library’s Sam van Schaik presented Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) which provides funding for projects to digitise and preserve archival materials at risk of destruction. The resulting digital images and sound files are made available via the British Library’s website. Sam drew attention to the challenges around ethical issues with the CC licenses used for these digital materials and the practical considerations with working globally.
Merete Sanderhoff from National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) raised a concern about how the GLAM sector at the institutional level is lagging behind in embracing the full potential of open cultural heritage. Merete explained that GLAM users increasingly benefit from arts and knowledge beyond institutional walls by using data from GLAM collections and by spurring on developments in digital literacy, citizen science and democratic citizenship.
Towards a National Collection (TaNC), the research development programme funded by AHRC was the last talk of this session and presented by Rebecca Bailey, Programme Director at TaNC. The programme sponsors projects that are working to link collections and encourage cross-searching of multiple collection types, to enable research and enhance public engagement. Rebecca outlined the achievements and ambitions of the projects, as they start to look ahead to a national collections research infrastructure.
This session highlighted that the GLAM sector should embrace their full potential in making cultural heritage open for public good beyond their physical premises. The use of more open and public domain licences will make it easier to use digital heritage content and resources in the research and creative spheres. The challenge comes with the unethical use of digital collections in some cases, but licensing mechanisms are not the tools with which to police research ethics.
Session Two: Measuring and Evaluating Impact of Open Resources Beyond Journal Articles
The second half of the conference started with a metrics project, Cobaltmetrics, which works towards making altmetrics genuinely alternative by using URIs. Luc Boruta from Thunken talked about bringing algorithmic fairness to impact measurement, from web-scale attention tracking to computer-assisted data storytelling.
Gemma Derrick from University of Lancaster presented on the hidden REF experience and highlighted assessing the broader value of research culture. Gemma noted that the doubt in whether the impact can be measured doesn’t comes from lack of tools, but it is more about what is considered as impact that differs between individuals, institutions, and fields of disciplines. As she stated, “the nature of impact and the nature of evaluation is inherently better when humans are involved, mainly because mitigating factors and mitigating aspects of our research, and what makes our research culture really important, are less likely to be overlooked by an automated system.” This is what they addressed in the hidden REF, celebrating all research outputs and every role that makes research possible
Anne Boddington from Kingston University reflected on research impact in three parts; looking at its definition, partnering and collaboration between GLAMs and higher education institutions, and the reflections on future benefits. Anne talked about the challenges of impact, the kinds of evidence it demands and the opportunities it presents. She concluded her talk noting that impact is here to stay and there are significant areas for growth, opportunities for innovation and leadership in the context of impact.
Helen Adams from Oxford University Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM) presented the Online Active Community Engagement (O-ACE) project where they combined arts and science to measure the benefits of online culture for mental health in young people. She highlighted how GLAM organizations can actively involve audiences in medical research and how cultural interventions may positively impact individual wellbeing, prior to diagnosis, treatment, or social prescribing pathways. The conference ended with this great case study on impact assessment.
In her closing remarks, Rachael Kotarski of the British Library underlined that opening up GLAM organizations is not only allowing us to break down the walls of our buildings to get content out there but also crosses those geographic boundaries to get content in front of communities who might not have had a chance to experience it before. It also allows us to work with communities who originated content to understand their concerns and not just the concerns of our organizations. Rachael echoed that licensing restrictions are not the solution to all our questions, or to the ethical issues. It is important that we can reflect on what we have learned to adjust and rethink our approach and identify what really allows us to balance access, engagement, and creativity.
In the context of research impact, we need to centre the human in our assessment and the processes. The other factor in impact assessments is the relatively short period of time to assess it. The examples like O-ACE project also showed us that the creation of impact can take much longer than we think and what impacts can be seen will vary through that time. So, assessing those interventions also needs a longer-term views.
Those who didn’t attend the conference or would like to re-visit the talks can find the recordings in the British Library’s Research Repository. The social media interactions can be followed with #OpenEngaged hashtag.
We are looking forward to hosting the Open and Engaged 2022 hopefully in person at the British Library.
This blog post was written by Ilkay Holt, Scholarly Communications Lead, part of the Research Infrastructure Services team.
Since 29 September, to support and guide the management of its collection, the Library has adopted a new persistent identifier policy. A persistent identifier or PID is a long lasting digital reference to an entity whether it is physical or digital. PIDs are a core component in providing reliable, long-term access to collections and improve their discoverability. They also make it easier to track when and how collections are used. The Library has been using PIDs in various forms for almost a decade but following the creation of a case study as part of the AHRC’s Towards a National Collection funded project, PIDs as IRO Infrastructure, the Library recognised the need to document its rationale and approach to PIDs and lay down principles and requirements for their use.
The Library encourages the use of PIDs across its collections and collection metadata. It recognises the role PIDs have as a component in sustainable, open infrastructure and in enabling interoperability and the use of Library resources. PIDs also support the Library’s content strategy and its goal of connecting rather than collecting as they enable long term and reliable access to resources.
Many different types of PIDs are used across the Library, some of which it creates for itself, e.g. ARKs, and others which it harvests from elsewhere, e.g. DOIs that are used to identify journal articles. While not all existing Library services may meet the requirements described in this policy, it provides a benchmark against which they can be measured and aspire to develop.
To make sure staff at the Library are supported in implementing the policy, a working group has been convened to run until the end of December 2022. This group will raise awareness of the policy and ensure that guidance is made available to any project or service which is under review to consider the use of PIDs.
A public version of the policy is available on this page and an extract with the key points are provided below. The group would like to acknowledge the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s policy which was influential in the creation of this policy.
Principles
In its use of identifiers, the British Library adheres to the following principles, which describe the qualities PIDs created, contributed or consumed by the Library must have.
A PID must never be deleted but may be marked as deprecated if required
A PID must be usable in perpetuity to identify its associated entry
A PID must only describe one entity and must never be reused for different entities
A PID must have established versioning processes and procedures in place; these may be defined locally by the Library as a creator or by the PID provider
A PID must have established governance mechanisms, such as contracts, in place to ensure the standards of use of the PID are met and continue to be met
A PID must resolve to metadata about the entity available in both a human and machine readable format
A publicly accessible PID must be resolvable via a global resolver
A PID must have an operating model that is sustainable for long-term persistent use
Established user community
A PID must have an established user community, which has adopted it as a standard, either through an organisation such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) or as a de factostandard through widespread adoption; the Library will support and develop the use of new types of PIDs where there is a defined and recognised use case which they would address
Interoperable
A PID must be able to link with the other identifiers in use at the Library through open metadata standards and the capability to cross-reference resources
New PID types or new use
New types of PIDs should only be considered for use in the Library where there is a defined need which cannot reasonably be met by a combination of PIDs already in use
Any new PID type used by the Library should meet the requirements described in this policy
Where a PID type is emerging and does not have an established community, the Library can seek to influence its development in line with principles for open and sustainable infrastructures
Requirements
These requirements outline the Library’s responsibilities in using PID services and creating PIDs. While the Library uses identifiers which do not meet all of these requirements, they are included for future work and developments.
The Library aspires to assign PIDs to all resources within its collections, both physical and digital, and associated entities, in alignment with the guiding principles of the Library’s content strategy 2020-2023.
The Library has varying levels of involvement in different PID schemes, but all PIDs created by the Library must meet the requirements described in this section and the Library prefers the use of PIDs which meet the principles
Identifiers created by the Library must have an opaque format, i.e. not contain any semantic information within them, to ensure their longevity
A PID must resolve to information about the entity to which it refers
The Library must have a process to specify the granularity at which PIDs are assigned and how relationships between PIDs for component and overarching entities are managed
The Library must have a process to manage versioning including changes, merges and retirement of entities
Standard descriptive information about an entity, e.g. creator, should have a PID
All metadata associated with a PID should comply with Collection Metadata Licensing Guidelines
Where a PID referring to a citable resource resolves to a webpage, that webpage should display a suggested citation including the hyperlink to the PID to encourage ongoing use of the PID outside the Library
If you would like to hear more about this policy and the Library’s approach to persistent identifiers, feel free to contact the Heritage PIDs project on Twitter or email [email protected].
This post is by Frances Madden (@maddenfc, orcid.org/0000-0002-5432-6116), Research Associate (PIDs as IRO Infrastructure) in the Research Infrastructure Services team.
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!