Digital scholarship blog

Enabling innovative research with British Library digital collections

40 posts categorized "Sound and vision"

18 December 2024

The challenges of AI for oral history: theoretical and practical issues

Oral History Archivist Charlie Morgan provides examples of how AI-based tools integrated into workflows might affect oral historians' consideration of orality and silence in the second of two posts on a talk he gave with Digital Curator Mia Ridge at the 7th World Conference of the International Federation for Public History in Belval, LuxembourgHis first post proposed some key questions for oral historians thinking about AI, and shared an example automatic speech recognition (ASR) tools in practice. 

While speech to text once seemed at the cutting edge of AI, software designers are now eager to include additional functions. Many incorporate their own chatbots or other AI ‘helpers’ and the same is true of ‘standard’ software. Below you can see what happened when I asked the chatbots in Otter and Adobe Acrobat some questions about other transcribed clips from the ‘Lives in Steel’ CD:

Screenshot of search and chatbot interactions with transcribed text
A composite image of chatbot responses to questions about transcribed clips

In Otter, the chatbot does well at answering a question on sign language but fails to identify the accent or dialect of the speaker. This is a good reminder of the limits of these models and how, without any contextual information, they cannot understand the interview beyond textual analysis. Oral historians in the UK have long understood interviews as fundamentally oral sources and current AI models risk taking us away from this.

In Adobe I tried asking a much more subjective question around emotion in the interview. While the chatbot does answer, it is again worth remembering the limits of this textual analysis, which, for example, could not identify crying, laughter or pitch change as emotion. It would also not understand the significance of any periods of silence. On our panel at the IFPH2024 conference in Luxembourg Dr Julianne Nyhan noted how periods of silence tend to lead speech-to-text models to ‘hallucinate’ so the advice is to take them out; the problem is that oral history has long theorised the meaning and importance of silence.

Alongside the chatbot, Adobe also includes a degree of semantic searching where a search for steel brings up related words. This in itself might be the biggest gift new technologies offer to catalogue searching (shown expertly in Placing the Holocaust) – helping us to move away from what Mia Ridge calls ‘the tyranny of the keyword’.

However, the important thing is perhaps not how well these tools perform but the fact they exist in the first place. Oral historians and archivists who, for good reasons, are hesitant about integrating AI into their work might soon find it has happened anyway. For example, Zencastr, the podcasting software we have used since 2020 for remote recordings, now has an in-built AI tool. Robust principles on the use of AI are essential then not just for new projects or software, but also for work we are already doing and software we are already using.

The rise of AI in oral history raises theoretical questions around orality and silence, but must also be considered in terms of practical workflows: Do participation and recording agreements need to be amended?​ How do we label AI generated metadata in catalogue records, and should we be labelling human generated metadata too? Do AI tools change the risks and rewards of making oral histories available online? We can only answer these questions through though critical engagement with the tools themselves.

The challenges of AI for oral history: key questions

Oral History Archivist Charlie Morgan shares some key questions for oral historians thinking about AI, and shares some examples of automatic speech recognition (ASR) tools in practice in the first of two posts...

Oral history has always been a technologically mediated discipline and so has not been immune to the current wave of AI hype. Some have felt under pressure to ‘do some AI’, while others have gone ahead and done it. In the British Library oral history department, we have been adamant that any use of AI must align practically, legally and ethically with the Library’s AI principles (currently in draft form). While the ongoing effects of the 2023 cyber-attack have also stymied any integration of new technologies into archival workflows, we have begun to experiment with some tools. In September, I was pleased to present on this topic with Digital Curator Mia Ridge at the 7th World Conference of the International Federation for Public History in Belval, Luxembourg. Below is a summary of what I spoke about in our presentation, ‘Listening with machines? The challenges of AI for oral history and digital public history in libraries’.

The ‘boom’ in AI and oral history has mostly focussed on speech recognition and transcription, driven by the release of Trint (2014) and Otter (2016), but especially Whisper (2022). There have also been investigations into indexing, summarising and visualisation, notably from the Congruence Engine project. Oral historians are interested in how AI tools could help with documentation and analysis but many also have concerns. Concerns include, but are not limited to, ownership, data protection/harvesting, labour conditions, environmental costs, loss of human involvement, unreliable outputs and inbuilt biases.

For those of us working with archived collections there are specific considerations: How do we manage AI generated metadata? Should we integrate new technologies into catalogue searching? What are the ethics of working at scale and do we have the experience to do so? How do we factor in interviewee consent, especially since speakers in older collections are now likely dead or uncontactable?

With speech recognition, we are now at a point where we can compare different automated transcripts created at different times. While our work on this topic at the British Library has been minimal, future trials might help us build up enough research data to address the above questions.

Robert Gladders was interviewed by Alan Dein for the National Life Stories oral history project ‘Lives in Steel’ in 1991 and the extract below was featured on the 1993 published CD ‘Lives in Steel’.

The full transcripts for this audio clip are at the end of this post.

Sign Language

We can compare three automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts of the first line:

  • Human: Sign language was for telling the sample to the first hand, what carbon the- when you took the sample up into the lab, you run with the sample to the lab​
  • Otter 2020: Santa Lucia Chelan, the sound pachala fest and what cabin the when he took the sunlight into the lab, you know they run with a sample to the lab​
  • Otter 2024: Sign languages for selling the sample, pass or the festa and what cabin the and he took the samples into the lab. Yet they run with a sample to the lab.
  • Whisper 2024: The sand was just for telling the sand that they were fed down. What cabin, when he took the sand up into the lab, you know, at the run with the sand up into the lab

Gladders speaks with a heavy Middlesbrough accent and in all cases the ASR models struggle, but the improvements between 2020 and 2024 are clear. In this case, Otter in 2024 seems to outperform Whisper (‘The sand’ is an improvement on ‘Santa Lucia Chelan’ but it isn’t ‘Sign languages’), but this was a ‘small’ version of Whisper and larger models might well perform better.

One interesting point of comparison is how the models handle ‘sample passer’, mentioned twice in the short extract:

  • Otter 2020: Sentinel pastor / sound the password​
  • Otter 2024: Salmon passer / Saturn passes​
  • Whisper 2024: Santland pass / satin pass

While in all cases the models fail, this would be easy to fix. The aforementioned CD came with its own glossary, which we could feed into a large language model working on these transcriptions. Practically this is not difficult but it raises some larger questions. Do we need to produce tailored lexicons for every collection? This is time-consuming work so who is going to do it? Would we label an automated transcript in 2024 that makes use of a human glossary written in 1993 as machine generated, human generated, or both? Moreover, what level of accuracy we are willing to accept and how do we define accuracy itself?

 

Samplepasser: The top man on the melting shop with responsibility for the steel being refined. Sampling: The act of taking a sample of steel from a steel furnace, using a long-handled spoon which is inserted into the furnace and withdrawn. Sintering: The process of heating crushed iron-ore dust and particles (fines) with coke breeze in an oxidising atmosphere to reduce sulphur content and produce a more effective and consistent charge for the blast furnaces. This process superseded the earlier method of charging the furnaces with iron-ore and coke, and led to greatly increased tonnages of iron being produced
Sample glossary terms

Continue reading" The challenges of AI for oral history: key questions" »

06 November 2024

Recovered Pages: Crowdsourcing at the British Library

Digital Curator Mia Ridge writes...

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

Crowdsourcing at the British Library

Screenshot of the Zooniverse interface for annotating a historical newspaper article
Example of a crowdsourcing task

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

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

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

Crowdsourcing Projects at the British Library

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

 

Research Projects

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

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

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

More Information

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

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

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

Past editions of our newsletter are available online.

11 September 2023

Join the British Library's Universal Viewer Product Team

The British Library has been a leading contributor to IIIF, the International Image Interoperability Framework, and the Universal Viewer for many years. We're about to take the next step in this work - and you can join us! We are recruiting for a Product Owner, a Research Software Engineer and a Senior Test Engineer (deadline 03 January 2024). 

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

A lavishly decorated page from a fourteenth century manusript 'The Sherborne Missal' showing an illuminated capital with the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus and surrounded by the three Kings.With other illuminations in the margins and the text.
Detail from Add MS 74236 'The Sherborne Missal' displayed in the Universal Viewer

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

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

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

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

A view of the Library's image viewer, showing an early nineteenth century Javanese palm-leaf manuscript inside its decorated wooden covers. To the left of the image there is a list with the thumbnails of the manuscript leaves and to the right the panel displays bibliographic information about the item.
British Library Universal Viewer displaying Add MS 12278

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

Product Owner (job reference R00000196)

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

Research Software Engineer (job reference R00000197)

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

Senior Test Engineer (job reference R00000198)

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

To apply please visit the British Library recruitment siteApplications close on 3 January 2024. Interview dates are listed in the job ads.

Please ensure you answer all application questions (CVs cannot be submitted). At the BL we can only shortlist with information that applicants provide in response to questions on the application.  Any questions about the roles or the process? Drop us a line at [email protected].

29 September 2021

Sailing Away To A Distant Land - Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs - final post

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.

I remember Professors Tim Hitchcock (now at Sussex University and who eventually sat (and is still sitting) on the BL Labs Advisory Board) and Laurel Brake (now Professor Emerita of Literature and Print Culture, Birkbeck, University of London) being in the audience together with staff from the Royal Library of Netherlands, who 6 months later launched their own brilliant KB Lab. Subsequently, I became good colleagues with Lotte Wilms who led their Lab for many years and is now Head of Research support at Tilburg University.

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
  • working on special projects
  • repeat!

The winners were announced in July 2013, and then we worked with them on their entries showcasing them at our annual BL Labs Symposium in November, around 4 months later.

'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.

In 2014, https://data.bl.uk was born and today, all our 153 datasets (as of 29/09/2021) are available through the British Library's research repository.

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).

More recently, we have experimented with browser based programming / computational environments - Jupyter Notebooks. We are huge fans of Tim Sherrat who was a pioneer and brilliant advocate of OPEN GLAM in using them, especially through his GLAM Workbench. He is a one person Lab in his own right, and it was an honour to recognise his monumental efforts by giving him the BL Labs Research Award 2020 last year. You can also explore the fantastic work of Gustavo Candela and colleagues on Jupyter Notebooks and the ones my colleageue Filipe Bento created.

Art Exhibitions, Creativity and Education

I am extremely proud to have been involved in enabling two major art exhibitions to happen at the BL, namely:

Crossroads of Curiosity by David Normal

Imaginary Cities by Michael Takeo Magruder

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.

We also had some interesting projects working with younger people, such as Vittoria's world of stories and the fantastic work of Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller at the Australian National University. This is something I am very much interested in exploring further in the future, especially around ideas of computational thinking and have been trying out a few things.

GLAM Labs community and Booksprint

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

Farwell-bl-labs-290921Mahendra'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:

http://tiny.cc/mahendramahey

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!

Mahendra Mahey, former BL Labs Manager / Captain / Sailor signing off!

09 July 2021

Subjects Wanted for Soothing Sounds Psychology Studies

Can you help University of Reading researchers with their studies examining the potential therapeutic effects of  looking at ‘soothing’ images and listening to natural sounds on mental health and wellbeing?

Sound recordings for this research have been provided by Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds, from the British Library Sound Archive.

One study focuses on young people; 13-17 year-olds are wanted for an easy online survey. Psychology Masters student Jasmiina Ryyanen from the University of Reading is asking young people to view and listen to 25 images and sounds, rating their moods before and after. Access the survey for 13-17 year-olds here: https://henley.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eKaQjEf2H3Vqw9U.

Poster with details of Soothing Sounds student study for young people

There is also an online survey managed by Emily Witten, which is aimed at adults, so if you are over 18 please participate in this study: https://henley.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cBa6tNtkN3fgkCO.  

Poster about Soothing Sounds student study for adults

Both surveys are completely randomised; some participants will be asked to look at images only, others to listen to sounds only, and the final group to look at images while listening to the sounds at the same time. These research projects have been fully approved by the University of Reading’s ethical standards board. If you have any questions about these surveys, please email Jasmiina Ryyanen (j.ryynanen(at)student.reading.ac.uk) and Emily Witten (e.i.c.witten(at)student.reading.ac.uk).

We hope you enjoy participating in these surveys and feel suitably soothed from the experience! 

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom

11 June 2021

Libraries & Museums & Archives (Oh My!)

Folks interested in creative reuse of digitised sound recordings, may want to come along to the "Libraries & Museums & Archives (Oh My!)" online conference this Saturday (12th June 2021), organised by The Folklore Library & Archive. Where Cheryl Tipp, the British Library's Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds and I will give a talk on how the Library’s sound archive has been innovatively used to create atmospheric soundscapes both in the virtual landscapes of videogames, and for physical sites of archaeological interest, such as Creswell Crags Museum and Visitor Centre. Plus how the Wildlife and Environmental Sounds collection has been interpreted in other artistic projects, including visualisations by Andy Thomas, and some delightful needlework by textile artist Cat Frampton.

Folklore Library and Archive logo with an open book and a wax seal
The Folklore Library & Archive artwork by Rhi Wynter

In our presentation we'll mention entries in the Off the Map competition, such as Midsummer by Tom Battey. Submissions to the recent Games in the Woods game jam for the Urban Tree Festival, such as Noisy Wood by Ash Green.

Also the fantastic Faint Signals by Invisible Flock, an interactive virtual woodland sound experience, which has been featured recently by Europeana Pro in an article on Seven tips for digital storytelling with cultural heritage, and in this BBC Culture story about The sounds that make us calmer.

Screen image of Faint Signals abstract virtual woodland
Faint Signals by Invisible Flock

The conference will be held online via Zoom, with ticket money going towards the Folklore Library and Archive’s appeal to save the archive of the late folklorist Venetia Newall. Furthermore, all ticket holders will be able to access video replays of the talks after the event, go here for booking your place. There is a stellar line-up of speakers from other organisations, including:

  • Jim Peters, Collections manager (Dept of Prehistory and Europe) from the British Museum talking about his favourite objects from the collections.
  • Alexandra Stockdale-Haley from the National Science and Media Museum, talking about The Cottingley Fairy artefacts and their role in the modern day.
  • Librarians from Senate House Library giving a presentation on The Harry Price Library of Magical Literature.
  • Geraldine Beskin, owner of the Atlantis Bookshop talking about Ghosts of the Theatre.
  • Rachel Morris, co-founder of Metaphor Museum Designers, speaking about the role of the archive in Museums and how to interpret it.
  • Peter Hewitt, founder of the Folklore Museums Network talking about their work bringing museums together.
  • Clare Smith, Historical Collections Curator from the Metropolitan Police Museum giving a talk on The Crime Museum fact vs fiction, and other police artifacts.
  • Lucy Gibbon, Acting Senior Archivist from Orkney Library & Archive will round off the event with stories from the Orkney Archives.

 We hope to see you there! Do follow #folklorelibrary for twitter chat during the conference.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom

05 May 2021

Games in the Library and Games in the Woods

Congratulations to the winner, runners up and everyone who made a game last month for Leeds Libraries Games Jam on Novels That Shaped Our World, which invited jammers to create playful interactive adaptations of books in the BBC’s Novels that Shaped Our World list. To accompany this jam, they programmed a fantastic series of events, which if you missed seeing live, or want to re-watch, can be found in this YouTube playlist.

I absolutely love the premise of the winning submission Frankenstein's Double Wedding, Or, The Modern P…romeo…ethius by WretchedBees (Will Binns). You need a deck of cards to play this solo or cooperative game. Playing as Dr. Frankenstein, with the help of both your monster and betrothed, the game’s aim is to organise a double wedding, arranging catering, a florist, a venue and inviting wedding guests. Not forgetting, that you also need to create a spouse for your monster, before you can both get wed.

A silhoutte profile of a face looking to the left with a bolt of lightning in the face. There are also brains in lightbulbs and the spade, club, diamond and heart symbols from playing cards
Frankenstein's Double Wedding, Or, The Modern P…romeo…ethius by WretchedBees

Well deserved recognition also goes to the two runners up, these are The Open Wizarding Challenge by Suzini56, where to win, players navigate rooms and corridors of their wizarding school, dodging moving staircases and obstacles, aiming to be the first to reach the exit with their bag of collected items, picked up on the way. Also, Fortune of War: A game of Napoleonic era Naval Life by webcowgirl, which is based on Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander books. Writing about her submission she says “this game tries to capture the flavor of the books, with its humor and humanity. Winning isn't just about money, it is ultimately also about pride, honor, and dignity.” Something we would all do well to remember.

A boardgame on a table with a paper ship at the centre of the board, and pot plants behind it
Fortune of War: A game of Napoleonic era Naval Life by webcowgirl

Other #NTSOWgamesjam submissions re-worked Pride and Prejudice, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener. You can check these out on the jam’s itch.io entries page. Being a Sandman graphic novels fan, I enjoyed looking at Of You by DarrenLEdwards, which has been structured so this tabletop roleplaying game could also be based on many other fantastical worlds such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Neverending Story, The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, The Chronicles of Narnia, His Dark Materials etc.

If exploring fantasy worlds and playing games has inspired you to want to make a game, or if you are a seasoned game maker, then you may want to take part in our Games In the Woods jam this month, which I am running with Ash Green, Marion Tessier from Story Circles and Kingston Upon Thames Libraries, and Cheryl Tipp. This is an online tree themed game jam for all ages, which will run throughout the duration of the Urban Tree Festival. There will be an online launch event on Saturday 15th May with inspiring examples of interactive digital experiences featuring trees and a virtual “show & tell” event on Sunday 23rd May for jammers to celebrate their creations.

Before and during the Urban Tree Festival, game jammers can meet and chat with organisers and each other on our Discord Server: https://discord.gg/qWXH8NcjHE, so please join and say hello on there and use #gamesinthewoods on social media to share images and details of your work in progress.

A wood with a deer standing to the left and a fox standing on the right
Games in the Woods game jam

You are welcome to join alone or in a team to create digital and analogue games, interactive fiction, web comics, board games, escape games, card games – anything you want! The only constraints are time, the theme and your imagination. We especially encourage creative re-use of images from the British Library’s Flickr collection of digitised 19th century books, do check out these online Flora and Fauna galleries. There is also a fantastic curated selection of wildlife and environmental sound recordings picked by my colleague Cheryl Tipp, which you can use in your creations. These are available via this SoundCloud playlist.

Portrait photographs of Sue Thomas, Irini Papadimitriou and Cheryl Tipp
Sue Thomas, Irini Papadimitriou and Cheryl Tipp

Cheryl is also speaking at a free Digital Nature online event next Monday, 10th May, 19:30 - 20:30. Chaired by Irini Papadimitriou, Creative Director at Future Everything, this event also features Ben Eaton from Invisible Flock (read more about their woodland work Faint Signals here), and author of books on nature and technology Sue Thomas. This is part of the British Library’s springtime season of events The Natural Word, which explores nature writing and reflects on our need to reimagine our relationship with the environment. Hope to see you there.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom)

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