Digital Research & Curator TeamInnovative ways of engaging researchers with digital content

Aquiles Alencar-Brayner

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Digital Research & Curator Team

Formed in 2010 as part of the new Digital Scholarship department

Team composed of 1 Head of DRCT; 5 Digital Curators, 1 eMSS Curator, 1 Curator Library & Information Studies; 1 Web & Intranet Coordinator

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Our Mission

• Support the BL to adopt clear strategies and operating models for Digital Scholarship

• Develop innovative models for Digital Scholarship exploiting digital content and new technologies

• Offer training and support to BL staff on Digital Scholarship practices and resources

• Involvement with various digital programmes (internal and external) involving digitisation, born-digital materials, publication on the Web, etc.

• Engage with new and existing user communities

• Strengthen the BL capabilities

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Main Activities

• Staff training

• Promotion of Digital Scholarship within BL

• Curation of digital research data

• Project management

• Engagement with users

• Create and share online content with other libraries and research centres

• Communication channels

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Staff training: Increasing skills and awareness

Objectives: Wider engagement from staff in implementing

the 2020 Vision and Digital Scholarship Strategy

Increased ability to work with digital content and services

Increased ability to shape digital services Increased engagement with researchers Increased confidence in establishing

collaborations with partners in digital scholarship

Improved fluency around data management

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Digital Scholarship Training Programme: 15 courses (offered 3 times a year) launched in October 2012

1. Social Media: Introduction to Yammer, Twitter, and Blogging

2. Working collaboratively: Using the BL Wiki

3. Presentation skills: From PowerPoint to Prezi

4. Foundations in working with Digital Objects: From Images to A/V

5. Behind the Screen: Basics of the Web

6. Metadata for Electronic Resources: Dublin Core, METS, MODS, RDF, XML

7. What is Digital Scholarship?

8. Digital Collections at British Library

9. Digitisation at British Library

10.Communicating our collections online: Access & Reuse Policy

11. Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions

12.Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)

13.Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research

14.Geo-referencing and Digital Mapping

15. Information Integration: Mash-ups, API’s and The Semantic Web

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Digital Conversations

Series of talks organised by DRCT on specific themes around ideas, tools and projects around Digital Scholarship. Contributors have included entrepreneurs, technologists, librarians, academics and analysts.

Events held:

1. Search and Discovery

2. Sharing and Annotation

3. Profiling and Privacy

4. Open for Re-use

5. Future of Text

6. Digital Narratives

7. Using the Cloud 

Events are recorded on video and made publicly available on BL Youtube account: http://bit.ly/XFJrcI

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Curation e-Manuscripts

Extracting and archiving digital content from personal devices

Assist with capture, management, description, and preservation of personal digital collections to facilitate access and content analysis

Data analysis beyond documents

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Support for digital collections and services

Involvement with BL digital programmes and services run by other departments

Web Archive team:

Collection development: Video games

http://bit.ly/ZwVAgJ

Tools for data analysis: JISC 1996-2010

http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/visualisation

DIPS (Digital Image Presentation System):

www.bl.uk/manuscripts

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Engagement with users I:Growing Knowledge exhibition (2010 – 2011)

Physical space where public could walk in and start exploring a wide number of digital toolsused by researchers from text mining to onlinecollaboration.

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Engagement with users II:Crowdsourcing projects

• Pin-a-Tale:

Online crowdsourcing initiative as part of the Writing Britain exhibition, that sought to connect our individual experiences of writing and place, and pin them to a searchable map. We welcomed contributions from Ireland and the Channel Islands in celebration of the close cultural and literary relationship between all these islands. http://www.bl.uk/pin-a-tale/pin-a-tale-map.aspx

• Europeana 1914 – 1918 Roadshows

Public was invited to bring WW1 photographs, letters, diaries, film or audio recordings, together with the stories of who they belonged to and why they are important to their families to the Europeana 1914-1918 while staff from museums and BL digitised the objects and uploaded them to the dedicated europeana1914-1918.eu website on the spot.

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Engagement with users III:BL Labs (Launch 25th March 2013)

The BL Labs project, sponsored by A. Mellon Foundation, designed to support the BL to provide access to its digital resources and enable scholars to research entire collections rather than just individual items by:

1. Reviewing the BL’s approach to licensing: moving towards a coherent licence framework and setting the standard for access to catalogue metadata and out-of-copyright materials in digital form.

2. Enabling scholars to use and implement novel services; to access, download, and analyse digital content; and to link data to other data and digital collections in order to allow research that analyses entire collections. This will be achieved by providing access to catalogue and digital materials through simple open protocols and semantic linking.

3. Creating BL Labs so that scholars can work intensively with the Library’s digital collections to collaboratively define and implement the services that they need in the digital age.

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Creating and Sharing Digital Content

Europeana 1914 – 1918:

The BL is digitising 10,000 items (up to 250,000 digital images) of a wide range of material related to the First World War. Digitised content will be retrievable via the Europeana portal, as well as via the BL website, and this will form the Library’s contribution to the Europeana Collections 1914-1918.

http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/en

International Image Interoperability Framework (iiif)

The BL and Stanford University, with a half dozen of the world’s leading research libraries and funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, are working collaboratively to produce an interoperable framework for image delivery. With shared technology, common application programming interfaces (APIs), and rich user interfaces, this framework will surpass the current crop of image viewers, page-turners, and navigation systems, giving scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to image-based resources.

http://lib.stanford.edu/iiif

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Network & partnerships

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Provide wider access to our collections

Enable users to create and manipulate data

Enhance research and learning

Support of Digital Scholarship: New tools applied to digital

collections: annotation, citation, comparison, analysis, etc.

Awareness of emerging research trends within DS

Strong collaboration between researchers, IT and information professionals

Distinctive through: Comprehensive digital collections Core infra-structure to store,

preserve, discover and access

Delivered through: Joint projects E-platforms Connecting data sets to research

tools

Integration

Engagem

ent

Innovation

Transform scholarlyproduction &communication

Digital Scholarship

Digital Curatorship

Staff trainingand support

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Communication Channels

• BL Digital Scholarship Blog:

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/

• Connect - DRCT Newsletter (internal)

• Twitter (Digital Curators personal accounts)

• Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LYaclanmcU

• Webpage: https://digitalscholarship.jux.com/