Digital Scholarship at BLCrowdsourcing activities

Aquiles Alencar-Brayner

@AquilesBrayner

and

Stella Wisdom

@miss_wisdom

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Digital Research & Curator Team

Formed in 2010 as part of the new Digital Scholarship department

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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, crowdsourcing, etc.

• Engage with new and existing user communities

• Strengthen the BL capabilities

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Engagement with users:BL Labs (Launched 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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Million image corpus

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UK SoundMap

• In 2009 British Library sound archive staff began tests for a new kind of field recording project to aggregate user-generated digital audio content using mobile phones. Named the UK SoundMap, the project represents a radical departure from the more traditional, curator-led professional archival practices we were used to.

• The UK SoundMap uses an informal community of mobile phone users (via Audioboo) to capture and describe their environmental sounds, then enable near-instant public sharing on a dedicated website: in effect, contributors as curator-publishers.

• http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/UK-Soundmap

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UK SoundMap: technical, legal and ethical issues

• poor sound quality, particularly wind noise and low quality recording equipment

• deliberate or inadvertent contributions of inappropriate recordings (e.g. copyrighted music or spoken performances, invasions of privacy, derogatory or rude language)

• inconsistent and missing metadata quality

• irrelevant recordings (e.g. outside the geographical scope or subject matter)

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Book Card catalogues

• First batch (or “drawer”) of the Pinyin card catalogue was released to the public on June 8th with 1,278 cards and all tasks were completed (meaning three or more individuals looked at every card and attempted to make a match) just over two and half weeks later on June 24th 2015.

• In the end for 50%, or 659 items, at least two people matched the same OCLC record against a particular card. The Indonesian Card Catalogue, launched at the same time, had proven a bit more challenging as the cards were digitised from microfilm so were more difficult to read on screen. That said that batch was completed a few weeks later with at least two people matching the same OCLC record against 48% of the batch, or roughly 483 out of 1,000 cards.

• next step is to do rigorous spot checking and work with our pals in metadata services to integrate them into Aleph http://www.libcrowds.com/

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Georeferencer

The British Library began a project to crowdsource the georeferencing of its scanned historic mapping in 2011 by partnering with Klokan Technologies.

Over 8,000 maps have already been "placed" by participants checked for accuracy and approved for reviewers.

We are currently on the sixth release, which features over 50,000 maps from the 17th, 18th, and 19th-century book illustrations on Flickr

http://www.bl.uk/maps/

Video explanation: https://vimeo.com/36419466

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Georeferencer

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Pin-a-tale

Pin-a-Tale was an online crowd-sourcing initiative that sought to connect our individual experiences of writing and place, and pin them to a searchable map.

It accompanied the British Library exhibition “Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands”, 11 May – 25 September 2012

We asked people to choose a literary work from any period and in any form that relates to a specific location in the British and Irish Isles and to tell us how the author captured the spirit of the place.

http://www.bl.uk/pin-a-tale/pin-a-tale-map.aspx

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Pin-a-tale

http://www.bl.uk/pin-a-tale/pin-a-tale-map.aspx

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“Many hands make light work.

Many hands together make merry work”

Wrote the philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham in 1793

Transcribe Bentham

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Transcribe Bentham

A participatory project based at University College London. Its aim is to engage the public in the online transcription of original and unstudied manuscript papers written by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

The UCL Bentham Papers and the British Library's Bentham material have all been digitised and made available via Transcribe Bentham for crowdsourcing. The manuscripts have been reunited (digitally) for the first time since Bentham's death, thereby creating a free-to-access historical and philosophical resource of great significance.

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Transcribe Bentham

Transcribe Bentham website: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/

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Transcribe Bentham

As of 7th August 2015 13,532 manuscripts have been transcribed or partially-transcribed

Transcribe Bentham Getting Started video:https://youtu.be/V541tJEAJ8w

Transcribe Bentham website:http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/

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Sounds of our Shores

The British Library, in collaboration with the National Trust, the National Trust for Scotland and audioBoom Ltd, are creating the first ever interactive coastal soundmap of the UK

http://www.bl.uk/sounds-of-our-shores

To get involved in this sound survey of coastal sounds all you need to do is upload your recordings using the free audioBoom app or a web browser.

When uploading your recordings via audioBoom, add the tag #shoresounds and they will appear on the soundmap

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From 21 June until 21 September, this interactive map will take a snapshot of the sounds of the whole UK coastline during the summer of 2015

http://www.bl.uk/sounds-of-our-shores

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Sounds of our Shores

Vote now open to find UK's favourite coastal soundhttps://www.surveymonkey.com/r/soundsofourshores

We have chosen 10 of the most evocative sounds from the amazing range of sounds already uploaded to the Sounds of our Shores map and we’re asking the public to vote for their favourite! 

Sounds include the sound of waves rolling on to golden sands, seagulls crying from the clifftops, seals snorting and children playing on the beach. 

The online poll closes at midnight on Thursday 27 August 2015

The results will be announced on 4 September 2015

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Aquiles Alencar-Brayner@AquilesBrayner

and

Stella Wisdom@miss_wisdom

digitalresearch@bl.ukhttp://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/