Digital Scholarship at the

British Library

Aquiles Alencar-Brayner

@AquilesBrayner

www.bl.uk 2

Digital Research & Curator Team

Formed in 2010 as part of the new Digital Scholarship department

www.bl.uk 3

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

www.bl.uk 4

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

•

www.bl.uk 5

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

www.bl.uk 6

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

www.bl.uk 7

Support for digital collections and services

Involvement with BL digital programmes

and services run by other departments

• Born-digital content:

Tools for data analysis: JISC 1996-2010

• Digitised resources:

Codex Sinaiticus

Shakespeare in Quarto

www.bl.uk 8

Engagement with users I:

Growing Knowledge exhibition (2010 – 2011)

Beautiful Science (Feb – May 2014)

Growing Knowledge offered a physical space

where public could walk in and start exploring a

wide number of digital tools used by researchers

from text mining to online collaboration.

Beautiful Science explores how our

understanding of ourselves and our planet has

evolved alongside our ability to diagram, graph,

and map the mass data of the time.

http://bit.ly/1juG9VG

www.bl.uk 9

Engagement with users :

BL Labs (Launched March 2013)• Mechanical Curator

Tumblr

Flickr

Wikimedia

How are users engaging with content?

List of projects

Video

Other projects:

• BL Digital Music Lab

• Off the Map

• Victorian Meme Machine

www.bl.uk 10

Creating and sharing digital content

through Social Media:

• Wikimedia Commons

• Pinterest

• Google Maps

• Flickr

• HistoryPin

www.bl.uk 11

Network & partnerships

www.bl.uk 12

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

www.bl.uk 13

Thank you