Role of libraries in supporting digital scholarship

ELAG 2014
Key note: The Role of libraries in supporting digital scholarship
Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator, The British Library

(see description of the talk)

Need to change the services to meet the need of researchers. There is more and more digital content, increased collaboration working or re-purposing of content. The BL wants the researchers to do innovative research with their content. The BL has been digitising for at least two decades and aims to do much more.

Digital content - examples of recent developments at the BL

• Georeference maps and new interactive tool (http://www.bl.uk/maps) 
• Europeana 1914-1918 Roadshows - visited museums in different parts of the country, showing some of their digitised images
• Off the Map: video games festival, following a preservation about complexe object conference to which Stella went to and gave her ideas of what the BL can do in this area. There's a museum about video games, Victoria & Albert Museum also organised a competition. The BL made a special feature on the web archive. BL organised a competion: Crytek off the map: visual trip through 17thC. London made by 6 2nd-grade students (winners of last year's competition)
• Work done on sound collections, with permissions to re-use (under certain conditions) see the Flying Buttress
• Organising exhibitions such as Beautiful Science (picturing data, inspiring insight)
• Dora's lost data game
• British Library labs: one of the main actions is a yearly competition to identify innovative ideas that showcase the Library's collections
• The Victorian Meme Machine, to preserve Victorian jokes (one of the winners of the labs competition) - it will combine jokes with images, all coming from the BL collections