The Mechanical Curator

ELAG 2014
The Surprising Adventures of the Mechanical Curator, and Other Tales
Ben O’Steen, technical leader of  British Library Labs

(see description of the talk and the slides)

This project started last year, as an accident! Taking the stuff that's technically accessible... and making it accessible! Engaged with the researchers, formally and informally through yearly competitions. What they win is our time and effort! The unifying theme to (pretty much) all the requests is: Give us everything! But this is quite depressing: so librarians don't take part in research, they're only there to provide content? Another theme is to have tools to interpret the content, to be able to work on broad sweeps of content rather than one at a time.

The Sample Generator shows the chasm between the collection and the digitised material. Not only is the content not as much digitised but it is also not as accessible as it could be.

The challenge was that research didn't want to work with api's but access large amounts of data. Made an experiment: face detection on 19thC illustrations - it wasn't very successful. The depiction is usually "clean" and posed, males represented differently from females and therefore less often detected etc. But it gave the idea of the mechanical curator, who digs in the collection of digitised images and tries to find visually similar images, based on a calculated match. It has now been doing that for a couple of months (and tweets about it). An unguided way of discovering material.

Images published on Flickr, many views in 4 days. They are published as CC0 and there are already examples of creative re-uses, such as colouring-in for children, an artit's interpretation etc. But this doesn't bring money to the Library, which is always hard to justify. But this is encouraging creativity, it may not be research but it's not less imporatnt. An animation student used images to represent them in 3-D. Moments, by Joe Bell

So the impact is hard to measure. Accessible is great, can we make it more useful? A group of UCL big Data CS students will be given access to all the book data, cloud computing and will make an experiment for broader and more direct access to the collections.

EuropeanaBot

ELAG 2014
EuropeanaBot – using open data and open APIs to present digital collections
Peter Mayr, administrator for the ILL-system at the North Rhine- Westphalian library consortium (hbz) in Cologne

(see description of talk)

Serendipity vs standard search. The library is a "precious provider of unpredictability"

TwitterBots are a class of software. EuropeanaBot is based on Europeana api - uses open data collections to sweep interesting things, and make some kind of catalogue enrichment. E.g. list of Nobel Prize winners, Guardian api, place names etc.The Guradian api allows to get news and keywords with corresponding images. Wordnik api: every day at 1pm a word is published and Europeana looks for relevant images. Wikipedia api works in a similar way.

There's of course a Digital Persona behind the EuropeanaBot (he likes to post images of cats).

Conclusion: we hide great objects behind search forms, so we need more serendipity! Let our collections speak for themselves. Not too much work and maintenance is required and it brings results. People out there will listen.

Code behind the EuropeanaBot api: https://github.com/hatorikibble/twitter-europeanabot

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