Digital Research at the British Library


Developments in digital 
scholarship: at the British Library 
and at kitchen tables everywhere

Dr. Mia Ridge, @mia_out
Digital Curator, British Library

digitalresearch@bl.uk @BL_DigiSchol



Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
http://acmssearch.sl.nsw.gov.au/search/itemDetailPaged.cgi?itemID=442696



The Digital Research Team is a 
cross-disciplinary mix of 
curators, researchers, librarians 
and programmers supporting 
the creation and innovative use 
of British Library's digital 
collections.

@AquilesBrayner @ndalyrose

@mia_out @miss_wisdom

@benosteen @mahendra_mahey

With thanks to... teamwork



Supporting digital scholarship @ BL

We support new ways of exploring and 
accessing our collections through:

• Getting digital and digitised content available 
online

• Collaborative projects

• Digital scholarship support and guidance

• Events, publications and training

• Competitions, and awards (BL Labs)



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CUSTODIANSHIP RESEARCH BUSINESS

CULTURE LEARNING INTERNATIONAL

Living Knowledge: The British Library 2015 – 2023



'We make our intellectual heritage accessible to 
everyone, for research, inspiration and enjoyment'



'We make our intellectual heritage accessible to 
everyone, for research, inspiration and enjoyment'

Ok, but how?



Internal digital scholarship training



• Staff across all collection areas are familiar and 
conversant with the foundational concepts, 
methods and tools of digital scholarship.

• Staff are empowered to innovate.

• Collaborative digital initiatives flourish across 
subject areas within the Library as well as 
externally.

• Our internal capacity for training and skill-sharing in 
digital scholarship are a shared responsibility across 
the Library.

Evaluating the training programme: goals



• Hands-on, practical 
exercises

• Time to explore 
innovative digital projects

• Trying new tools, 
particularly with BL or 
similar collections

• The expertise and 
enthusiasm of instructors

• Meeting colleagues and 
learning about BL projects

Participants appreciated...



• Case studies / real world 
examples help

• Articulate learning outcomes, 
expected results for exercises

• Provide clear, printable 
instructions

• No more than 15 people in 
hands-on courses

• Allow time for all to complete 
exercises

• Build in optional activities for 
advanced participants

Practical digital training tips



Inspired... Big Data History of Music

How can vast amounts of bibliographic data held by research libraries be 
unlocked for music researchers to analyse?

Analyses and visualisations of these datasets exposed previously uncharted 
patterns in the history of music.



• Applying new skills within 
the Library - more guidance 
and support within current 
Library policy and 
infrastructure

• Reaching staff who work on 
rosters and cannot attend 
for a whole day

• Digital tools for non-
Western materials; working 
with non-textual digital 
collections such as the UK 
Web and Sound Archives

On-going challenges



• Software tools  break/change - some 
courses need to be completely checked 
before they're run

• Digital Curators need to maintain our 
skills and knowledge too
– Digital Scholarship Reading Group - 1 hour, 

once a month

– Hack and Yack - 2 hours, once a month

– Both are open to all

Challenge: the pace of change



Transkribus for handwritten text recognition



Datasets and digital collections

Datasets about our collections
Bibliographic datasets relating to our 
published and archival holdings 

Datasets for content mining Content 
suitable for use in text and data 
mining research 

Datasets for image analysis Image 
collections suitable for large-scale 
image-analysis-based research 

Datasets from UK Web Archive Data 
and API services available for 
accessing UK Web Archive collections 

Digital mapping Geospatial data, 
cartographic applications, digital 
aerial photography and scanned-in 
historic map materials http://bl.uk/digital

http://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/datasets-about-our-collections
http://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/datasets-for-content-mining
http://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/datasets-for-image-analysis
http://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/datasets-from-uk-web-archive
http://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/digital-mapping


http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/download.html



http://data.webarchive.org.uk/



Ask me for a 
demo!

Contact us: digitalresearch@bl.uk @BL_DigiSchol @mia_out @Miss_Wisdom



BL Labs Competition

BL Labs Competition finalists for 2016
• Black Abolitionist Performances and their Presence in 

Britain
• Hannah-Rose Murray, PhD student at the University of 

Nottingham 

• SherlockNet: Using Convolutional Neural Networks to 
automatically tag and caption the British Library Flickr 
collection

• Luda Zhao, Brian Do and Karen Wang, students 
from Stanford University, California 



"I was able to do in minutes with a 
python code what I'd spent the last ten 
years trying to do by hand!"

-Dr. Katrina Navickas, BL Labs Winner 
2015

Political Meetings Mapper



Political Meetings Mapper

Video: https://youtu.be/XabsuyNkD5s

https://youtu.be/XabsuyNkD5s


Spatial Humanities

‘Being able to link the map 
and the underlying text 
allows us to understand 
how patterns vary from 
place to place.’

Combining Text Analysis 
and Geographic Information 
Systems to investigate the 
representation of disease in 
nineteenth-century 
newspapers, Lancaster

Places associated with a range of common nineteenth century diseases.



BL Labs Bi-Annual Competition & Awards

The 2016 British Library Labs Awards deadline is 5 September. 



'A million images' on Flickr Commons



Mario Klingemann
'556 Minerals'



'Grassroots' projects





Participatory history as learning

• Constructive environments for learning and 
mastering skills
– Palaeography

– Tagging / classification

– Source familiarity

– Biographical research

– Database and web design

– Data collation, analysis, interpretation

– Extended research projects



@marinelivesorg http://digitalpopuplab.org/



Olney & District Historical Society http://www.mkheritage.org.uk/odhs/



Conclusion



Kiitos / Thank you!

Mia Ridge @mia_out
Digital Curator, British Library

digitalresearch@bl.uk @BL_DigiSchol

mailto:digitalresearch@bl.uk