Inspiring computationally driven research with the BL's digital collections and other GLAMS (WINNER)
Channel: British Library Labs
Date: 2020-12-13

BL Labs People's Choice: Public Awards 2020 WINNER!
BL Labs Learning and Teaching Award 2020 Runner-up
BL Labs Community Award 2020 Special Commendation
(see judges comments at the end)

By the Research Libraries Team  - University of Alicante, Spain - Gustavo Candela; Pilar Escobar; María Dolores Sáez; Manuel Marco-Such all at the Department of Software and Computing Systems, University of Alicante, Spain.

Short Summary
Inspiring cultural heritage institutions and (digital) humanities researchers to experiment with Collections as Data and GLAM notebooks by showcasing practical implementations from a wide range of GLAM institutions and digital collections.

URL for further information
http://data.cervantesvirtual.com/blog/notebooks/

Abstract
BL Labs has been an inspiration to many. It has given us the opportunity to discover computational access to digital collections as well as encourage us to reuse the richness of the materials provided by GLAM institutions. Following the BL Labs set up in 2013, many Labs have started to appear within a wide range of GLAM institutions to facilitate the adoption of innovative and creative tools for content delivery and user engagement. In addition, new methods have been proposed to address the publication of digital collections as datasets amenable to computational use.

The lockdown and self-isolation period has given us more time to implement and develop projects that we were postponing to promote Labs and computationally-driven research within GLAM institutions. In this sense, inspired by the British Library-initiated International GLAM Labs community, the US Collections as Data initiative and the GLAM Workbench, we propose a methodology to create machine actionable collections. This methodology is then applied to several use cases based on data sets published by relevant GLAM institutions including the British Library to inspire both the GLAM Labs community and (digital) humanities researchers worldwide. The collection includes a notebook showing how to create a topic model based on a dataset that comprises 264 volumes of digitised theatrical playbills published between 1660 – 1902 (mostly 19th century) from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. An additional notebook uses the British National Bibliography as a LOD platform to create a map showing the publication places of the books using GeoNames and Wikidata.

In addition, we propose a methodology for the evaluation of the quality of LOD adapted to the specific case of RDF triples. The methodology includes 35 criteria covering 11 dimensions. The specified quality measures are reported in the case of four highly relevant libraries including the British National Bibliography. The methodology has been enhanced by adopting ShEx to automate the process.

Regarding education and outreach to the (digital) humanities community, the collection of notebooks will be published as a Programming Historian tutorial as well as used as a pedagogical tool in several subjects at the University of Alicante to introduce future researchers how digital collections can be reused.

These examples are useful to raise the awareness and encourage the adoption of Collections as Data within GLAM institutions. The collection will be enhanced with a new methodology based on the creation of transnational and multilingual datasets and including additional notebooks.

Full details of entry available on the BL Labs Projects Archive page:
https://data.bl.uk/bl_labs_digital_projects_archive/individual_projects/BL_Labs_Public_Awards_2020_GLAM-Notebooks.pdf

Judges comments
For Community Special Mention
The most nominated in multiple categories. The panel particularly loved the generosity of the group in developing computational access to 12 Gallery, Library, Archive and Musuem’s data through Jupyter Notebooks. Many of these organisations do not have the capacity or expertise to do this, so this was some really kind and fantastic work moving these organisations forward computationally, a great contribution to the GLAM Labs community, find out more about the project at the URL above and about GLAM Labs at glamlabs.io

From Educational:
We were impressed that the notebooks the team have developed are being used in their own teaching on courses and how they have very generously created them for other GLAMs data, where many do not have the capacity to do so. That’s 15 notebooks for 12 GLAMs!!!

For People's Award received 582 votes!