Last Friday we travelled to Sheffield Hallam University’s
Art & Design Research Centre, who are working in partnership with the British Library Labs. This workshop focused on
how the British Library’s digital collections team is making their data
accessible to researchers, and the opportunities and challenges involved.
So far in this traineeship our focus has been on how to
preserve the data, but recently we have been thinking about what to do with the
data once it’s been stored. Archive records aren’t much use if nobody can read
them, so how do you allow researchers to access these digital records, and what
tools will they need to use it? For the British Library, the solution was to
make datasets on the collections freely available through BL Labs, and allow
researchers, developers and artists to reinterpret the collections in new ways.
A mixture of archivists, librarians, designers and artists at the start of the workshop. |
A lot of the research has been in finding ways to automate
the process of identifying what is in each collection. One starting concept was
to take an ordinary face-recognition algorithm and pass it over scanned pages
from 19th Century books to find drawings of people. This simple
concept has been developed and expanded into the Mechanical Curator, a program
which automatically identifies illustrations within the text, identifies the content
and posts a random selection of pictures online. Similar algorithms can perform
similar functions, such as teaching an Optical Character Recognition program to
spot long-forgotten Victorian poetry in digitised journals.
The biggest point that came from this was less the technical
aspect, but the human aspect. It is important to ask questions about exactly
what researchers want to find, and how to help them find it. Digital
collections can easily contain thousands or millions of files, and good search
tools are key to letting users filter through stacks of data to get to what
they want.
After the coffee break, professors from Sheffield Hallam’s
ADRC shared some projects they have worked on, using new technology in new ways
to display data and curate exhibitions. We saw some work by the meSch project into new concepts for
presenting information. It can be all too easy for the presentation to overtake
the content - the meSch project aims to develop museums technology which
doesn’t interfere with the visitor experience.
A prototype guide for Sheffield General Cemetery, resembling a memorial book. Visitors use the bookmarks to play audio recordings on different themes. |
Throughout the workshop, we saw how not just how new
technology can be used to engage with the museums and archive sector, but the
importance of working directly with users to provide the tools they want or
need to use. We’ll be keeping these lessons in mind as we continue to develop
the Hull History Centre’s digital collections.
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