{"id":1688,"date":"2014-11-03T17:27:56","date_gmt":"2014-11-03T16:27:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/?p=1688"},"modified":"2014-11-03T17:50:15","modified_gmt":"2014-11-03T16:50:15","slug":"lessons-from-the-labs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/2014\/11\/lessons-from-the-labs\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons from the Labs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This blog post was written during a presentation at the <a href=\"http:\/\/britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk\/digital-scholarship\/2014\/10\/british-library-labs-symposium-2014.html\">British Library Labs Symposium<\/a> in November 2014. It is likely full of errors and omissions having been written real-time.<\/p>\n<p>Adam Farquhar, Principal Investigator of the British Library Labs project<\/p>\n<p>In summer 2014 BL ran a survey to improve understanding of digital research behaviour. Around 1600 particpants, 57% femail, 50% academic inc. 32% postgraduates. Nearly 75% were registered readers at the BL. 58% from Arts &amp; Humanities, 21.5% Social Sciences, 13.1% STM. 42.4% from London and a further 35% from other parts of the UK.<\/p>\n<p>92% would recommend the library and 82% said the Library plays an important role in digital research &#8211; which was 3 times more than the result for the same question in 2011.<\/p>\n<p>63% of users are satisfied with BL digital services &#8211; remote access to more BL electronic resource, the option to view BL digital content on personal devices could improve this.<\/p>\n<p>Some things not changing &#8211; perhaps against expectations. Most readers work alone still but using social media more than previously.<\/p>\n<p>1 in 6 respondents were using programming in their research.<\/p>\n<p>Digital collection at BL has been growing rapidly &#8211; now around 9million items (huge jump in 2012 from under 2 million to almost 7 million). But remember a book counts as one item &#8211; even if many images and pages made available separately, and an &#8216;item&#8217; in the web archive is a WARC file that can contain many thousands of websites. Looking at size of content in gigabytes the growth is more linear.<\/p>\n<p>The Digital Collections are extremely varied &#8211; datasets, images, manuscripts, maps, sounds, newspapers, multimedia, books and text, web archive, journal articles, e-theses, music, playbills.<\/p>\n<h2>Lessons from work so far<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Lesson 1: More is more\n<ul>\n<li>it&#8217;s about digital content &#8211; without this you can&#8217;t do digital scholarship. Getting the digital content is &#8220;bloody hard work&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>digital deposit coming and will be the basis for the national digital collection in years to come &#8211; but not a panacea<\/li>\n<li>partnerships &#8211; e.g. DC Thomson for further Newspaper digitisation<\/li>\n<li>partnership with Google to digitise around 250k works<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Lesson 2: Less is more\n<ul>\n<li>Delivering a single &#8216;perfect&#8217; system won&#8217;t be perfect for everyone<\/li>\n<li>Deliver people more systems that give more access to more content<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Lesson 3: Bring your own tools\n<ul>\n<li>People want to bring their own tools with them &#8211; need to enable this to happen<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Lesson 4: Be creative\n<ul>\n<li>Let people be creative with the content<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Lesson 5: Start small &#8211; finish big\n<ul>\n<li>Easy to start with small things &#8211; 5 books, 50 books &#8211; do this before trying to work with larger collections<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Conclusions<br \/>\n* Researchers are embracing digital technology and methods<br \/>\n* Digital collections with unique content are large enought to support research &#8211; with some caveats<br \/>\n* Library staff need training to keep pace with change<br \/>\n* Open engagement fits ermeging practice<br \/>\n* Radical re-tooling is needed to support researcher demands&#8230;<br \/>\n* &#8230; but existing technology provides what we need<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This blog post was written during a presentation at the British Library Labs Symposium in November 2014. It is likely full of errors and omissions having been written real-time. Adam Farquhar, Principal Investigator of the British Library Labs project In summer 2014 BL ran a survey to improve understanding of digital research behaviour. Around 1600 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[99],"class_list":["post-1688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bl_labs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1688"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1704,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1688\/revisions\/1704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}