Digital Scholarship Training Programme at British Library

Aquiles Alencar-BraynerCurator, Digital Research

@AquilesBrayner

Blog: http://bit.ly/11bhQ5k

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Objectives

– Wider engagement from staff in implementing BL Digital Scholarship Strategy

– Redefine the role of BL in taking an active approach to digital research

– Increase awareness of digital tools and methodologies used by researchers

– Foster stronger engagement between BL departments and teams

– Increase ability to shape digital services– Increase confidence in establishing

collaborations with external partners for supporting digital research

– Improve fluency around data management and analysis

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Design & Development

• Surveyed the current literature, primarily around Digital Humanities• Sought out scholars working at the intersection of computing and

scholarship and joined them for informal chats about their research.• Consulted the proceedings of major conferences across Europe such as

Digital Humanities 2012 in Hamburg and the Digital Humanities Congress 2012 at University of Sheffield

• Surveyed the skills which academics were acquiring by attending pertinent training courses and reviewing open syllabi and course materials.

• Drafted individual briefs and learning outcomes for what would become our core offering of 15 one-day courses.

• Each of the team members took responsibility for managing a set of the courses and worked with our internal advisory board and experts from within the Library and institutions on the leading edge of digital scholarship such as King’s College London, University College London and University of Oxford to finalise the courses.

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The Initial Programme: 15 courses (offered 3 times a year) launched in November 2012

1. Social Media: Introduction to Yammer, Twitter, and Blogging

2. Working collaboratively: Using the BL Wiki

3. Presentation skills: From PowerPoint to Prezi

4. Foundations in working with Digital Objects: From Images to A/V

5. Behind the Screen: Basics of the Web

6. Metadata for Electronic Resources: Dublin Core, METS, MODS, RDF, XML

7. What is Digital Scholarship?

8. Digital Collections at British Library

9. Digitisation at British Library

10.Communicating our collections online: Access & Reuse Policy

11. Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions

12.Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)

13.Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research

14.Geo-referencing and Digital Mapping

15. Information Integration: Mash-ups, API’s and The Semantic Web

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New courses offered:• Cleaning up Data Uncover hidden datasets within your area which may prove

useful to researchers, and gain the skills to clean and arrange it in a way which makes it more accessible for further analysis. The day will primarily consist of hands-on guided introduction on getting started in OpenRefine through a mix of prepared exercises highlighting the key features and functions of the software

• The Programming Curator Provides an introduction to querying, transforming and mining research data using the command line. It will explore why well documented and structured research data is an important prerequisite of data mining, before introducing a number of basic Unix command line actions for querying, transforming and mining research data.

• Managing Personal Digital Research Information This course will explain how reference management software can be used to manage individual and collaborative research.

• Digital Storytelling This course looks at why stories are a powerful and effective way to communicate and how the technique can be used effectively for a wide range of purposes including learning, publicity and marketing and community engagement.

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Our Principles

• Deliver from the library practitioner perspective and highlight the Library’s current work, or potential for supporting Digital Research.

• Make staff aware of digital tools in research environment and how these can be applied to their role at the Library.

• Focus on the wider concepts, methods and processes which tools enable rather than teaching to the tools.

• Include a hands-on practical element preferably using British Library digital content.

• Courses aimed at “intelligent novices”, that is, staff who have heard about the concepts but haven’t had the time, space or opportunity to explore them in any depth.

• Deliver a one-day workshop onsite rather than online as audience comes to table with varied technical skills and subject expertise.

• More important to alert colleagues to what is happening outside the Library so they can make informed decisions on whether to adopt a new tool or method, rather than stay solely within boundaries of current British Library policies and practices.

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So far so good!

“Great to have something often referred to demystified”

“I’ve never done anything like this before!”

“Well done to you and your DC team, I have attended some of the other courses myself and am recommending my staff attend them too.”

“[I valued] the time to explore our ideas and see how to develop current projects into a more useful resource”

“…I was very grateful to attend this and learned a great deal…Look forward to more. Renewed thanks for organising this.”

November 2012-March 2014 saw: 52 course days delivered 256 individual members of staff attended one or more684 seats filled 3 courses attended pp on average

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Thank you!

@AquilesBrayner

Follow: Digital Scholarship Blog: http://bit.ly/11bhQ5k

Read: DH2014 Abstract on the Program: http://dh2013.unl.edu/abstracts/ab-264.html