On February 25, Mahendra Mahey, British Library Labs Manager, will give a keynote and workshop discussing the experiences and lessons learned from the British Library and around the world engaging with researchers, artists, educators and entrepreneurs who have used digitised cultural heritage collections and data.
Keynote
10:30am-12pm, Bennett Library, Room 7200 (refreshments served)
In the morning, Mahendra will give a brief overview of digital collections and data being made available through British Library Labs (BL Labs) and examine how some of them have been re-used by making connections and collaborating with digital researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators, curators and librarians around the world through a range of innovative projects, research questions and engagement activities. He will highlight the myths and assumptions many make about libraries and address the significant issues and challenges they face when working with digital collections and data.
To address some of these challenges, he has begun to build an exciting international support network with colleagues around the world. This community is bringing national, state, university and public Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums together that either had, are planning or already have experimental digital ‘GLAM Labs’ which encourage their users to re-use their digital collections and data.
Workshop
1:30pm-4:30pm, Bennett Library, Wosk Room
In this afternoon workshop, Mahendra will invite you to explore data-sets at your leisure, setting a challenge for those of you are interested, skilled in exploring, finding patterns and grouping data. They could become data-set authors/creators of derived data-sets, based on pre-existing digital collections/data provided on the day or already available on https://data.bl.uk.
The workshop will conclude with reflections from you and possibly highlighting a number derived data-sets that were generated by participants on the day that could now potentially exist on https://data.bl.uk. If selected, these new derived data-sets will be attributed with the creators' / authors' details and each will have its own cite-able Digital Object Identifier (D.O.I). These new data-sets would then be available for reuse by any researcher in the world.
About the Speaker
Mahendra Mahey has been the manager of British Library Labs (BL Labs) for over five years, an Andrew W. Mellon foundation and British Library (BL) funded initiative supporting and inspiring the use of the BL’s data in innovative ways. He has a strong background of working with digital technology as a manager, educator, researcher, adviser and community builder in Further and Higher Education for researchers, educators, librarians and businesses both in the UK and internationally.