Thursday, 17 February 2011

Online developments at the British Library

Presented by various members of British Library staff as part of the Coalition for Social Science Libraries Study Day, British Library, February 17 2011.

Management & Business Studies Portal

  • Free, subject-focussed portal for remote access to BL content.

  • Provides pointers to other content: visit London for x, purchase y.

  • User-led: made use of panels & focus groups from the start.

Sport & Society: examining Olympics & Paralympics through the lens of Social Science.

  • Populated by BL subject specialists in each Social Science area:

    • Gender & sport

    • Media & sport

    • Politics & sport

  • Outsourced site design

  • Technical set-up provided by BL Web Services Team

  • Notes importance & difficulty of maintenance commitments for web content.

Video Server: creating a news resource

  • Archives television and radio news from 18 channels.

  • Currently, only BBC content live; others will follow when BL service established.

  • Uses subtitle tracks to allow text-searching of video – 'as searchable as a newspaper'. This requires OCRing the bitmap subtitle images!

  • Provides thumbnails every few seconds for visual time-scrolling.

  • Will contribute to a multimedia news archiving strategy.

Evolving English, Voices, and Children's Games: enhancing content & creating resources

  • Archival Sounds Recordings: Accents & Dialects originally data for researchers; BL expanded to public, discovered huge interest.

  • Repackaged for schools, primarily A-level English Language – Sounds Familiar.

  • Voices of the UK: searchable dataset

  • Playtimes: sociolinguistic research on children's games, currently in progress; hope it will be used in teacher education.

  • Evolving English: 'one language, many voices' most visited BL exhibition ever.

    • Voicebank / Map Your Voice – online and in city libraries across the country – crowdsourcing huge collections of accent/dialect data.

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