Hi,

Having had a number of conversations with people working in archives in Real Life about releasing images, Flickr, open licensing and the BL Labs work with the Mechanical Curator, I thought the event detailed below (which is FREE!) might be of interest to list members. I spotted this on a library-related email list so thought I'd share here. Booking link/info at the bottom of the announcement.

Best wishes,
Steph


Book your place for the British Library Labs 2014 Symposium
When: Mon 3 November 2014, 0930 – 1730
Where: Conference Centre, St Pancras

Professor of Digital History, Tim Hitchcock will launch the second annual British Library Labs Symposium with a keynote focusing on “Big and small data in the humanities”. 

Roly Keating, Chief Executive, will also present awards to the 2014 Labs competition winners. The winners will present their work followed by presentations from researchers who are actively using the Library's digital content; such as text mining scanned books to help build a cityscape of Edinburgh, analysing the performance characteristics of some of our digitised live music recordings and how it might be possible to measure the impact of releasing digital content and data into the public domain.

The Labs Team will talk about some of their surprising findings and the impact of the project, for instance, the tremendous appetite for openly licensed digital content when the team released over 1 million images on to Flickr, with the collection already having over 200 million views in less than a year and stirring great interest from artists, researchers and the general public.

Adam Farquhar will highlight key lessons that we’ve learned working closely with researchers since the Labs were formed and discuss how the Labs is transforming our approach to providing services to support digital research and scholarship. He will also outline plans for the Labs over the coming years and give further details of the 2015 Competition.

The event will end with a reception to celebrate the end of the first phase of the project and there will be an entertaining talk and live music performance which tries to connect the 'old' with the new digital world. Sarah Angliss, composer, automatist and sound historian will explore some unlikely affinities between sound making today and in the Victorian era through presentation and musical performance and she will facilitate a D.I.Y. session where you can record your own voice on wax cylinder. The Labs team will be around to talk about their Data Giveaway if you are interested in getting hold of large of amounts of open and free digital content for your institution / organisation on portable devices.
Booking your place
Tickets are free but you will need to book your place. For more information about the event and to book a ticket please visit: http://goo.gl/rAkNYt

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