British Library Labs Project Showcase and Ideas Lab

This was a workshop organised by British Library Labs and Cambridge Digital Humanities as part of a wider roadshow advertising the Labs and promoting the competitions currently being run. Essentially, teams from the British Library came and said "Look, we've got all this stuff, and we've been able to pull all this sort of data out and mash it up and produce something else. What ideas have you got to do the same?" There were a few short presentations about the teams, and what they did, and what resources they had to offer, before we all sat down in groups to look at the datasets the BL Labs had available, and try to come up with an innovative way of using that data. The team that won suggested a kareoke booth which took Victorian music hall songs from the collection, and people could be filmed performing them and the results put on YouTube.

Excuse me while I photoshop top hats, monocles and moustaches onto this lot.

There were a lot of librarians at the workshop, but it felt it was pitched towards researchers (not saying that librarians can't be researchers, just that there are many researchers in the university who could have made use of this opportunity and didn't!). Nonetheless, I shall take a moment to have a think about a better pitch than the one my team came up with (using sheet music titles to chart naval history and developments in the military - interesting academically, but not very sexy, which I think is what they were looking for). There is a competition to see what new things can be come up with (details here) and an award scheme to reward the best use of currently available datasets (details here).