BDLSS staff have received Fell funding for a project on DIY digitization, looking at the research impact of users’ own photography of Special Collections, and working with Daniel Wakelin, Professor of Palaeography at the University of Oxford.
—Judith Siefring
Digital.Bodleian, the Libraries’ new digital collections delivery interface, was launched on 8 July with a lecture by Bruno Racine.
Matthew McGrattan, our Collections Delivery Architect, will demonstrate Digital.Bodleian on 14 October as part of the Bodleian’s series of lunchtime lectures.
Emma Stanford presented the interface to a group of Engineering Science alumni as part of the University’s Alumni Weekend.
—Emma Stanford
Working closely with the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre in the Department of International Development, current and back issues of the ‘Forced Migration Review’ are being ingested into the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA).
The number of articles currently stands at 330. They are available online.
—Sarah Barkla
A new thesis deposit form for Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) was launched on Wednesday 23 September, following on from the new article and ORA-Data deposit forms.
This new form is part of a general overhaul of the ORA submission system, dispensing with old forms that were unstable, difficult for depositors to follow and increasingly out of date.
The new form makes the submission process as easy as possible for the depositor, with comprehensive help text available in the form, allowing the depositor to complete their graduation requirement of depositing their Research eThesis to ORA with minimum stress. The new system will be easier for ORA staff to manage deposits, whilst still capturing necessary metadata so that Oxford etheses are easily discoverable, citable and accessible.
Further additions and improvements to the ORA submission system will continue over the coming months.
Thesis deposit can be accessed via the main ORA website: just select ‘Deposit’ followed by the Oxford Research Student – ‘thesis’ link. Our ‘How to deposit’ guide is available via our LibGuide and the ORA team can be contacted at: ora@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.
—Sarah Barkla and David Watson
On the 1 September Sarah Barkla and Michael Davis presented to the newly formed Research Software Developers Network (RSDN) on the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA).
Sarah talked about the service that ORA provides to the University and the funder requirements that make this so important to the University. Michael talked about the technologies used within the service and the development methodology to deliver the service and to continually improve it. Both sessions were well received by the RSDN members who attended.
—Michael Davis
We are delighed to welcome Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller to discuss her research on Semantic Web technologies and Assyriology at the Centre for Digital Scholarship.
What: Telling Ancient Tales to Modern Machines: representing Sumerian literary narratives as RDF
Who: Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller
When: 13.00—14.00, Thursday 12 November 2015
Where: Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library (map)
Access: open to all; free; registration is essential
Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data have the potential to support and complement traditional scholarship in Assyriology. In this talk, the suitability of three existing Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies (CIDOC CRM, FRBRoo, and Ontomedia) to adequately capture and represent the heterogeneous and incomplete narratives published by the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature are discussed and evaluated.
Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller is a postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre. Her research involves the use of Linked Data and semantic technologies to support and diversity scholarship across a range of topics in the Digital Humanities.
This seminar is open to all. You can download a flyer for it.
Please meet by 12.55 inside the Parks Road entrance of the Weston Library (map: opposite the King’s Arms). If you are already in the Library, you can find the Centre for Digital Scholarship on the first floor of the Weston Library, through the Mackerras Reading Room and around the glass walkway.
This seminar is open to the public. It is free to attend, and reserving a place is essential.
Please note that bags must be left in lockers (£1 returnable deposit) by the entrance.
Euclid’s Elementa in Digital.Bodleian
Last weekend the Bodleian invited engineering science alumni attending the University of Oxford’s Alumni Weekend (18-20 September) to a presentation on the Bodleian’s engineering-related materials. This event was held in the Bahari Room and the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Weston Library. While Julie-Anne Lambert of the John Johnson Collection showed our guests a selection of printed ephemera related to automobiles and engineering, I gave a brief tour of the old Toyota Project website (created in 1996 to display images of ephemera digitized with funding from Toyota City) and then gave a demo of our new collections delivery interface, Digital.Bodleian. While the engineers were disappointed that I couldn’t currently show them any editions of Newton or Pythagoras in Digital.Bodleian, they showed interest in the technical aspects and capabilities of the site, especially in the ways in which the IIIF APIs and apps such as Mirador can be used to view and compare items in Digital.Bodleian and other repositories.
– Emma Stanford
On 9 June David Howell gave a spell-binding seminar to a packed Centre for DIgital Scholarship: It’s a kind of magic: early results from Analytical Imaging in the Bodleian Libraries.
After a tour through some of the fascinating and high profile conservation projects David has worked on, he turned to a history of analytical imaging techniques, the tricks our eyes use to make sense of the world around us, and, via the mantis shrimp and C5 BCE Persia, to Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and hyperspectral imaging. We were very grateful to colleagues from Special Collections for bringing items from the collections to illustrate David’s talk. Alan Coates, Rare Books Assistant Librarian, brought an incunable (a printed book from the earliest years of print), and Gillian Evison, Head of the Oriental Section, brought some of the oldest items in the Bodleian’s collection, the fifth-century BCE Arshama clay seals.
You can recapture a little of the magic through a Storified version of tweets from the seminar, or through David’s slides, which he’s kindly published through Slideshare:
Following the launch of Digital.Bodleian after years of work by Bodleian Digital Library colleagues the Bodleian Libraries’ Wikimedian in Residence, Martin Poulter, describes how images from this freely available resource are already being used to augment articles in Wikipedia in a post on our sister blog, Archives and Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library: “Digital.Bodleian + Wikipedia“. Find out how you can get involved!
Mid-June saw BDLSS recognized with several awards.
On the 16th, many of the great and the good gathered for the annual OxTALENT awards which recognize members of the University who have made innovative use of digital technology in order to foster learning and academic practice, develop links between teaching and research, and improve impact through outreach and public engagement.
Matt Kimberley of BDLSS joined Bodleian colleagues Frankie Wilson and Jennifer Townshend, along with their video production team (Tom Wilkinson and Tom Fuller), to collect the runners-up prize in the Data Visualization category for their work on the ‘Bodleian Library in Numbers’ display in the Weston Library.
David Tomkins and Liz McCarthy then collected the runners-up prize in the Open Practices category on behalf of the whole team, which also included Michael Popham, Judith Siefring, Pip Willcox, and Kathryn Eccles (TORCH Digital Humanities Champion) for their work on the EEBO-TCP Hackfest and Ideas Hack Competition.
A day later, Jason Partridge accepted two awards on behalf of the Osney One Green Impact Team (also including Kim Wicks, Angela Arnold and Richard Ferguson).
The first award was Bronze, for completing the criteria required in the Green Impact workbooks, covering the areas of energy, communication, procurement, travel, waste & recycling, water and biodiversity & community.
Jason also picked up a Special Award in the area of Innovation, for which the team listed the accolades of the building and staff, naming specifically the engagement with regular Bike Doctor visits, bird-feeder use, and outside seating and walks around the area.
—David Tomkins