Search Constraints
Search Results
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Report
Locating a National Collection/Research Bods quantitative findings summary
The National Trust and The British Library, along with several cultural heritage partners, commissioned an audience research project to inform the development of an online history and heritage platform to provide broader access to the wealth of artefacts and resources from across the entire network of information providers. This slide...Strachan, Peter
Quantitative, Audience Research, Geography, Location, and Cultural Heritage
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Report
Locating a National Collection/Research Bods qualitative findings summary
The National Trust and The British Library, along with several cultural heritage partners, commissioned an audience research project to inform the development of an online history and heritage platform to provide broader access to the wealth of artefacts and resources from across the entire network of information providers. This report...Horgan, John
Audience Research, Qualitative, Location, Cultural Heritage, and Geography
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Journal article
Reading the Way to the Heavenly Jerusalem in the Book of Armagh
This paper examines the series of text-image devices found in the Book of Armagh (Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 52), at the explicit to the Gospel of John (fol. 103r), the tituli to the Book of Revelation (fol. 159v), and the Revelation explicit (fol. 170r), to suggest how the manuscript...Jackson, Eleanor
John the Evangelist, diagrams, Book of Armagh, manuscript, Gregory the Great, Moralia, art, white martyrdom, Heavenly Jerusalem, reading, eschatology, and meditation
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Presentation
Locating a national collection through audience research
Locating a National Collection (LaNC) aims to help cultural heritage organisations to use location data — such as where objects were made and used or the places they depict and describe — to connect collections and engage audiences. Location-based interfaces such as web maps offer opportunities to open up collections...Rees, Gethin
Interface design, Geography, Location, Web maps, Cultural Heritage, and Metadata
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Presentation
Locating a National Collection
Locating a National Collection (LaNC) aims to help cultural heritage organisations to use location data — such as where objects were made and used or the places they depict and describe — to connect collections and engage audiences. Location-based interfaces such as web maps offer opportunities to open up collections...Rees, Gethin ; Vitale, Valeria
Interface design, Geography, Location, Web maps, Cultural Heritage, and Metadata
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Journal article
British Library Additional Manuscript 8537 as a Source for Florentine/Pisan University History
British Library Additional Manuscript 8537 contains a selection of statutes related to the university of Florence and Pisa from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The manuscript was originally produced to specifically document rulings between the institution and Florentine government, suggesting it may have been a personal vademecum of...Rossi, Elena
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Journal article
A Sense of Place: The ‘London’ Cityscapes of BL, Royal MS. 13 A. III
The British Library, Royal MS. 13 A. III, containing a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie, was likely produced in southeast England in or around London between the late thirteenth century and the first quarter of the fourteenth century. The only manuscript with an extended series of illustrations,...Chunko-Dominguez, Betsy
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Journal article
‘The Great Bowyer Bible’: Robert Bowyer and the Macklin Bible
This article examines an iconic example of grangerizing: the Macklin Bible extra-illustrated in 45 volumes by London artist and bookseller Robert Bowyer (1758‐1834) in the first quarter of the nineteenth century (Bolton Libraries and Museums, Bolton, United Kingdom). The principal focus is on the Bowyer Bible as an example of...Billingsley, Naomi
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Research report
British Library Research Report 2019-20
It will come as no surprise that the impacts of a global pandemic on our research activities are a major theme of this, our fourth, annual Research Report. Regular readers will know that our reports reflect the breadth of research undertaken by our staff, students, fellows and collaborators during the...British Library
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Conference paper (unpublished)
Developing Identifiers for Heritage Collections
'Developing Identifiers for Heritage Collections ' is a tool aimed at heritage professionals to support decision making for persistent identifier (PID) use. The project’s 2020 survey found the value of PIDs, for example in creating trustworthy links, was understood but needs to be more clearly addressed directly to decision makers...Madden, Frances
persistent identifiers, Towards a National Collection, and PIDs
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Journal article
Six Poll-Tax Receipts from Arsinoe
Micucci, Federica
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Book chapter
“Existentialist Hu-ha”?: Censoring the Existentialists in the British Theater
This chapter will look at the censorship of playwrights associated with existentialist thinking in the British theater, from the opening up of the London stage to French writers after the Second World War to the end of theater censorship in Britain with the passing of the Theatres Act 1968. Consideration...Andrews, Jamie
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Journal article
Covid-19 and the Future of the Digital Shift amongst Research Libraries: An RLUK Perspective in Context
Research Libraries UK is a consortium of 37 of the UK and Ireland’s largest research libraries with the purpose of convening its members around the key issues that affect them, to represent their collective voice, to support them as they face shared challenges, and to be an effective advocate on...Baxter, Guy ; Beard, Lorraine ; Beattie, Gavin ; Blake, Michelle ; Greenhall, Matthew …
library services, library space, academic libraries, Covid-19 pandemic, and digital shift
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Abstract
PIDs for Repositories: DOIs and URNs and Handles, oh my….
This presentation, given at a workshop on PID requirements in the UKRI Open Access Policy, gives an overview of implementation options to meet technical requirement 5a: "PIDs for research outputs must be implemented according to international recognised standards, examples of international standards include DOI, URN or Handle".Cope, Jez
PIDs, Open Access, and UKRI
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Report
Archiving Social Media Workshop Two (June 2019)
The workshop was organised by the British Library Web Archiving Team with support from Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education at the British Library on Monday 10th June 2019. The participants at the workshop were a mix of academic researchers, postgraduate research students and information professionals from the British Library,...UK Web Archive
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Report
Archiving Social Media Workshop One (July 2018)
The workshop was organised by the British Library Web Archiving Team with support from Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education at the British Library on Monday 16th July, 2019. The participants at the workshop were a mix of academic researchers and information professionals from the British Library, The National Archives...UK Web Archive
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Presentation
Publisher Submission Portal User Survey - Autumn 2021
A presentation given to the Collection Development and Acquisitions sub-group (CDAS) of the Legal Deposit Implementation Group in December 2021. CDAS brings together representatives from the six UK legal deposit libraries, to report on operational matters and plan policy for co-operation on managing the legal deposit collections. The Publisher Submission...Hazell, Lottie
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Research report
Publisher Submission Portal User Survey Report – December 2021
The Publisher Submission Portal is a tool that can be used to deposit born digital publications to the British Library, and other legal deposit libraries, to fufil obligations under legal deposit law. The Portal is designed for use by small publishers, defined as producing 50 or fewer publications per year....Hazell, Lottie
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Research report
Quality Assurance in the New Media Writing Prize Collection
The UK Web Archive is an online repository for UK based websites. Managed by the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries—the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University, Cambridge University Libraries, and the Trinity College, Dublin—the UK Web Archive's chief...Pyke, Tegan
Emerging Formats, digital preservation, British Library PhD placement, web archiving, digital storytelling, and New Media Writing Prize
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Dataset
Persistent Identifiers as IRO Infrastructure: Survey 2 Data
The survey ran from 4 October to 8 November 2021 and was open to everyone working in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums internationally but the survey had a clear UK focus. Some responses have been removed or recoded to protect the identity of respondents.Kotarski, Rachael ; Madden, Frances
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Journal article
MapReader: A Computer Vision Pipeline for the Semantic Exploration of Maps at Scale
We present MapReader, a free, open-source software library written in Python for analyzing large map collections (scanned or born-digital). This library transforms the way historians can use maps by turning extensive, homogeneous map sets into searchable primary sources. MapReader allows users with little or no computer vision expertise to i)...Hosseini, Kasra ; Wilson, Daniel C.S. ; Beelen, Kaspar ; McDonough, Katherine
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Research report
Data Study Group Final Report: The National Archives, UK: Discovering Topics and Trends in the UK Government Web Archive
The challenge we address in this report is to make steps towards improving search and discovery of resources within this vast archive for future archive users, and how the UKGWA collection could begin to be unlocked for research and experimentation by approaching it as data (i.e. as a dataset at...Beavan, David ; Nanni, Federico
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Journal article
Design Choices for Productive, Secure, Data-Intensive Research at Scale in the Cloud
We present a policy and process framework for secure environments for productive data science research projects at scale, by combining prevailing data security threat and risk profiles into five sensitivity tiers, and, at each tier, specifying recommended policies for data classification, data ingress, software ingress, data egress, user access, user...Arenas, Diego ; Atkins, Jon ; Austin, Claire ; Beavan, David ; Cabrejas Egea, Alvaro …
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Journal article
Neural Language Models for Nineteenth-Century English
We present four types of neural language models trained on a large historical dataset of books in English, published between 1760-1900 and comprised of ~5.1 billion tokens. The language model architectures include static (word2vec and fastText) and contextualized models (BERT and Flair). For each architecture, we trained a model instance...Hosseini, Kasra ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Colavizza, Giovanni ; Coll Ardanuy, Mariona
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Conference paper (published)
When Time Makes Sense: A Historically-Aware Approach to Targeted Sense Disambiguation
As languages evolve historically, making computational approaches sensitive to time can improve performance on specific tasks. In this work, we assess whether applying historical language models and time-aware methods help with determining the correct sense of polysemous words. We outline the task of time-sensitive Targeted Sense Disambiguation (TSD), which aims...Beelen, Kaspar ; Nanni, Federico ; Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; Hosseini, Kasra ; Tolfo, Giorgia …
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Journal article
Maps of a Nation? The Digitized Ordnance Survey for New Historical Research
Although the Ordnance Survey has itself been the subject of historical research, scholars have not systematically used its maps as primary sources of information. This is partly for disciplinary reasons and partly for the technical reason that high-quality maps have not until recently been available digitally, geo-referenced, and in color....Hosseini, Kasra ; McDonough, Katherine ; van Strien, Daniel ; Vane, Olivia ; Wilson, Daniel C.S.
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Conference paper (published)
Living Machines: A study of atypical animacy
This paper proposes a new approach to animacy detection, the task of determining whether an entity is represented as animate in a text. In particular, this work is focused on atypical animacy and examines the scenario in which typically inanimate objects, specifically machines, are given animate attributes. To address it,...Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; Nanni, Federico ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Hosseini, Kasra ; Ahnert, Ruth …
nineteenth-century English, living machines, BERT, and animacy
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Conference paper (unpublished)
A Deep Learning Approach to Geographical Candidate Selection through Toponym Matching
Recognizing toponyms and resolving them to their real-world referents is required for providing advanced semantic access to textual data. This process is often hindered by the high degree of variation in toponyms. Candidate selection is the task of identifying the potential entities that can be referred to by a toponym... -
Book chapter
How we got here
Wilson, Daniel C.S.
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Book chapter
Text Meets Space: Geographic Content Extraction, Resolution and Information Retrieval
In this half-day tutorial, we will review the basic concepts of, methods for, and applications of geographic information retrieval, also showing some possible applications in fields such as the digital humanities. The tutorial is organized in four parts. First we introduce some basic ideas about geography, and demonstrate why text...Leidner, Jochen ; Martins, Bruno ; McDonough, Katherine ; Purves, Ross
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Research report
Data Study Group Final Report: Smart monitoring for conservation areas
WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) monitors over 250,000 protected areas (e.g. national parks and nature reserves) and thousands of other sites and critical habitats. These sites are the foundation of global natural assets and are central to the preservation of biodiversity and human well-being. Unfortunately, they face increasing pressures... -
Abstract
Using smart annotations to map the geography of newspapers
Geographic information is a key component in the description of collection objects, and yet its format is often unsuited for use with methods of geographic analysis. Catalogue entries are often inconsistent, in plain text, and without geographic coordinates (much less coordinates linked to authority records). Georesolution of the relevant fields...Ryan, Yann ; Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; van Strien, Daniel ; Hosseini, Kasra ; Beelen, Kaspar …
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Conference paper (unpublished)
Contextualizing Victorian Newspapers
Beelen, Kaspar ; Ahnert, Ruth ; Beavan, David ; Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; Hosseini, Kasra …
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Conference paper (unpublished)
Defoe: A Spark-Based Toolbox for Analysing Digital Historical Textual Data
This work presents defoe, a new scalable and portable digital eScience toolbox that enables historical research. It allows for running text mining queries across large datasets, such as historical newspapers and books in parallel via Apache Spark. It handles queries against collections that comprise several XML schemas and physical representations.... -
Journal article
Babbage among the insurers: Big 19th-century data and the public interest
This article examines life assurance and the politics of ‘big data’ in mid-19th-century Britain. The datasets generated by life assurance companies were vast archives of information about human longevity. Actuaries distilled these archives into mortality tables – immensely valuable tools for predicting mortality and so pricing risk. The status of...Wilson, Daniel C.S.
big data, Thomas Rowe Edmonds, Charles Babbage, public interest, and insurance
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Policy report
British Library Persistent Identifier Policy
The purpose of this policy is to outline the approach to the use of identifiers and persistent identifiers (PIDs) in internal and external facing British Library systems, to define a consistent set of requirements for PIDs to use when managing and developing services and to articulate the responsibilities in applying...British Library
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Dataset
Digitised Books. c. 1510 - c. 1900. JSONL (OCR derived text + metadata)
The dataset comprises metadata and OCR generated text from 49,455 digitised books published between c. 1510 - c. 1900. The books cover a wide range of subject areas including philosophy, history, poetry and literature. The dataset is in JSON Lines (JSONL) text format.British Library Labs ; British Library
OCR and monographs
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Book
A catalogue of manuscript and printed reports, field books, memoirs, maps, etc., of the Indian Surveys, deposited in the map room of the India office
A catalogue of manuscript and printed reports, field books, memoirs, maps, etc., of the Indian Surveys, deposited in the map room of the India office is the published listing of the holdings of the map collection of the India Office, the working archive used for the administration of India from...Markham, Clements
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Dataset
Mapping Irish Football
The Mapping Irish Football project called on the crowd to share any newspaper references they may have come across of women and any code of football prior to and including 1973. It is hoped that this project will start a conversation amongst researchers interested in Irish sports to do more...Byrne, Helena ; Bolton, Steve ; Carrier, John ; Farrell, Gerald ; Faller, Helge …
women's football, newspaper data, crowdsourcing, and Irish football history
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Dataset
Dataset for Toponym Resolution in Nineteenth-Century English Newspapers
We present a new dataset (version 2) for the task of toponym resolution in digitised historical newspapers in English. It consists of 455 annotated articles from newspapers based in four different locations in England (Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne, Poole and Dorchester), published between 1780 and 1870. The articles have been manually annotated...Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; Beavan, David ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Hosseini, Kasra ; Lawrence, Jon …
nineteenth-century English, dataset, newspapers, toponym resolution, and geographic information retrieval
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Presentation
Mapping Irish Women’s Football
The Mapping Irish Football project is calling on the crowd to share any newspaper references they may have come across of women and any code of football prior to and including 1973. It is hoped that this project will start a conversation amongst researchers interested in Irish sports to do...Byrne, Helena ; Gibbs, Stuart
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Research report
Living with Machines Delivery Plan version 1, 2019
Living with Machines is a five-year collaborative project. It aims to generate new perspectives on the effects of the mechanisation of labour on the lives of ordinary people in Britain during the 'long nineteenth century' (c.1780-1918), by developing computational and historical techniques and research questions for working with historical sources....Ahnert, Ruth ; Beavan, David ; Colavizza, Giovanni ; Farquhar, Adam ; Griffin, Emma …
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Conference paper (published)
Station to Station: Linking and Enriching Historical British Railway Data
The transformative impact of the railway on nineteenth-century British society has been widely recognized, but understanding that process at scale remains challenging because the Victorian rail network was both vast and in a state of constant flux. Michael Quick’s reference work Railway Passenger Stations in Great Britain: a Chronology offers...Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Lawrence, Jon ; McDonough, Katherine ; Nanni, Federico …
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Conference paper (published)
Towards a Foundation for Collaborative Digital Archiving with Local Concert-Giving Organisations
The centenaries of former chapters of the British Music Society (BMS), established in 1918, have prompted their governing bodies to take stock of their histories and build on the cataloguing, documentation and preservation of their archival collections. The InterMusE project aims to support this shared instinct to archive by capturing... -
Journal article
Dunhuang scrolls: Innovative storage solutions at the British Library
The British Library’s Stein collection contains about 14,000 scrolls, fragments and booklets in Chinese from a cave in the Buddhist Mogao Caves complex near Dunhuang in north-west China. This article describes storage and access solutions for the collection in the context of a busy research library and the currently ongoing...Kralka, Paulina ; Muzart, Marya
conservation, storage, paper, Central Asia, Dunhuang, and scroll
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Conference paper (unpublished)
What does the future hold for "open" and cultural heritage institutions?
GLAMs’ [Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums] public interest mission is squarely aligned with the open access ethos. Indeed, making their collections as openly accessible, shareable, and reusable as possible is the best way for GLAMs to achieve their mission as they digitize and offer their collections online. But only a...Vézina, Brigitte
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Conference paper (unpublished)
The Ethics of Open Access in the Endangered Archives Programme
The Endangered Archives Programme (also known as EAP) gives funding to people running projects to digitise and preserve archival materials at risk of destruction. These can date from any time before the middle of the twentieth century, and from most parts of the world except Europe and North America. The...Schaik, Sam van
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Conference paper (unpublished)
Users understand OpenGLAM. Do GLAMs?
For more than a decade, a dedicated bunch of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums [GLAM] around the world have been advocating for opening up cultural heritage collections while pushing for openness in their own institutions. Today, more than 1,200 GLAMs worldwide feature open access to their digitised assets – making...Sanderhoff, Merete
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Conference paper (unpublished)
Increasing engagement through Towards a National Collection
At the centre of the £18.9m research development programme Towards a National Collection is the aim to increase engagement with the cultural heritage collections of the UK. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the programme is working to link collections and encourage cross-searching of multiple collection types, to...Bailey, Rebecca
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Presentation
Developing Identifiers Resource and Q&A
A presentation as part of 'Developing Identifiers for Heritage Collections' webinar held on 21st April 2021.Madden, Frances
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Presentation
Persistent Identifiers Demonstrator
A presentation as part of 'Developing Identifiers for Heritage Collections' webinar held on 21st April 2021.Page, Roderic
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Presentation
Question and answer session 1 : Increasing Engagement with Cultural Heritage Collections
Recording of the Question and Answer discussion from Session 1: Increasing engagement with cultural heritage collections.Vézina, Brigitte ; Schaik, Sam van ; Sanderhoff, Merete ; Bailey, Rebecca
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Conference paper (unpublished)
Impact cannot be measured, and other sad half-truths about impact measurement
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. In this talk, I look at bringing algorithmic fairness to impact measurement, from web-scale attention tracking to computer-assisted data story-telling. Drawing on my experience with altmetrics, I argue that many proxies for impact correlate not...Boruta, Luc
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Conference paper (unpublished)
Assessing the broader value of research culture: The hidden REF experience
The hidden REF was an experiment to counteract existing evaluation methods. UK REF Impact Case Studies have a narrative linearity which fails to appreciate the amazing plethora of interactions, individuals and different types of output that are part of our research culture. The hidden REF exercise aims to celebrate the...Derrick, Gemma
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Conference paper (unpublished)
Making a Difference and 'Partnering for Impact'
This presentation will reflect on impact as defined in the Research Excellence Framework (REF2021) and that forms a key element of the current dual funding structure of research for Higher Education Institutions. Although impact in its broadest sense extends beyond research, it is most prominently highlighted in the REF as...Boddington, Anne
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Conference paper (unpublished)
Best of both: combining arts and science to measure the benefits of online culture for mental health in young people
An inter-disciplinary project undertaken by museum and psychiatry staff at the University of Oxford in 2020 set out to find out if online cultural content could be effective against common mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. The O-ACE (Online Active Community Engagement) project used traditional arts engagement research...Adams, Helen
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Conference paper (unpublished)
Question and answer session 2 : Measuring and evaluating impact beyond journal articles
Recording of the Question and Answer discussion from Session 2: Measuring and evaluating impact beyond journal articles.Boruta, Luc ; Derrick, Gemma ; Boddington, Anne ; Adams, Helen
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Journal article
The Spiral-Locked Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots
This article presents evidence about the use of the ‘spiral lock’, a highly secure letterlocking mechanism used by Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, and other letter-writers in early modern Europe, to secure their correspondence shut. After explaining the concept of letterlocking, a centuries-old communication security technique, we demonstrate how...Dambrogio, Jana ; Smith, Daniel Starza ; Pellecchia, Jennifer ; Wiggins, Alison ; Clarke, Andrea …
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Journal article
A Transcription and Translation of Sloane MS. 2131, Robert Ashley’s (1561-1641) Vita: with Additional Biographical Details
British Library Sloane MS. 2131, Vita, is an autobiography written in Latin by Robert Ashley (1565-1641), bibliophile, lawyer, and translator. Ashley bequeathed his collection of approximately 5000 books to establish a library at Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court. This is the first full transcription and translation...Kelser, Astrid ; Nelson, Jennifer K. ; Satterley, Renae
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Presentation
Developing Identifiers for Heritage Collections: Introduction and Case Studies
A presentation as part of 'Developing Identifiers for Heritage Collections' webinar held on 21st April 2021. Photo Credit: Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society © ArchivePlus/Max Bamber 2016Madden, Frances
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Video
Persistent Identifiers in Cultural Heritage Collections
Persistent Identifiers help make collections available for the long term so they can be discovered, researched and cited. A range of experts describe how PIDs can help manage, research and digitise collections.British Library
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Book
US Fine Presses Established after 1945: A Guide to the British Library’s Holdings
This project grew out of a conversation in late 2019 with Phil Hatfield, then Head of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, who had recently pledged financial support towards the cataloguing of a backlog of US fine press publications that had been acquired by our curatorial...Petrovic, Jean
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Dataset
May's British and Irish Press Guide and Advertiser's Handbook & Dictionary etc. (1871-1880)
Newspaper directories produced and published annually in contemporary 19th Britain by advertising agent Frederick May and successors, containing information on newspapers, magazines and periodicals and arranged in alphabetical and sometimes tabular order. Information for each title included price, publisher, office, political and religious leaning.Frederick May & Son ; British Library
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Dataset
The Newspaper Press Directory (1846-1880)
Newspaper directories produced and published annually in contemporary 19th Britain by advertising agent Charles Mitchell. Newspapers listed primarily listed in alphabetical order of the town the newspaper where the title was published. Information for each title included: features connected with the district such as population and trade; principal towns in...C. Mitchell and Co. ; British Library
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Research report
UK Web Archive Annual Report April 2020 - March 2021
The UK Web Archive is a shared resource and collaborative activity of the six UK legal deposit libraries. Since April 2013 it has been a cornerstone of our collecting under legal deposit. This report covers an exceptional year, which has highlighted the strengths, resilience and adaptability of staff across the...UK Web Archive
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Research report
UK Retail Industry: Scoping Document
This document aims to establish the scope of a thematic website collection initiated as part of the UK Legal Libraries Non-Print Legal Deposit collection building. The proposed collection has been given the working title ““The UK retail industry: changes on the high street””. The objective is to preserve those web...Mattos, Lola