Day 2: The British Library

We are a bunch of very lucky library students: today we spent the entire day at the British Library. I have about 12 pages of notes from all the talks we had.

First, we had a tour of the BL. Our guide helpfully explained a.) how the Reading Rooms work, b.) how to get a Reader Pass, and c.) that the elevation of the BL building looks like a ship when viewed from the roof of Kings Cross. He showed us the magically barcode-and-trolley system that zips books from the miles of storage underground to the Reading Rooms.

Later in the day, some of us visited the HQ of the International Dunhuang Project, a digitization project for Silk Road manuscripts. They took us through their standard workflow, from photography, to photoshop, to cataloging and website design. It was a great behind-the-scenes look at a digitization project: I have only participated in the later stages of these kinds of projects, so I was very happy to see the whole thing from start to finish (e.g. What decisions do photographers make when digitizing? What are best practices for editing photos?).

Besides these tours, the librarians at BL had prepared a series of fantastic talks on the digital projects going on, and let me tell you, this is some really amazing stuff. I am very interested in web archiving/big data and all those kinds of preservation projects, and I was very glad for their overview of the UK Web Archive. The new deposit mandate for UK websites will hopefully be a very good thing for web archiving, let’s hope we have something similar in the US to help clarify what the Library of Congress is allowed to do when it comes to saving our digital heritage. We had more great talks on digital scholarship and digital outreach, which is efforts by the Digital Curator Team to get the rest of the BL curators on board with web/tech tools. I see a lot of posts on this kind of outreach and the strategies to implement it on various librarian blogs, and the BL is doing some really useful things anyone can emulate. We also heard about personal archiving and digital donations (the future!) and the cool stuff coming out of the Sound & Vision dept, like sound maps! Everyone was very welcoming and generous with their time, and I am so grateful for their brilliant work.

We finished off the day with a visit to their temporary exhibition Propaganda: Power and Persuasion which was extremely interesting and comprehensive. After that we looked into the treasures exhibit for those amazing items like the Magna Carta and Jane Austen’s writing desk. I especially liked the letter from Michelangelo where he mentions that he has finally finished that ceiling for the Pope. You know, that ceiling.