 Hi everyone, my name is Dr Lucy Henney, I'm the current Wikimedian in residence at the British Library and I'm here to talk to you today along with two of my colleagues about some of the work that we've been doing. I've been in post since March 2021 for a one year residency with the support of Wikimedia UK. My role is to work with the library to develop and support colleagues with projects using Wikidata, Wikibase and Wikisource. I work with curators and members of staff throughout the library to identify and progress opportunities to accelerate this kind of work. My view my work is having six key aims and objectives, amplify and marginalise voices centring underrepresented communities, creating innovative partnerships, embodying an active decolonisation praxis, promoting accessible collections and empowering GLAM employees to contribute to Wikimedia. My vision on the legacy of Wikimedia activity in GLAM institutions is a crucial part of ensuring that the work we do is useful, engaging, vibrant and important. I use creative thinking to produce output that opens up British Library digital collections and relevant culturally sensitive and engaging ways, as you will see today. I call on the Wikimedians and residents as being the Swiss Army knife of any GLAM institution looking for interesting and useful solutions to problems brought to us by our colleagues across the organization. The residency is built upon the pillars of Wikimedia knowledge equity, digital literacy and advocacy, the projects we're going to speak about today have touched on each of these pillars in turn. With knowledge equity, we'll hear about how digital scholarship has hosted placements such as that of Dominic Kane in order to promote and utilise Wikimedia resources in a responsible way. We have advocated for digital literacy by running a hack and yak event for library staff, which showed them the techniques we have used with projects such as the Bengali books project and the India Office records work. With advocacy, you'll see today how different departments within the library have spoken to one another in order to promote and understand the use of Wikimedia in promoting library collections. And with all that in mind, I will hand over now to our other two speakers for today. So my name is Tom Derek. I'm a digital curator at the British Library for a project called Two Centuries of Indian Print. To give a brief introduction to the project. Two Centuries of Indian Print is a major project at the library that has been digitising rare and unique printed books from the South Asian collections. The books themselves date between 1713 and 1914. The project launched in 2015 and was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as well as the UK government's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. And as digitised 1600 out of copyright books, predominantly in Bengali language, but also we've digitised Assamese, Leti and Urdu language texts. The project has covered several work strands including digitisation, cataloging, community and public outreach, research engagement and digital research activities. And it's the digital research side of things that I'll be focusing on in my talk. We recently have used Wikisource and what were our motivations for doing so. Well, during an unrelated workshop that our project ran in India, we connected with members of the Centre for Internet Society, and in particular with Bodhisattva Mandau, who is a member of the West Bengal Wikimedians user group. We finally decided to get involved with Wikisource after attending a talk that was given by the National Library of Scotland, who spoke about receiving a good amount of user visits to their chat books that they had digitised and made available through Wikisource. And so accessibility was a key motivator for us as an Indian based platform with the interface written in Bangla, putting our books on Bengali Wikisource as a way of widening access to researchers based in India, or who have a preference to work within a Bengali language interface and who might not otherwise use the British Library's image presentation services to access the digitised texts. We already had OCR for our books available, searchable PDFs, and so we were interested in whether we could upload the books to Wikimedia Commons and automatically extract the text into Wikisource. That proved to be possible, but a comparison of our OCR against that that was produced within Wikisource led Bodhisattva to recommend that we use Google's OCR that has been integrated into the Wikisource platform. And finally, as well as those benefits I've described already, other benefits that we could see about working with Wikisource were around collaborating with new partners in India, getting involved with the Wikii community, as well as learning new skills that we might be able to share with our colleagues by introducing more people and collections to the benefits that Wikii platforms can bring. And indeed, that's something that we have carried through and have been running training events for British Library staff. So it was recommended to us that the best way to organise our project on Wikisource would be to run a competition in which we could ask contributors to proofread the OCR that has been created using Google. This would both help produce accurate transcriptions more quickly and also raise the profile of our collection on Wikisource. Initially we thought about selecting books that related to a specific theme that would be easy for contributors to understand, but in the end it was again recommended to us that the text that would be of most interest to the Bengali community should be selected. And so it ended up being a cross section of books from those that we had digitised and in close consultation with the West Bengal Wikimedia user group in terms of the selection. Once the books were shortlisted, the process that we followed was that I uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons and Body then created Wikisource page and simultaneously created Wikidata entry for the books. He set up a competition page which brought together all of the relevant information for contributors, including the shortlist of books, the rules, information about prizes, and it also tracked live progress showing how many pages have been proofread. We were very happy with the competition results, although there were only 17 contributors, they managed to completely proofread 20 books which amounted to more than two and a half thousand pages. And those who proofread the most pages were rewarded with various prizes including books, t-shirts, mementos and certificates. As a result of the competition we'd like to do more of the same, and will in fact be running another proofreading competition on Bengali Wikisource that's slated to start in September 2021. That competition will feature more books than the first, and will run for longer than the first competition. We plan on uploading as many of our books as possible over the next year for the two centuries of Indian print projects. The competition page is already in place and records all of the activities of our project relating to Wiki platforms. And so it's the go to place to see where we are up to with our work. So I would encourage people to to visit that. And at this point, I'll hand over to Dominic. So I'm, I'm Dominic Kane, and I'm a master student at UCL, and I was invited to do a placement at the British Library working with the Indian office records. So this project was a proof of concept to support the wider integration of in the office records into various Wikimedia platforms like Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and any other platforms that we thought might be useful. We found that this was good as a case study for dealing with sensitive historical documents. And that this might also help other colleagues who are dealing with sense of sensitive historical documents to to improve and reflect on their own processes in digitizing those documents. We also found that this would be a good way of making more, more heavily consulted documents more easily available for for for users, because Wikipedia pages are easily discoverable and also they allow advanced search functionality. The project also enabled us to create a wide range of use cases for for different, for different techniques, like, for example meteorological data in in Wikidata is one use case we've explored. And also, finally, it enabled us to engage the curators of the Indian office records project in ways that they thought their material could be successfully digitized. Engaging a wide range of Wikimedians in ways they could help the project and and improve, improve wider understanding of the documents and also engaging the wider community of Wikimedia users in what what is in these documents and what they might be able to use them for. And so we used you. We use Wikidata as as a way of importing lots of data from the documents so that they could be used in a wide range of ways. So one, one type of data we used was catalog data. So the, there's a wide range of bibliographical data available in the British Library catalogs. And we wanted to make that widely available so that people could could consult the British Library records but also use the data as references, knowing where come from and how to find it. The future improvements of these catalog records would be possible from Wikidata. So tables of contents, for example, could be imported from Wikidata back into back into the catalogs, but also any other type of enrichment of the, the pages for each of the lists and reports could be that we that we worked on, could be easily imported back into the library. Using Wikidata also presented an opportunity to engage the wider community of the British Library in how to work with Wikidata. As Lucy mentioned, we conducted a hack and yak on on Wikidata which, which proved a useful opportunity to advocate for the importance of Wikidata within within the library. And then the Wikidata is an excellent way of giving scholars and anybody who's interested access to to information in a format that's searchable and and that's free for all. And we've included here at the bottom, an image of a query that could be conducted on on using sparkle on the data. And for anybody interested, there's excellent resources on on how to how to have query data and Wikidata available on the Wikidata platform. We also use Wikimedia Commons. We use this as a way of uploading easily usable versions of the lists into into into onto Wikimedia. For us presented an opportunity to increase visibility and widen access to the end to the Indian office records. As Tom mentioned, the platform, the Wikimedia platforms can be viewed in a variety of languages. This means that although the texture in English users can use any interface that in any language that they're comfortable with. And this is an important improvement in accessibility for us. We also want to encourage greater use of these documents in research and data analysis. And again, this means that users can use these these available documents to inform, for example, Wikipedia pages or Wikidata data sets, or any other uses that they find are appropriate and which enrich wider understanding of these documents. And finally, making these these documents easily available should help to to strengthen the existing relationship between the British British Library and communities in India, particularly family researchers who are already a frequent user base for these documents, and just making their lives easier was an important goal of this of this project. So, in terms of our upcoming plans, we've already uploaded a number of lists onto Wikimedia Commons, but we're aiming to upload even more lists. So, these lists were published at a rate of about two a year. We have a large number of lists to that we can still upload available in our records. We also have administrative reports that we want to upload. These these reports include a wide range of information on data, including data such as crime data, crop yields, meteorological data, and educational information and much, much more. And we're really excited to share this with the wider Wikimedia community. And we're really looking forward to interesting uses for this data and the people that people from all across the Wikimedia community might be able to to to envision. And to that end, we're also going to upload more meteorological data to Wikidata from these administrative reports. And we're going to upload more personnel data, mainly from the lists into Wikidata, which should help with with family researchers in understanding, for example, what what jobs that the ancestors may have held, but also maybe useful for other forms of research. So, we worked closely throughout this project with the two centuries Indian print project. They advised us on possibilities for how we might be able to crowdsource certain aspects of the project in particular in improving the Wikidata from from and extracting that from from the documents and the OCR possibilities for the Indian office records. So there is OCR ready, but we would like to improve the OCR and we were looking at how that might be best achieved. We all attended the same training and Patty pan and the 2021 triple IF conference, which both of which helped us get a picture of how we might be able to conduct and improve the project in the long term. And also, for the two centuries Indian print, they're further on in in in their project. So for them, it presented opportunities to reflect on what they've done so far. For the Indian office records, we also use Wikidata more heavily than they had in the two centuries Indian print and this our project served as an as an encouragement for them to use Wikidata more. And finally, the greater ability of the Indian office records means that they can be looked at with alongside the books that form part of two centuries of Indian print on the same platforms with the same interface. And we're hopeful that that will produce all kinds of interesting and innovative results. Thank you all for your attention for our presentation. And we've included information on all of our users, the user information for Wikimedia. So if you want to get in contact, use that, and we'll be happy to answer any questions that way. Thank you again.