Behind the scenes at the knowledge factory…
Cogapp visits the Qatar Foundation project at the British Library
My colleague Gavin Mallory, has made a brilliant case for the idea that Museums are experience factories. In many ways the British Library is also a wonderful experience factory, but down in the depths of stacks they mine knowledge. At least that’s how it felt after learning about the mighty digitisation and documentation factory that is the British Library Qatar Foundation Project.
Our team (Tristan Roddis, Gavin Mallory, Jon White, Adrian Hindle, Neil Hawkins and myself) went along on 1 March to catch up with the latest updates from the team at the British Library. We found out more about their workflow and we explained how we build the qdl.qa portal that gives unified access to nearly a million items (combining BL records with those from the Qatar National Library).
As a fan of digitisation I was massively impressed by the scale and sophistication of the team’s approach and fascinated to learn about the organisational challenges they overcame to make it work. There’s a good summary in this video — although things have got even better since then!
The pragmatic balance between quality and efficacy was very impressive and was based on a lengthy process of refinement to the system. Many of us in the Cogapp team were particularly fascinated by the conservation processes — those that were most intimately engaged with the physical objects and furthest from our digital experiences. We immediately began imagining ways to give digital researchers access to the fascinating biographies of the physical objects that are only seen by the conservators. What extra information might a historian glean from the fact that a text was damaged, trimmed or rebound?
We also got some great feedback and insight from the topic experts among the BL team into how the QDL might be improved and enriched.
To find out more about this world-leading archive, see the case study.
If you’d like to discuss how Cogapp can help your organisation develop a state-of-the art archive publishing system, get in touch.
