scholarly journals Archival strategies for contemporary collecting in a world of big data: Challenges and opportunities with curating the UK web archive

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 205395172199040
Author(s):  
Nicola Jayne Bingham ◽  
Helena Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
British Library ◽  
National Library ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
The Uk ◽  
British Culture ◽  
Web Archive

In this contribution, we will discuss the opportunities and challenges arising from memory institutions' need to redefine their archival strategies for contemporary collecting in a world of big data. We will reflect on this topic by critically examining the case study of the UK Web Archive, which is made up of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries: the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries Oxford, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Dublin. The UK Web Archive aims to archive, preserve and give access to the UK web space. This is achieved through an annual domain crawl, first undertaken in 2013, in addition to more frequent crawls of key websites and specially curated collections which date back as far as 2005. These collections reflect important aspects of British culture and events that shape society. This commentary will explore a number of questions including: what heritage is captured and what heritage is instead neglected by the UK Web archive? What heritage is created in the form of new data and what are its properties? What are the ethical issues that memory institutions face when developing these web archiving practices? What transformations are required to overcome such challenges and what institutional futures can we envisage?

Habemus Corpora: Reapproaching Philological Problems in the Age of ‘Big’ Data

2021 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-127
Author(s):  
Mark Faulkner
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Language ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
British Library ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
Major Task ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
Primary Focus

Abstract This paper demonstrates the potential of new methodologies for using existing corpora of medieval English to better contextualise linguistic variants, a major task of philology and a key underpinning of our ability to answer major literary-historical questions, such as when, where and to what purpose medieval texts and manuscripts were produced. The primary focus of the article is the assistance these methods can offer in dating the composition of texts, which it illustrates with a case study of the “Old” English Life of St Neot, uniquely preserved in the mid-twelfth-century South-Eastern homiliary, London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D.xiv, fols. 4–169. While the Life has recently been dated around 1100, examining its orthography, lexis, syntax and style alongside that of all other English-language texts surviving from before 1150 using new techniques for searching the Dictionary of Old English Corpus suggests it is very unlikely to be this late. The article closes with some reflections on what book-historical research should prioritise as it further evolves into the digital age.

scholarly journals Retraction: Challenges and opportunities of hydrothermal carbonisation in the UK; case study in Chirnside

RSC Advances ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (54) ◽  
pp. 33938-33938
Author(s):  
Eloise Bevan ◽  
Jile Fu ◽  
Ying Zheng
Keyword(s):  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Hydrothermal Carbonisation ◽  
The Uk

Retraction of ‘Challenges and opportunities of hydrothermal carbonisation in the UK; case study in Chirnside’ by Eloise Bevan et al., RSC Adv., 2020, 10, 31586–31610, DOI: 10.1039/d0ra04607h.

Thinking about Religious Welfare and Rethinking Social Policy in the British Context

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 613-624 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rana Jawad
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Welfare Provision ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Ways Of Being

The role of religion in social welfare provision, and more broadly in shaping the development of state social policy in the UK, has become an issue of increasing prominence in the last decade raising both new challenges and opportunities. This article brings together new and existing research in the field of religion and social action/welfare in the British context to present a preliminary discussion of how and why religion, as a source of social identity and moral values, matters for social policy. The key argument is that religious welfare provision goes beyond the mixed economy of welfare paradigm and has the capacity to challenge the Utilitarian underpinnings of mainstream social policy thinking by giving more relative importance to ethical issues such as self-knowledge and morality, in addition to the more conventional concepts of wellbeing or happiness. The article proposes the concept of ways of being in order to bring together these moral ideational factors that underpin social welfare.

scholarly journals Strategies for preserving memes as artefacts of digital culture

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 895-904
Author(s):  
Fátima García López ◽  
Sara Martínez Cardama
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
The Internet ◽  
British Library ◽  
National Library ◽  
The Future ◽  
Specific Assessment ◽  
New Type ◽  
Expression Characteristic ◽  
Web Archive

The Internet archives kept by heritage libraries are analysed, focusing specifically on that new type of expression characteristic of web culture and digital folklore, the meme. Five paradigmatic examples of heritage institutions engaging in web archive initiatives are explored: the Library of Congress, British Library, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Biblioteca Nacional de España and National Library of Australia. Specific assessment categories are defined for the study. The findings reveal a lack of collection policies for such representative objects of today’s mass culture and identify the challenges both for the custodial institutions and for research in the future.

scholarly journals Distributed National Collections: Concept and Reality in Two Countries

2002 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Genoni
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Resource Sharing ◽  
British Library ◽  
Higher Education Funding ◽  
National Library ◽  
Research Libraries ◽  
Similar Scheme ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Specialized Subject

The ‘distributed national collection’ is a scheme whereby the British Library envisages completing agreements with other libraries to facilitate the development of specialized subject-based research collections in order to make the most of total national resources. The implementation in Australia of a similar scheme, the Distributed National Collection (DNC), was proposed during the late 1980s and 1990s, with the National Library (NLA) as a main advocate, and a great deal of enthusiasm was generated. The use of Conspectus was envisaged, and a DNC Office was set up at the NLA. It failed for various reasons: Conspectus proved unusable, the NLA had to cut back its own acquisitions, and financial restraints forced other libraries to look after their own interests. In the UK, the initiative for collaborative collection development has been driven by the British Library and the Higher Education Funding Councils. The UK has some features which give it a better chance of success - for instance, the responsible office should be independent of all the main players, whereas in Australia this responsibility could be carried only by the National Library; the UK has a more established network of research libraries, including a number outside the higher education/national library nexus; and the existence of BLDSC is highly beneficial. However, key challenges lie ahead, notably the complexities of managing the scheme, the time needed to put it into operation, the commitment demanded from participants (notably some sacrifice of local interests required for ‘deep resource sharing’), and obtaining the initial acceptance needed from users.

Use of a National Library: A Survey of Readers in the Humanities and Social Sciences Reading Rooms of the British Library

1992 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 197-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Cranfield ◽  
Joe Hellowell
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Seasonal Variations ◽  
Questionnaire Survey ◽  
Survey Methods ◽  
Academic Staff ◽  
British Library ◽  
National Library ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Uk ◽  
National Libraries

A questionnaire survey was carried out in the humanities reading rooms of the British Library one day each month from September 1990 to August 1991 with the aim of providing information of help in planning services, particularly at the new building in St Pancras. Readers were asked about their occupations, nationalities, the location of the academic institutions to which they were affiliated, the reasons for and frequency of their visits etc. 65% of readers were academic staff or students, and 33% lived outside the UK; 31% said they had visited the library over 50 times in the past year. The results were compared, where appropriate, with earlier surveys in 1968 and 1977. These comparisons highlighted significant seasonal variations in patterns of usage. It was not possible to compare the results with those from surveys by other national libraries, because of widely differing survey methods and content of reports.

scholarly journals Cross-Sectoral Big Data

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme T. Laurie
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Health Sector ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Biomedical Data ◽  
Ethical Values ◽  
Ethics Framework ◽  
Full Explanation ◽  
Health And Well Being

Abstract Discussion of uses of biomedical data often proceeds on the assumption that the data are generated and shared solely or largely within the health sector. However, this assumption must be challenged because increasingly large amounts of health and well-being data are being gathered and deployed in cross-sectoral contexts such as social media and through the internet of (medical) things and wearable devices. Cross-sectoral sharing of data thus refers to the generation, use and linkage of biomedical data beyond the health sector. This paper considers the challenges that arise from this phenomenon. If we are to benefit fully, it is important to consider which ethical values are at stake and to reflect on ways to resolve emerging ethical issues across ecosystems where values, laws and cultures might be quite distinct. In considering such issues, this paper applies the deliberative balancing approach of the Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and Research (Xafis et al. 2019) to the domain of cross-sectoral big data. Please refer to that article for more information on how this framework is to be used, including a full explanation of the key values involved and the balancing approach used in the case study at the end.

Cooperation between Legal Deposit Libraries in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. D. McGowan
Keyword(s):  
Pilot Project ◽  
British Library ◽  
Republic Of Ireland ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University ◽  
National Libraries ◽  
Retention Policies

Five libraries in the UK and the Republic of Ireland - the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the university libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, and Trinity College Dublin Library - can claim material from publishers through the Copyright Libraries' Agency, while deposit with The British Library, which maintains the Legal Deposit Office, is obligatory. In spite of problems caused by diverse sources of funding, there is much incentive and pressure to cooperate, and efforts have been made, particularly since 1988, to coordinate the activities of all six libraries. The Mellon Microfilming Project aims to film important scholarly collections in Britain and Ireland to agreed archival standards, and to improve access to the Register of Preservation Microfilms. A Working Group on Legal Deposit identified as areas for fruitful collaboration the coordination of acquisition of serials and of some types of monograph, and retention policies; some savings have already been made. A third exercise, a pilot project for shared cataloguing, aimed to maximize the utility to all libraries of the BL's National Bibliographic Service and minimize costs in the participating libraries; the Shared Cataloguing Programme itself started in September 1993.

Conspectus in the United Kingdom

1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Matheson
Keyword(s):  
Endangered Species ◽  
British Library ◽  
National Library ◽  
Search System ◽  
Research Libraries ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
Subject Areas ◽  
The Uk

Conspectus started in the US where it is used as a means of distributing responsibilities by consensus within a group of research libraries. The main issues are the identification of Primary Collecting Responsibilities (PCRs) for subject areas and the identification of ‘endangered species.’ In the UK the British Library's programme and the Conspectus in Scotland programme have been completed and the National Library of Wales hopes to complete its own programme in 1989. Elsewhere in the UK the reaction to Conspectus has been generally cool. The British Library has created an online Conspectus search system which allows UK Conspectus information to be interrogated via a wide range of access points. Conspectus information may also have potential for identifying priorities for collaborative programmes for preservation and retrospective conversion. The Scottish group is now hoping to examine this area in some detail.

Big Data Ethics in Social Media-- A Case Study of Evaluating Websites

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-31
Author(s):  
Yueming Niu ◽  
Yulin Yao
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Information Protection ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Hidden Information ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Data Ethics

This article combines qualitative and quantitative analysis to study the ethical issues of Big Data in social media, especially in evaluating websites. First, this article discusses the Big Data ethics of evaluation websites, and finds that there are some problems in the evaluation websites, such as false information, hidden information, and lack of user information protection. Second, this article uses questionnaires to investigate the awareness of users of different genders and ages on the evaluation website and their personal information protection consciousness.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document