Contextual Collections, Colossal Collaboration, Curious Connections Lucie Burgess, British Library Libraries Australia Forum 2013

2 John Constable, Clouds, Original held at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, digitised by Google Art Project, sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Constable’s clouds

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4 Libraries in the cloud All images copyright British Library Board, all rights reserved

5 All images copyright British Library Board, all rights reserved The British Library

6 The Cloud Culture equation Cloud Culture, Charles Leadbeater, published by Counterpoint Can be accessed from pamphlets/cloud-culture/ More cultural heritage stored in digital form More accessible to more people People better equipped with more tools to add creatively to the collection Exponential growth in mass cultural expression Cloud Culture

7 Libraries and our digital collections

8 Ordnance Surveyors Drawing 40 (detail). Pen and Ink on paper Overlaid on Google Earth, © Inforterra Ltd and Bluesky. British Library, Maps OSD 40(3). British Library Maps Georeferencer

9 British Museum’s Research Space

10 Historypin

11 Which Venus did you mean? 1.Make raw data about content available 2.Make it openly licensed 3.Put it in RDF format – make it linkable ‘triples’ 4.Put in on web using http

12 British Library semantic search pilot

13 Europeana

14 Digital Public Library of America Street fair hot air balloon ascension, Red Wing, Minnesota From the Minnesota Digital Library and copyright Goodhue County Historical Society

15 Biblissima

16 Google Cultural Institute

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18 British Library’s UK Soundmap

19 Harvard’s ShelfLife demo

20 The Westminster Bridge problem Website: copyright Tate and Image: copyright Cleveland Museum of Art Complete poetical works of Wordsworth – public domain, available from

21 Curious connections

22 Storm clouds Cloud Break over the Sea, by John Reginald Brunsdon Image found through Europeana; held in the Government Art Collection, UK

23 Libraries in 2023? Interconnected Personalised Central to communities Social Less collecting, more selecting EnablingUnique Mobile, many devices Digital curation Partnerships Linked, open

24 Thanks to: Dan Cohen, Executive Director, DPLA Adrian Cockcroft, Director of cloud infrastructure, Netflix Thank you for listening British Library colleagues: James Baker Simon Bell Lewis Crawford Catherine Eagleton Adam Farquhar Kimberley Kowal Matthew Shaw Sandra Tuppen Neil Wilson Favourite sources: Lorcan Dempsey’s blog Charles Leadbeter, Cloud Culture, 2010 Numerous websites cited within