During the first few months of lockdown we trialled a crowdsourcing project to help enrich catalogue metadata. We chose a project that funded the digitisation of late 19th – early 20th century glass-plate negatives from Siberia. Using the free platform Zooniverse, contributors looked at some of these fantastic images, helped identify them and provided keywords. We hope to further refine and improve this added metadata through working with specialists as well as using computer vision software, or other technologies. The British Library’s Russian language curators were keen to be involved as they were unable to work on collections while at home; they matched the images to the original metadata and also translated core Zooniverse site terms into Russian for possible future crowdsourcing projects.

The project attracted many contributors whose specialist knowledge will enhance this collection, and help make it more accessible to a wider audience.


Photograph from the EAP016 collection of Siberian photographs

Bengal’s traditional Baul (madmen) folk singers travel from village to village performing music, song, and dance about love, mysticism and spiritual liberation. In 2005, UNESCO recognised the Baul tradition by inscribing it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This has led to increased efforts to preserve aspects of this culture. The ‘Songs of the Old Madmen’ project team aim to digitise 10,000 hand-written Baul songs from the personal note-books of influential singers/songwriters.

This project will aim to locate, survey, and carry out sample digitisation of lontar (palm-leaf) manuscripts on the islands of Bali and Lombok. These manuscripts are precious and in need of digitisation as they are virtually the only medium through which Old Javanese literature has survived to the present. They also document nearly all aspects of Balinese life and therefore will be a fantastic resource for historians when made available.