Case Study - National Library of Scotland
The Scottish Tech Army teamed up with The National Library of Scotland to assist with a project that has so far resulted in the ability to search and access over 8 million open and free publications from Libraries via a new service https://opentexts.world/
The National Library of Scotland is entitled to access to everything published in the United Kingdom, from books to magazines to football programmes and has over 120 miles of shelves. In addition to this, it has an active programme of digitisation, taking out of copyright materials, photographing them page by page, and putting them online for use worldwide.
When lockdown hit the UK in March 2020, the National Library of Scotland was looking at ways to ensure its digitised collections, along with digitised collections from other Libraries, could be found easily, particularly as the lockdown meant that libraries worldwide were shut. This gave the impetus to continue a previous project investigating the feasibility of creating a resource of millions of digitised books from libraries worldwide. The National Library of Scotland approached the Scottish Tech Army after learning about the group on Twitter to see if they could help.
Working closely with Project Manager Alec, Designer Sarah and Programmer Brian and handling the data side in-house, the project to make the digitised collections available online began.
Alec, Sarah, and Brian worked together to design and create the website for The National Library of Scotland’s new resource, and they oversaw the user testing process to make sure everything was running smoothly.
Volunteer Alec Davis was one of the first 100 volunteers to sign up with The Scottish Tech Army, having heard about the group in a conversation about IT while walking his dog.
Alec said “The procedure at getting teams together at Scottish Tech Army works very well and this was a worthwhile project to get involved with. The press coverage the project has had is also great.“
The resource is now available and is free for absolutely anyone to use, including school children, students, and academic researchers. The National Library of Scotland is continuing to digitise its collection with 100k-200k new items each year and diversifying the collection available online.
The project has continued to evolve with further functionality such as advanced search, and collections from new libraries being added.
Stuart Lewis, Associate Director of Digital for The National Library of Scotland, said:
“The Scottish Tech Army has made a massive difference to the project; the team we worked with was extremely skilled. Without them, the project wouldn’t have happened in the way it has, and it wouldn’t have been as good.”
Stuart and Alec both recently featured on episode 14 of our Scottish Tech Army podcast to discuss the project. You can listen to them here.
You can catch up on all of our podcast episodes on our website.