At
heart this is a post about discoverability, access, and bringing things
to the surface that might otherwise not be seen. The Mechanical Curator
of the title is one way of the ways the BL has done this with their
digitised images, but only one of many - the point is we all have
collections which WOULD engage people if they knew about it, so why not
invest some time in getting the message out there in innovative ways?
I
ran some workshops for the British Library at the end of last year,
aimed at social media 'improvers' (people already using it as part of
their professional role, who want to get more engagement and measure
their impact etc), during which I talked about Tumblr. I showed various examples and confessed my favourite Tumblr of all was from the BL themselves, the Mechanical Curator.
The Mechanical Curator is Tumblr blog
which regularly (and automatically) posts images from 1,000,000+ the BL
have scanned from out-of-copyright books from previous centuries. It
has been programmed with some Artificial Intelligence - or as far as I
can see, more like Artificial Whimsy - and becomes taken with certain
shapes, symmetries, and themes, and posts these more often and in
clusters. After its set up and tweaking, there's no human intervention -
it just gets on with it.
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