The Towards Dolly project, showcasing research from genetics at the Roslin Institute, has helped surface lots of interesting material within the library, not least at the current exhibition. One of its outputs was the Science On A Plate subproject, a Wellcome-funded digitisation of 3,500 glass plate slides.

We’ve put these into our metadata games infrastructure, to allow social tagging of the slides, and- while they are well-described- improve their keywording to allow superior faceting in the LUNA application, making the collection more searchable. The game follows the same methodology as the Tag It! Find It! art game- tag ten images, and vote on ten, and build up a high score. It has the additional incentive though, of a hidden Dolly The Sheep image. The lucky user who comes across this image first will be lavishly rewarded (i.e. they will almost certainly get an L&UC calendar!)!!

The game was launched in time for a talk given by Gavin Willshaw, Clare Button and Claire Knowles at The Central Library– a great example of our Library engaging with the wider community- on Tuesday September 29, and will be featured again at Ada Lovelace Day on October 13. You don’t need to be at these events to play the game though- it’s there for you to have a go at any time you like, at librarylabs.ed.ac.uk. You’ll need to login via EASE.

Scott Renton- Digital Development