Mahendra Mahey is a Senior Research and Development Specialist at Tallinn University, a Junior Researcher at the Estonian National Museum in Tartu, Estonia and a PhD candidate at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.

Mahendra works as part of the Digital Cultural Heritage as a Resource for Social Development project, and gave a talk in August 2024 at a workshop organised by the project at the Estonian National Museum. He spoke about creative uses of digital cultural heritage and how he has helped engage researchers, artists, educators, entrepreneurs and the public to access, use and more importantly reuse, experiment and remix British Library digital cultural heritage through new and exciting projects. He told the story of how he set up and ran British Library Labs (BL Labs) at the British Library (BL) in London from 2013 to 2021, the first digital cultural heritage Laboratory at any large National Library in the world.

Mahendra not only has a passion for making digital cultural heritage openly accessible and visible for everyone but also for people and computers to access, use, reuse, remix and recycle digital cultural heritage in new ways, often creating new culture along the way.

Image 1: Painting by David Normal (2014) entitled ‘Curiouscillotropy’ meaning ‘to follow the oscillations of thought’. The painting uses and remixes images taken from digitised books from the 19^th Century made available by British Library Labs on Flickr Commons. The painting is one of four which were transformed into large illuminated lightboxes as part of the Crossroads of Curiosity exhibit at the Burning Man Festival at Nevada, USA (2014) and the British Library in London (2015).

Oleksandr Cherednychenko, Tallinn University, Data Engineer

In the summer of 2024, Oleksandr Cherednychenko, a data engineer, led a workshop on creative uses of digital heritage at Tallinn University. During the workshop, he taught participants how to experiment with simple queries to retrieve data from MUIS. In the following interview, you will learn how Oleksandr, an engineer from Ukraine with a passion for high-quality data, views the importance, developments, opportunities, and current state of digital cultural heritage.