Library Labs [Online-Event]

Veranstaltung mit Julie M. Birkholz (KBR – Royal Library of Belgium & Ghent University), Martijn Kleppe (KB – National Library of the Netherlands, Den Haag) sowie Rafael Ball und Maximiliane Okonnek (ETH-Bibliothek/ETH Library Lab)

Julie M. Birkholz
Library + University Collaboration in the Lab Setting: the case of the KBR’s Digital Research Lab

Library Labs have largely emerged from within the library as an institution. In this talk, I present the KBR Digital Research Lab, a collaboration between the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) and the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities, Ghent University (Ghent CDH); a lab that emerged across institutions. The Lab is funded by a unique federal grant that seeks to bring together Belgian federal institutions (e.g. the Royal Library and the State Archives of Belgium), and Belgian universities through the appointment of a project lead that bridges the institutions. The KBR Lab is the start of a long-term cooperation between a library and university, which is a unique collaboration in the labs setting.

KBR developed a new strategic plan and an action plan for the period 2019-2021. One of the key objectives of the plan is to increase the availability of both information on their collections and make it available online, where legally possible, as to facilitate its re-use. Realizing this requires different and unique capacities, and expertise that does not solely exist in a library or university. Thus, the Lab is an opportunity to address this challenge. The Lab, which officially began with the appointment of its head, Julie M. Birkholz, on 1 February 2020, has two components: 1) creating a laboratory to experiment and facilitate these goals; and 2) with a specific focus on developing a knowledge network for the study of editorial, literary and digital historical heritage from the 19th to the 21st century. In this talk, I will discuss the goals of a national library-university collaboration and the Lab; the positioning of the Lab – both its affordances and perceived challenges; how we have worked to align the Lab with the strategic plan of the Library and digital humanities researchers; as well as reflect on the ecosystem of a Lab in and across these institutions.

Martijn Kleppe 
KB Lab: serving Digital Humanists and AI researchers

The KB, National Library of the Netherlands has an active Digital Scholarship Team that promotes the digital collections of the KB. Academic researchers can get access to API’s allowing them to harvest all digital newspapers, periodicals and books to do all kinds of research. Tools that are built with the collections are collected and shared through the KB Lab website. While we first mainly served Digital Humanities researchers, we now see a new kind of academic interest: Computer Scientists seem to be more and more interested in digital historical sources, mainly because of their textual and visual richness. These sources provide new perspectives that bring in counter bias that are relevant for algorithm development within the domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI). To further promote the use of our digital collections within the AI Community, the KB was co initiator of the Cultural AI Lab. Together with heritage institutes Rijksmuseum and National Institute for Sound and Vision and academic partners we jointly research how we can apply AI to open up our collections in new ways. But we also stimulate the use of our collections to improve AI techniques. In this talk, I will show how we evolved from serving Digital Humanists to collaborating with more different types of academic researchers. This allows us not only to assist researchers but also to improve our services and internal processes.

Rafael Ball, Maximiliane Okonnek 
ETH Library Lab: Can library real-world labs act as proponents of transformative science?

Real-world labs can be understood as “contexts for real-world experiments, which aim at an improved understanding of transformation processes and actively facilitate them” (Schneidewind 2014). Departing from this notion, ETH Library Lab understands itself as “think and do tank” exploring plausible future scenarios for science and research and their potential impact on scientific libraries. Through facilitating co-design and co-production in an interdisciplinary setting it derives target knowledge on most desired library futures and transformation knowledge on how to work towards these in order to accelerate innovation.

The presentation will give an introductory overview of ETH Library Lab’s Innovator Fellowship Program, people and projects supported though its program and outcomes of the initiative. Moreover, it will elaborate on the concept of transformative science and examine the potential of the growing number of library labs to act as proponents of this development.

ETH Library Lab started in 2018 as a joint innovation initiative of ETH Library and the Library of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Its goal is to advance information infrastructure and services for science, research and education. The lab’s Innovator Fellowship Program welcomes talents from across disciplines and educational levels.

Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Vorlesungsreihe «Bücher, Daten, Räume. Die Hochschulbibliothek im 21. Jahrhundert»

Link zum Zoom Meeting. (Meeting-ID: 694 8467 1087 Kenncode: 869491)

Die Veranstaltung findet ausschliesslich online statt.