LIBER Forum for Digital Cultural Heritage

2016 Forum - Helsinki, Wednesday 29 June 2016

The Wood for the Trees – Discoverability of Digital Collections




Abstract: Delpher is the national platform for full-text searchable, historical publications in the Netherlands and at present, it contains over 60 million digitized pages from books, journals, newspapers and news bulletins. In this talk I will highlight the cooperation that went into the development of this platform and I will give an overview of the initiatives we have taken – and continue to take – to remain in contact with our different user groups and improve the discoverability of both our website and our data.
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Abstract: Jisc has done a lot of work in this area in the last three years as part of the Spotlight on the digital project and within the contexts of the large investment in digitisation programmes that Jisc has made over the last 15 years. Ms Marchionni will share the results of the project and some of the work JISC is taking forward in this area.
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Abstract: The Rijksmuseum is known for its very early open data policy in the digital cultural heritage world and it's very ambitious digitisation plans. I will briefly talk about the discussions that led up to that policy and the past and current collection data management involved. Most recently, the Rijksmuseum has decided to centralize all its hybrid collection data within one department, Research Services, and combine this with the scientic research data output as well. I'll briefly mention the challenges that lie ahead, especially several linked open data solutions we are planning to explore.
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Abstract: JSTOR Global Plants contains over 2 million digitized plant specimens and hundreds of thousands of digitized primary source materials contributed by herbaria from all over the world. Livingstone’s Zambezi Expedition, created by JSTOR Labs and the JSTOR Global Plants team, curates and organizes a portion of this content as an experiment in story-telling and story-discovery within large primary source collections. With it, users can explore Livingstone’s expedition both chronologically and geographically, discovering stories like Livingstone’s dawning awareness of the horrors of slavery, the conflict and correspondence with the expedition funders, and personal stories like the tragic death of Livingstone’s wife. Reaction since launch has been especially powerful amongst our herbaria partners, who are eager to contribute similar stories. Slides

Presentation:http://www.slideshare.net/EvelienHauwaerts/beehive-sessions-introduction
Video 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T_7n6VbdsU&feature=youtu.be
Video 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvC735V43H4 (over een Middelnederlandse verluchte kopie van het gynaecologische handboek Liber Trotula)

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The descriptions for three interesting H2020 calls
The original presentation for the MSEG in Luxembourg

Abstract: In the last ten years, the Library & Information Center, University of Patras, Greece (UPAT) runs a long term digitization project aiming to cover content demands of the researchers in Social Sciences and Humanities, both in an institutional and a national level. Through these years, the main part of the project focused on the digitization and indexing of Greek journals and periodicals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This resulted in a set of specialized digital collections, with a considerable impact on the research output in the relevant academic disciplines. In our presentation, we will describe the context of UPAT's digitization initiatives and its key elements (focus on demand, involvement of third parties/partners, funding, selection criteria, etc) and we will discuss the main conclusions and results so far (reception and use), as well as the critical issues we should consider for the long term success and sustainability of this project (business model, digital preservation, advanced indexing and editing tools etc.).
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Abstract: The PARTHENOS project brings together a cluster of EU-funded research infrastructures (RIs) in the humanities to pool resources and share knowledge toward a more efficient overall provision within the research ecosystem. One of the areas of concern for the cluster is skills and professional development, and the role education and training plays in increasing the accessibility and usability of research infrastructures. The PARTHENOS approach to this issue is trying to overturn the common paradigm for RI training, in which skills development is only seen as the need to learn how to use a project's own tools. Instead, PARTHENOS is looking at key stakeholder communities (including libraries and archives) and trying to develop a deeper understanding of and support for these communities, enabling them to understand the value of RI developments and work more actively with and within them.
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Abstract: The National Library of Finland has been the Minority Languages Project as of 2012. The project is financially supported by the Kone Foundation. During this project the National Library of Finland has digitized and made available approximately 1200 monograph and more than 100 newspaper titles in several Uralic languages. The materials are available to both researchers and citizens in the National Library’s Fenno-Ugrica collection. The project will produce digitized materials in the Uralic languages as well as their development tools to support linguistic research and citizen science. The resulting materials will constitute the largest resource for the Uralic languages in the world with data that can be utilized for instance in language revitalization projects. Through this project, researchers will gain access to corpora, which they have not been able to study before, and to which all users will have open access regardless of their place of residence. In my brief presentation, I will discuss 1) how we utilized the social media (Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte etc) to gain audience for our collection and 2) how the needs of researchers and laymen were met in crowdsourcing.
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After the coffee break - Planning the 4th Digital Curation Workshop
 Over the years, LIBER has organised several Digital Curation Workshops (here is an impression of the 3rd Digital Curation Workshop).

In 2017, we would like to organise the 4th Digital Curation Workshop around the theme of Discoverability of Digital Collections. In this workshop participants suggested topics that might be further explored in a focused workshop on a European level.

Possible topics included: