Speaker
Nele Gabriels (KU Leuven)
Abstract
Digitisation of heritage materials has found firm footing as part of the KU Leuven Libraries core operations ever since its initiation in 2010. With nearly 120.000 objects fully digitised and available through our search interface Limo, during the past few years we have taken exploratory steps towards disclosing these collections as datasets amenable for computational use, for example for research or creative purposes. This journey has been characterized by exploration, trial and error, and finding inspiration in international networks such as the GLAM Labs community. It has taken off more firmly thanks to the organization of the KU Leuven Libraries BiblioTech 2023 Hackathon which entailed dataset preparation in close collaboration with researchers from KU Leuven’s Faculty of Arts and with colleagues from various departments of both the library and the university in general. This collaboration allowed us to make informed choices regarding dataset content, format and structure and provided both a testing environment and a lively marketing opportunity for our collection datasets. The presentation will tell the story of this journey so far, including an overview of our first experiments and a full insight in how datasets were prepared based on both library and research expertise. It will also share experiences with collaborating in the GLAM Labs community and talk about ideas for future work in the area of collections as data at KU Leuven Libraries.