Collections as Data and Juypter Notebooks: experimenting in Library Labs
Sally Chambers, Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities, Ghent University, Belgium, Julie M. Birkholz, KBR, Royal Library of Belgium’s Digital Research Lab & Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities, Ghent University, Belgium and Gustavo Candela, Department of Software and Computing Systems, University of Alicante, Spain
The international GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) Labs Community [1] was established in September 2018 following a “Building Library Labs’’ workshop organised by the BL Labs team at the British Library [2]. This initial event led to a second workshop at the Royal Library of Denmark in Copenhagen in March 2019 [3] which in turn inspired a Book Sprint in Doha, Qatar to write the hands-on guide “Open a GLAM Lab” [4]. Such activities have been catalysts for other Labs activities in a range of libraries, including the establishment of the KBR Digital Research Lab [5], a long-term collaboration between KBR – Royal Library of Belgium and the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities, Ghent University, Belgium to facilitate text and data mining research on KBR’s digitised and born-digital collections; the emerging DATA-KBR-BE open data platform, facilitating data-level access to KBR Collections and inspired by the North American ‘Collections as Data’ initiative [6], as well as the development of a series of GLAM Jupyter Notebooks [7] set-up by the BVMC Labs as part of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library, Alicante, Spain and inspired by the GLAM Workbench [8]. In this lightning talk we would like to give you a brief taste of some of our Labs’ experiments from the last few months, and hopefully inspire you to try some similar experiments in your library!
References
[2] https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2018/09/building-library-labs-around-the-world.html
[4] https://glamlabs.io/books/open-a-glam-lab/
[5] https://www.kbr.be/en/projects/digital-research-lab/
[6] https://collectionsasdata.github.io