Glen Worthey, Chair
Sally Chambers (Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities, Belgium)
The mission of DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, is to empower research communities with digital methods to create, connect and share knowledge about culture and society. Digital methods are a cornerstone of what we do, ensuring we focus on how technology is transforming not objects, but activities. For us, the digital is not a goal in itself, but a means to explore, discover and grow. Libraries, Archives and Museums are essential partners in this endeavour. DARIAH is committed to continuing to encourage, facilitate and celebrate this collaboration at the core of what we do. In this presentation a number of examples of existing partnerships with cultural heritage communities will be introduced, as well as proposing one or two suggestions for future collaborations.
Marian Lefferts (Consortium of European Research Libraries)
The Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL – www.cerl.org) hosts a large number of databases related to early printed books (1450-1850) and manuscripts that are useful for those that study the history and economics of printing, the spread of ideas, or the knowledge networks of a by-gone age. In this presentation, Marian Lefferts, CERL Executive Manager, will give an overview of what is on offer and how you can access the data.
Leon Wessels (CLARIN ERIC / Utrecht University, Netherlands)
Short abstract:
This presentation introduces the European Research Infrastructure CLARIN, its partnerships with research libraries and invites you to discuss potential future collaboration.
Long abstract:
The Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure or CLARIN is a research infrastructure initiated to make digital language resources and tools from all over Europe and beyond accessible through a single sign-on online environment. CLARIN supports academic researchers as well as students, journalists and citizen-scientists interested in digital language resources, such as parliamentary records, social media data, newspaper archives and spoken corpora. In 2012, CLARIN received the status of European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) and as of 2016 CLARIN is recognized as an ESFRI Landmark. [1]
Research libraries have always played a vital role in CLARIN. National libraries actively participate in several of the 25 national CLARIN consortia. Clearly, libraries are some of the largest providers of digital resources used by linguists, historians, literary scholars and other researchers engaged in the (digital) social sciences and humanities. In addition, many libraries encourage digital scholarship by offering analytical tools, training and data management support. [2]
On a supranational level, CLARIN has a number of partnerships with large cultural heritage infrastructures. In 2017, CLARIN signed a Memorandum of Understanding with LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries. The goal of the Memorandum is to engage in and share information about policy and advocacy activities of mutual interests such as copyright regulations, identification of opportunities for joint capacity building and planning, and cooperation on user involvement in the design of services. [3]
CLARIN is also a partner in the Digital Service Infrastructure of Europeana, an EU platform for digital cultural heritage. As a result of this partnership, a selection of Europeana records can be found in CLARIN’s main search engine, the Virtual Language Observatory. These records include newspapers from Austria, Finnish travel brochures and audio recordings of Romanian poetry. [4]
CLARIN ERIC continues to explore new ways to strengthen its relations with research libraries across the world and is very open to suggestions for further collaboration.
References
[1.] Koenraad De Smedt, Franciska de Jong, Bente Maegaard, Darja Fišer, Dieter Van Uytvanck, ‘Towards an Open Science Infrastructure for the Digital Humanities: The Case of CLARIN’, Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (DHN), 2018, pp. 139-151; Franciska de Jong, ‘CLARIN: Infrastructural Support for Impact through the Study of Language as Social and Cultural Data’, in: Bente Maegaard and Riccardo Pozzo ed., Stay Tuned to the Future. Impact of the Research Infrastructures for Social Sciences and Humanities, Leo S. Olschki Editore, Florence 2019, pp. 121-129.
[2.] John W. White and Heather Gilbert ed., Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries, vol. 7, Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, Indiana, 2016.
[3.] Memorandum of Understanding between LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche) and CLARIN ERIC, https://office.clarin.eu/v/CE-2017-0997-MoU-with-LIBER.pdf.
[4.] Twan Goosen and Nuno Freire, ‘Bridging the Europeana and CLARIN infrastructures: Cultural heritage data for the social sciences and humanities’, CLARIN.EU [weblog], 13 September 2017, https://www.clarin.eu/blog/bridging-europeana-and-clarin-infrastructures.
Marketplace participant, not presenting a lightning talk:
Xuemao Wang (University of Cincinnati, United States)
A global discussion forum to share knowledge, and promote best practices of Digital Scholarship/Digital Humanities among international library communities. For additional information, please visit: https://www.ifla.org/dhds.