The Forum for Digital Cultural Heritage was part of LIBER’s 2013-2017 Strategy.

 

Via the Forum, LIBER collaborated closely with the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL), which focuses on cultural heritage in the form of hand-written and printed books. Forum members focused on making cultural heritage meaningful for today’s online research environment and for the general public.

This page gives an overview of the Forum’s work from 2013-2017. The topic is still meaningful for LIBER, and is addressed in our 2018-2022 Strategy via the Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group.

Annual Reports

Events

  • Workshop of the LIBER Forum for Digital Cultural Heritage (Patras, 5 July 2017)
    The theme of the workshop was suggested by Dr Frédéric Blin (BNU Strasbourg): Managing bequests and digital estates: new challenges for libraries. Preserving the literary, musical and scientific heritage of the past centuries has always been at the core of national, regional and academic libraries’ missions. Today’s writers, composers and scientists are no longer using the pen, but the computer to compose their work, challenging libraries to develop the appropriate strategy in order to preserve the digital manuscripts and all other kinds of documents related to the act of creation, from the basic text file until the e-mails and even the text messages sent and received by the author. This session explored what kind of answers libraries are beginning to put in place to respond to this challenge. See details of the programme.
  • Workshop of the LIBER Forum for Digital Cultural Heritage (Helsinki, 29 June 2016)
    The theme of the workshop was ‘Discoverability of Digital Collections’. Libraries, archives and museums are all actively digitising their collections, and providing access to digitised materials via their websites, VRE’s, public-private partnerships with publishers, cross-sector platforms such as Europeana, WikiMedia, etc., all with the end-user firmly centre-stage. The investment has been huge, but the return-on-investment has proven hard to measure, and re-use is reported to be low. Details of the programme may be found here.
  • Recording provenance evidence II (Salamanca, 16 March 2016)
    A second workshop on ‘A coordinated approach to recording and searching provenance records and images: moving forwards’,was organised by CERL and REBIUN at the University of Salamance (16 March 2016). The programme and powerpoint presentations are made available here.
  • Workshop of the LIBER Forum for Digital Cultural Heritage (London, 24 June 2015)
    The theme of the workshop was ‘The state of the art in Image recognition’. Image recognition has the potential for being extremely useful to improve the discoverability, comparison and description of images in cultural heritage material thanks to digital procedures and, applying intelligent technical developments. Details of the programme, and the information presented by the speakers may be found here.
  • Printer’s devices (Vienna, 17-18 March 2015)
    A conference on ‘Signa vides – Researching and recording printers’ devices: current activities and new perspective’s, organised under the auspices of CERL by Professor Dr Anja Wolkenhauer (University of Tübingen), Michaela Scheibe (Berlin State Library) and Dr Andreas Fingernagel (Austrian National Library) took place in Vienna on 17-18 March 2015. Articles are currently being prepared and CERL intends to publish the proceedings. Powerpoint presentations are made available here.
  • Recording provenance evidence (London, 11-12 March 2015)
    A workshop on ‘A coordinated approach to recording and searching provenance records and images: moving forwards’,was organised by IFLA RBMS and CERL at the Warburg Institute (London, 11-12 March 2015). This was a follow-up to the successful Pre-SHARP CERL Workshop in Antwerp (September 2014). Conceived as a series of roundtable discussions, the programme explored a coordinated approach to recording and searching provenance records and images.  Discussion topics included: What do we have and what do we need? Can we agree upon a common model or metadata structure;  How do we achieve interoperability between existing databases; Can we consider a contributed model that includes scholars, libraries, and research institutions;  What are the principal challenges (ex: coat of arms)?; and the use of Inconclass. The programme and powerpoint presentations are made available here.
  • The First Conference of the CERL Security Network (Vatican, 8 May 2015)
    The former LIBER Security Network is now hosted by CERL. LIBER Libraries are encouraged to join the CERL Security Network  for their physical collections, the Forum acting as an adviser: please contact Marian Lefferts.The Security Network organised a conference on ‘Library Security: Practices and Strategies’, which was hosted by the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and took place on 8 May 2015. The full programme is available here.
  • Provenance research – SHARP (Antwerp, 17 September 2014)
    CERL organised a workshop on ‘Historical Provenance Research: Material Evidence, Documentary Evidence, and Digital Humanities’ (presenters included M. van Delft, C. Dondi, M. Hulvey, M. Lefferts, P. Cullhed). It focused on today’s integrated approaches to provenance research. Another stream focused on other European projects on provenance research integration, as well as on the use of documentary evidence to complement evidence-based historical research. Finally, there was a discussion on digital repositories for provenance images.
  • Workshop of the LIBER Forum for Digital Cultural Heritage (Riga, 3 July 2014)
The programme included progress reports from the former LIBER Expert Groups

– Ivan Boserup: CERL Manuscripts Expert Group

– Renata Šolar, National and University Lib, Ljubljana: Maps Expert Group

– Kristian Jensen, British Library, London: CERL Security Network (CERL-COLLECTION-SECURITY-WORKING-GROUP Presentation)

The programme contined with a Report on the 3rd LIBER Workshop on Digital Curation (Vienna, 19-20 May 2014) by Saskia van Bergen, University Library, Leiden,  (Presentation) and Marian Lefferts, Consortium of European Research Libraries (Presentation) a presentation by Marian Lefferts about CERL in the years to come (Presentation) and finally a session during which participants in the session reported on their own projects and proposals, research and new initiatives.

  • 3rd LIBER Workshop on Digital Curation (Vienna, 19-20 May 2014)
    The programme for the 3rd LIBER Workshop on Digital Curation can be viewed on the Workshop website. Key note speakers were Herbert Van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library) and Norbert Lossau (Vice-President of Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Director of Göttingen State and University Library).

– The programme and power point slides are available via http://liber2014.univie.ac.at/

– Pictures of participants and speakers are available in the picture gallery http://liber2014.univie.ac.at/pictures/

– Paul Ayris summed up the workshop in seven points https://libereurope.eu/blog/report-libers-3rd-digital-curation-workshop/

– Participants posted many tweets: #DigCur2014