Originally the managing director of a publishing house, Thomas Kaarsted joined the University Library of Southern Denmark in 2008 and was appointed Deputy Library Director in 2013. He is on LIBER’s Conference Programme Committee and is active in the Citizen Science Working Group.

Thomas has since worked on a number of strategic community-/society-based projects on a national and international level and — together with Anne Kathrine Overgaard, also a member of the Citizen Science Working Group — co-founded the Citizen Science Network at the university.

The network advocates on Citizen Science, aims at building strong ties between the library and the Faculties while also adopting the role as project managers on a number of Citizen Science projects in close collaboration with researchers. He is also the manager of a national Danish project that investigates the possible roles of research libraries within the field.

I see Citizen Science as the outcome of Open Science, as professor Eva Mendez once put it. Research libraries as knowledge brokers are the ideal place to support, facilitate and potentially grow the field of Citizen Science. A number of core competences within libraries can aid this endeavour and others will most likely emerge as the role of libraries are constantly changing. Furthermore, after working with Faculties on Citizen Science since 2016 it is my firm belief that all parties could benefit making this a strategic platform for research libraries to not only do support services but also facilitate and potentially integrate themselves into research.