Introduction

What the Digital Humanities (DH) is – or is not – has been a subject of debate, and the term means different things to different people. Consider, for instance, contributions to the Debates in the Digital Humanities series and Day of DH, a social publication project that different institutions have organized since 2009. What most practitioners can agree upon, however, is that DH is a thriving field that encompasses the application of computing technology in the humanities. Cultural heritage institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) play a key role in the DH research lifecycle as curators of analog and digital source material and fosterers of relevant, subject-based, and functional expertise.

Libraries provide valuable social and technical infrastructure that enables DH inquiry, particularly inquiry that draws upon the centuries of knowledge once encapsulated in print-based source material. Library workers play a variety of important roles in this process, from the digitization of analog materials to partnership in analyzing and visualizing research data. Some library staff are also DH researchers, and all are collaborators in DH knowledge production.

European Studies and other liaison librarians whose roles require depth in a subject and/or geographic area bring a valuable combination of knowledge and skills to the DH research process, including a refined understanding of data sources and disciplinary expertise in their areas of specialization. They also are important points of connection between researchers and the resources LAMs offer for DH work. Liaison librarians are thus collaborating ever more closely with functional specialists such as data librarians, developing higher-level DH skills, and becoming increasingly involved in research collaborations and in DH initiatives in the cultural heritage sector.

This chapter provides a starting point and source of inspiration for liaison librarians and others wanting to learn more about and actively engage with DH and digital cultural heritage in Europe. It provides an entry point for identifying available digital cultural heritage collections for DH research related to Europe, so readers can share this information with and access relevant resources for faculty and student researchers in a variety of disciplines focusing on different European geographical areas.

The DH landscape in Europe, as in North America, is multifaceted and relatively developed, though it is markedly more cooperative and collective, due in part to national and EU funding schemes and consortia that drive support for DH projects, training, infrastructure, and other resources.

In its first section, this chapter provides a succinct overview of the DH landscape in Europe. It covers an array of associations, communities, conferences, and educational and training opportunities at the international, regional, and national levels, touches upon European research infrastructures relevant to DH, and concludes with profiles of three geographically and linguistically diverse DH centers in Europe. The second section explores the contribution of LAMs to European DH, looks at several digital cultural heritage initiatives providing an important foundation for this work, and discusses the impact of the Collections as Data movement on the European cultural heritage sector and how GLAM (galleries + LAMs) labs spark experimentation and collaboration among DH researchers, data scientists, and cultural heritage professionals. The chapter includes examples from across Europe in a range of languages, and includes references to further information throughout.

Digital Humanities in Europe

This section provides readers with a general overview of the DH landscape in Europe is intended to help European Studies librarians, liaison librarians, and other interested users navigate various opportunities for active engagement with the DH community in Europe. First, we discuss DH associations, communities, conferences, and educational and training opportunities, and give examples of various initiatives at the international, regional, and national level. Then we touch on European research infrastructures relevant to DH, before turning to profiles of three geographically and linguistically diverse DH centers in Europe.

Associations, Communities, Conferences, Education and Training, and Research Infrastructure

The two major international associations to which European DH-engaged centers and individual researchers and librarians belong, respectively, are centerNet and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). centerNet is a global membership network of DH centers that aims to facilitate international connections and educate the broader academic community about the value of DH. The majority of member organizations are from Europe and North America. ADHO, on the other hand, is an umbrella organization for national and regional DH organizations whose members join individually. Associate organizations, in turn, make a contribution to sustain ADHO, and include the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH), Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum (DHd; Digital Humanities in German-speaking countries), and Humanistica: L’association francophone des humanités numériques/digitales (French-speaking association of Digital Humanities). A further international organization of interest that is not affiliated with ADHO is Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas (Hispanic Digital Humanities).

ADHO‘s main activities are to organize an annual international DH conference, which takes place in Europe every three years, award research prizes, and publish the journal DSH: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (hybrid access); two open access journals: DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly and Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, are also published under the ADHO umbrella. ADHO sponsors several Special Interest Groups, including Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH) and Libraries and Digital Humanities, and works in tandem with the Research Data Alliance (RDA), an international organization that builds expertise and technical infrastructure for the open sharing and reuse of data. It accomplishes its goals through various working and interest groups, some of which are relevant to DH and cultural heritage.

Some notable international-level DH conferences and publications exist independently of the major associations. Journals such as the International Journal of Digital Humanities (hybrid access) and the Journal of Open Humanities Data (open access), which feature peer-reviewed papers describing humanities data or techniques with high potential for reuse, provide additional outlets for DH scholarship. And the Computational Humanities Research (CHR) is a community of researchers addressing humanities research questions through a range of computational and quantitative approaches to humanities data. CHR is supported through an online community and annual conference, and its organizers consider CHR to be different from but complementary to the DH landscape.

The main European umbrella organization for DH is EADH, which also supports the formation of DH interest groups defined by region, language, methodological focus, or other criteria. EADH organizes an annual conference in the years that ADHO‘s DH conference takes place outside of Europe. Its associate organizations include DHd, the Associazione Informatica Umanistica e Cultura Digitale (AIUCD; Humanistic Computer Science and Digital Culture Association), the Česká asociace pro digitální humanitní vědy (CzADH; Czech Association for Digital Humanities) , Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic countries (DHNB), and the Russian Association for Digital Humanities (DH Russia). A DH initiative of particular relevance to librarians is the Digital Scholarship and Digital Cultural Heritage Collections Working Group of Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (LIBER; Association of European Research Libraries), which aims to build a knowledge network among European libraries interested in DH.

In Europe there are numerous regional and national-level DH associations in which librarians and researchers interested in a particular area or language may find information, community, and partnerships. These organizations organize conferences, workshops, and other events for DH-aligned researchers and professionals and provide a platform for them to network, collaborate, and share ideas through promoting projects, disseminating scholarship, and offering means to connect online, among other activities. Regional associations such as DHd, DHNB, and Digital Humanities Benelux (DH Benelux) foster DH research, education, and collaboration in the German-speaking area, Nordic and Baltic countries, and Benelux countries, respectively, and the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Network is currently laying the foundation for a formal UK-Irish DH association. Many such associations exist at the national level as well, including CzADH (Czech Republic), AIUCD (Italy), and DH Russia (Russia).

DH initiatives are also organized by institutes, centers, departments, and networks in a variety of European countries. Three centers are profiled in detail below, but further examples are offered here to give a fuller idea of the diverse range of organizations and offerings that exist. In France, Maison Européenne des sciences de l’homme et de la société (MESHS; European Centre for the Humanities and Social Sciences) is a regional research center, headquartered in Lille, that structures and supports humanities and social sciences research by linking together labs, innovation clusters, and other relevant organizations in northern France. In the UK, the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield organizes the Digital Humanities Congress every two years. In Hungary, the Department of Digital Humanities at Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem (Eötvös Loránd University) organizes an annual DH conference called DH Budapest.

Many learning opportunities are offered to those interested in learning more about DH methods, skills, and competencies in Europe. Two long-standing summer schools, the Digital Humanities @ Oxford Summer School, at the University of Oxford, and the European Summer University in Digital Humanities, at the University of Leipzig, provide opportunities to think, discuss, and learn in an intensive environment. They welcome learners at a variety of levels and career stages. Courses cover a wide range of topics, including an introduction to DH, humanities data, Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) encoding, linked data, Python programming, digital archives, online mapping, and crowdsourcing. Tutorials and workshops also are offered regularly at many DH conferences.

The Digital Humanities Course Registry is an online inventory of DH modules, summer schools, courses, and degree programs in Europe that allow students, researchers, instructors, librarians, and institutions to find and connect to DH teaching and training activities. It allows sorting and filtering by country, language, discipline, technique, and type of educational offering, among other options. For those who prefer self-paced tutorials, The Programming Historian (open access) offers user-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that engage humanists with a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows that facilitate DH research and teaching. The free lessons include topics such as network analysis, mapping, distant reading, digital publishing, data analysis, and Python, and are available in a variety of languages, including English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. The Programming Historian is run by volunteers and invites contributions.

The European research infrastructures Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) and Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) are key resources for librarians and others who are interested in European DH. Both offer a range of tools and services, including the Digital Humanities Course Registry, DARIAH-Campus learning resources, and CLARIN Resource Families language resources. Options also exist for individuals and institutions in North America to become involved. DARIAH, for example, organizes activities through working groups on a wide range of topics such as research data management, geohumanities, and ethics and legality in DH, and it recently reached out “beyond Europe” to welcome the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton as its first North American Cooperating Partner (VanSant 2021).

Other related European research infrastructure initiatives have important applications for DH. The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), for example, is developing a European network to facilitate publication, discovery, and reuse of data, tools, and services for research across disciplines. DARIAH, CLARIN, and other social sciences and humanities (SSH) research infrastructures are collaborating to streamline the provision of key services to the European Open Science Cloud via the SSH Open Cloud (SSHOC; Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud) project. OPERAS (open scholarly communication in the European social sciences and humanities) coordinates and federates resources to support open scholarly communication in SSH research across Europe, and the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) coordinates research infrastructures in Europe across disciplines.

DH Centers in Europe: Profiles

DH centers and networks provide research and educational opportunities, build community at the local and regional levels, and plug into and power broader DH efforts. Their on-the-ground work is vital to growing the next generation of DH researchers. Three European centers, diverse in their locations and focuses, are profiled here to give an idea of the range of activities they undertake and the opportunities they offer. The profiles describe their geneses, institutional partners, areas of research focus, major projects, educational offerings and events, and connections with cultural heritage institutions.

Center for Digital Humanities Perm State University (Russia)

The Center for Digital Humanities at Perm University (Центр цифровой гуманитаристики Пермского университета) is an interdisciplinary center that focuses on research and education related to the application of information technology in the humanities. The university established the center in 2016 based on its pre-existing Laboratory of Historical and Political Information Science, which the departments of History and Political Science founded in 2003 with support from the Russian Foundation for the Humanities (Российский гуманитарный научный фонд). It was the first of its kind in the Urals.

Among the Center’s key projects are the Digital History of Virtual Museums, The Parliamentary History of Late Imperial Russia (Парламентская история позднеимперской России), Perm Provincial Periodicals: 1914-1922 (Пермская губернская периодика: 1914-1922), and the Virtual Antique 3D Collection of the History Museum of Perm University (музея истории Пермского университета Коллекции). The Center offers DH courses, and in 2017 launched a master’s program in Digital Technologies in Sociocultural and Artistic Practices. It organizes a variety of events, including the Historical Informatics Olympiad.

The Center collaborates closely with museums, libraries, and other cultural heritage institutions in the state of Perm. It has, for example, implemented joint projects with the Perm State Art Gallery (Пермская государственная художественная галерея), the Perm Regional Museum (Пермский краеведческий музей), and the Perm State Archives (Государственный архив Пермского края). The Center is involved in several EU and international networks and collaborations, and its director is currently a co-chair of centerNet; the Center thus is a representative on centerNet’s International Executive Council. It also is a partner in the EU-funded Erasmus+ ARTEST project, which aims to rethink education in humanities in Russia and Mongolia, in part by incorporating DH methods and creating a virtual platform for projects aimed at preserving and promoting cultural heritage.

Hel­sinki Centre for Di­gital Hu­man­it­ies (HELDIG), Finland)

HELDIG, a collaboration network among Finnish universities, focuses on DH research, education, and applications. Established at the University of Helsinki (Helsingin yliopisto) in 2016, along with eight new professorships and a Department of Digital Humanities, it is an outcome of the strategic funding program of the Academy of Finland (Suomen Akatemia) that works to strengthen university research profiles in target areas. HELDIG aims to foster collaboration between academic research groups, cultural heritage organizations, companies, and the general public.

DH research associated with HELDIG covers various areas and topics, including corpus linguistics, social media studies, semantic web applications, e-learning, and legal studies. HELDIG is committed to open science in research as a means to foster reuse of data and workflows and replicability of research. The center offers a tiered educational curriculum in DH, including an introductory undergraduate course, graduate minors of varying intensity, and a master’s degree. HELDIG coordinates a range of events that facilitate discussion, learning, and research, including presentations at its annual Digital Humanities Summit. Its signature event is the annual Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon, in which attendees conduct an interdisciplinary research project from start to finish in ten days.

Cultural heritage institutions, including libraries, are key HELDIG collaborators, along with humanists and computer scientists. Partners include the Finnish Heritage Agency (Museovirasto), the Finnish National Museum (Kansallismuseo), the National Archives of Finland (Kansallisarkisto), the National Library of Finland (Kansalliskirjasto), and the Finnish Literature Society (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura). HELDIG is involved in various international projects and networks in the EU and beyond, including the national FIN-CLARIAH research infrastructure for Social Sciences and Humanities, which supports both DH and linguistic research and contributes as a national consortial member to DARIAH and CLARIN.

Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (Germany)

The Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH) is an interdisciplinary unit at the University of Göttingen (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) that coordinates, implements, and further develops DH research, teaching, and infrastructure activities for the Göttingen Research Campus. It was founded in 2011 with support from the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony (Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur) and with funding from the Volkswagen Foundation (VolkswagenStiftung). Since 2016, it has coordinated the CampusLab: Digitization and Computational Analytics, which focuses on digital methods in the humanities and social sciences and offers a fellowship program for early career researchers.

The GCDH engages with a variety of DH research projects and topics, and is especially strong in text-oriented approaches such as computational literary studies, as illustrated by the Uncertain Attribution and Reflective Passages projects. Its educational programs combine computing and the humanities, and focus on digital skills for text and language as well as images and objects, with several options for degree programs and certificates at the undergraduate and master’s levels. Additionally, it offers a range of training opportunities and events, from an informal DH coffee hour (Stammtisch) to the semiannual Hildesheim-Göttingen-Workshops on Digital Humanities and Computational Linguistics.

The GCDH is supported in part by Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen (SUB, State and University Library Göttingen(), and the SUB director serves on the Center’s executive board. SUB also serves as a bridge to national and international research infrastructure consortia such as DARIAH and the National Research Data Infrastructure, particularly in its participation in the Text+ initiative. Additional GCDH partner institutions are the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen), the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung multireligiöser und multiethnischer Gesellschaften), and the Herzog August Library (Herzog August Bibliothek) in Wolfenbüttel, Germany.

National- and European-Level Digital Cultural Heritage Initiatives

With digital cultural heritage an essential part of DH, LAMs have a crucial role to play in curating their digital – both digitized and born-digital – collections and making them available to DH researchers. In this section we explore some of the national- and European-level digital cultural heritage initiatives in Europe, including Europeana, Europe’s digital library, archive, and museum, and give particular emphasis to the multilingual nature of Europe’s cultural heritage collections. We then explore two intertwined initiatives: the Collections as Data: Always Already Computational movement, originating in the US and now gaining momentum across Europe, and the European “library labs,” including the International GLAM Labs Community. We conclude by looking at the emerging role of Artificial Intelligence (AI), computer vision, and machine learning in the cultural heritage sector in Europe.

European cultural heritage institutions have been digitizing their collections in earnest since the mid-1990s. Several national libraries, for example, have developed their own digital library initiatives, such as Gallica at Bibliothèque National de France (BnF; National Library of France); Delpher at Koninklijke Bibliotheek van Nederland (KB; National Library of the Netherlands, and the Polish National Digital Library, Polona, led by Biblioteka Narodowa Polska (National Library of Poland). Other national libraries have focused on digitizing particular collections, such as historical newspapers. Examples include ANNO Historische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften (AustriaN Newspapers Online), from the National Library of Austria; Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (ÖNB; National Library of Austria); BelgicaPress, from the Royal Library of Belgium; Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België /Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique (KBR; Royal Library of Belgium); and, most recently, Deutsches Zeitungsportal (the German Newspaper Portal) from Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library).

In addition to digitized collections, born-digital collections such as web and social media archives are of interest to DH researchers. The number of web archives in in Europe is increasing, and includes Arquivo.pt, the Portuguese web archive; Hrvatski arhiv weba (Croatian Web Archive, managed by Nacionalna i sveučilišna knjižnica u Zagrebu (National and University Library in Zagreb); Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO), a volunteer effort to preserve the digital cultural heritage of Ukraine; and Vefsafn.is, the Icelandic Web Archive, owned and maintained by Landsbókasafn Íslands – Háskólabókasafn (National and University Library of Iceland).

Many European web archives are members of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), the key objectives of which are to “identify and develop best practices for selecting, harvesting, collecting, preserving and providing access to Internet content” and “encourage and facilitate research use of archived Internet content” (IIPC, n.d.), and many contribute to the IIPC’s Collaborative Collections program, which aims to build transnational public web archive collections based on themes or events. The IIPC uses Archive-it, built at the Internet Archive, to harvest the IIPC’s Collaborative Collections. Research use of web archives in Europe is increasing thanks to initiatives such as RESAW (a Research Infrastructure for the Study of the Archived Web) and WARCNet (Web ARChive studies network researching web domains and events). With its web-archive datasets, Det Kgl. Bibliotek (Royal Library of Denmark) is a forerunner in the provision of research access, including the necessary legal agreements (Laursen 2020).

Europeana

Europeana, the flagship initiative for fostering access to digital cultural heritage collections in Europe, provides access to digital cultural heritage from LAMs across Europe. When first launched as a prototype in November 2008, Europeana provided access to over 4.5 million digital objects from 1,000 cultural heritage institutions across Europe (Purday 2009, 1). By 2023, Europeana was providing access to over 52 million cultural heritage objects from more than 4,000 institutions. In November 2021, the European Commission announced that Europeana would be the basis for building a common European data space for cultural heritage (European Commission 2021).

The Europeana platform aggregates cultural heritage metadata and provides persistent links back to content in the originating cultural heritage institutions. The Europeana Data Model (EDM), an “open, cross-domain Semantic-web based framework,” captures the richness of the domain-specific metadata. Europeana provides detailed guidelines for data sharing and information on accessing data through a range of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

Communities are a key aspect of the European Network Association under European Pro, which brings network members together to exchange knowledge, expertise, and best practice around a range of topics, such as copyright, technology, impact, and research. Europeana Pro provides a number of resources, including tools such as the Impact Playbook, the Europeana Public Domain Charter, the Europeana Publishing Framework, and the Europeana Licensing Framework; recommendations, such as AI in Relation to GLAMs and Research Requirements; and regular events, such as the Europeana annual conferences and aggregators forums.

Collections as Data in Europe

Originating in the US, the “Collections as Data” data movement was established to encourage cultural heritage professionals to start thinking differently about how they provide access to their collections to facilitate analysis using digital tools and methods.

Until recently, implementations of Collections as Data have largely occurred in the US (Wittmann et al. 2019), but they are starting to appear in Europe as well. Colleagues at the University of Alicante in Spain, for example, have developed a methodology for reusing collections from GLAM institutions, inspired by the Collection as Data initiative (Candela et al. 2020). Here we discuss three examples of European Collections as Data initiatives from Luxembourg, Scotland, and Belgium.

Luxembourg’s largest cultural, scientific, and research library, Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg (BnL; National Library of Luxembourg, strives to enhance the value of its collections on a national and international level. Through its Open Data Platform, BnL aims to facilitate access to its collections for the widest possible audience through the provision of Open Data, Open Tools and Open APIs. Currently, BnL’s open datasets include Historical Newspapers, along with historical monographs, Luxembourg Authority Records for Persons, the National Bibliography of Luxembourg, and URLs from their special web archive collection related to local elections.

The Data Foundry, at Leabharlann Nàiseanta na h-Alba (National Library of Scotland), was launched in September 2019 and provides access to four core data collections: digitized collections, metadata collections, map and spatial data, and organizational data. Of particular note is the Foundry’s Open Data Publication Plan. For more detailed information about the Data Foundry and its role in digital scholarship at the National Library of Scotland, see Ames and Lewis (2020) and Ames (2021).

In Belgium, the DATA-KBR-BE project at Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België / Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique (KBR; Belgian National Library) aims to facilitate data-level access to the KBR’s digitized and born-digital collections for DH research. DATA-KBR-BE collaborates closely with the KBR’s Digital Research Lab, which facilitates text and data mining research using KBR’s digitized and born-digital collections. To ensure that access is developed with researchers in mind, the DATA-KBR-BE team is co-designing three interdisciplinary research scenarios focused on KBR’s digitized historical newspaper collection: BelgicaPress. These scenarios are conceived as initial case studies to demonstrate the scientific potential of providing data-level access to KBR’s collections, and to understand how Collections as Data could be implemented at KBR. The project also harnesses the expertise of data scientists for the semi-automatic extraction and classification of articles from historical newspapers, the results of which are available in NewspAIper: Metadata Extraction of Historical Newspaper Archives (Ali and Verstockt 2021).

International GLAM Labs Community

Labs are places of scientific experimentation, but what does this mean in the context of cultural heritage and DH? In a 2013 article, a library lab was defined as “any library program, physical or digital (or a hybrid) in which innovative approaches to library services, tools, or materials are tested in some structured way before being made part of regular workflows, programs, or mission” (Brooks, Heller, and Phetteplace 2013, 186). Founded in 2006, the Scholar’s Lab at the University of Virginia Library is one of the earliest examples.

In Europe, library lab initiatives started in national libraries. The forerunner was the BL Labs at the British Library (BL), formed in 2013 and initially funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The BL Lab support and inspire experimentation with the British Library’s digital collections and data. One of the longest-running library lab initiatives in Europe, BL Labs became an integrated part of the BL’s offerings in Spring 2019.

BL Labs were closely followed by KB Lab at Koninklijke Bibliotheek van Nederland (KB; National Library of the Netherlands). This lab, founded in 2014 within the KB Research Department, was scoped as a showcase for research and prototype experimentation. KB Lab users can find experimental tools and data from KB’s digital collection.

ONB Labs at Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (ÖNB; the National Library of Austria) were established in 2017 and intended as “a platform to foster and inspire research, experimentation and creative work with the Austrian National Library’s digital collections as data” (Austrian National Library, n.d.). As well as providing access to datasets, tools, and collections, ONB Labs encourage creative engagement with the library’s digital datasets. The results of this work are displayed in the ONB Labs Artspace, a dedicated online platform for displaying artworks that engage with ONB collections.

Launched in October 2021, BnF DataLab is one of the newest labs, and is both a physical and a digital laboratory designed to facilitate access to the wealth, breadth, and diversity of the BnF’s digital collections. The lab’s services have been designed to support the whole research project lifecycle, from corpus building to data analysis. To encourage active collection between researchers and collection experts, a number of labs are located at the BnF‘s François-Mitterrand site, and are available for both individual and group work as well as for accessing in-copyright materials. The lab provides a dedicated IT environment, including access to secure virtual machines, dedicated storage, configurable computing power, and software for data mining.

With momentum for library labs increasing in Europe, in September 2018 the BL Labs team organized the first international workshop for building these labs (Mahey 2018). This workshop, which attracted over 40 institutions from North America, Europe, Middle East, Asia, and Africa, was the catalyst for establishing the International GLAM Labs Community. A second event was held at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen in March 2019 (Mahey 2019b), and was followed by a book sprint in Doha, Qatar, in September 2019 (Mahey 2019a). The book sprint resulted in a practical, open access guide, Open a GLAM Lab, which has since been translated into Arabic (مختبرات الابتكار في المؤسسات الثقافية), Bulgarian (да отворим GLAM лаборатория), Russian (Откройте GLAM – лабораторию) , and Spanish (Open a GLAM Lab; Mahey et al., 2019). The GLAM Labs community is in the process of collecting examples of Labs Notebooks to facilitate computation access to digital cultural heritage collections; these notebooks include Tim Sherratt’s GLAM Workbench and the GLAM Jupyter Notebooks, developed by Gustavo Candela as part of the BVMC Labs at Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (BVMC; Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library). A geo-visualization of the current members of the International GLAM Labs Community can be found on the Member Map. You can participate in the community via the GLAM Labs mailing list, GLAM Labs on Slack, or GLAM Labs on X (formerly Twitter). 

Cultural Heritage and AI

AI, computer vision, and machine learning are starting to play a more prominent role in the cultural heritage sector in Europe. In the context of the Europeana Tech Community, Europeana established a task force on AI in relation to GLAMs in late 2019. The resulting report, published in September 2021, analyzed opportunities and challenges related to the use of AI, as well as recommendations on how Europeana could continue to facilitate knowledge sharing in this area in the years to come (EuropeanaTech AI in relation to GLAMs Task Force 2021).

European partners are actively involved in initiatives related to AI in cultural heritage institutions. Artificial Intelligence for Libraries, Archives and Museums (AI4LAM), for example, is an international community focused on advancing the use of AI in, for, and by libraries, archives, and museums. The community holds conferences, most recently “Les futurs fantastiques” at the BnF in December 2021. Similarly, the AEOLIAN Network: Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organisations, a joint US-UK program between the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK, investigates the role AI can play to make born-digital and digitized cultural records more accessible to users.

Finally, Time Machine, a large-scale research program using historical big data to create a distributed digital information system mapping Europe’s social, cultural and geographical evolution, is, in short, “invigorating European history with the Big Data of the past” (Time Machine, n.d.). Its members are designing and implementing advanced new digitization and AI technologies to mine Europe’s vast cultural heritage with a goal of creating innovative new applications of digital cultural heritage that add a new dimension to the past. They are, for example, working to engage people with cross-reality applications to deepen their understanding of historical events, including simulations of hypothetical spatiotemporal 4D reconstructions. Europeana is a founding partner of Time Machine, and Local Time Machines are a key pillar of program’s development. Initiatives such as these, with their application of AI, demonstrate not only the potential of digital cultural heritage, but its importance for cutting-edge DH research.

Conclusion

This chapter provides an overview and guide for European studies librarians and other interested readers wanting to explore the rich and diverse landscape of DH and digital cultural heritage in Europe, and includes suggestions for how to get involved and for further reading.

In the first section, the chapter explored the broad array of associations, communities, and networks as a starting point for further exploration. These were supplemented by information on conferences, journals, and education and training options with DH as their core focus. It also touched upon European research infrastructures relevant to DH before turning to profiles of three geographically and linguistically diverse DH centers in Europe.

The second section of the chapter focused on digital cultural heritage and the essential role played by the GLAM plays in curating digitized and born-digital collections for DH research. It examined the flagship initiative Europeana, as well as a number of national digital library initiatives. Inspired by the “Collections as Data” movement, which originated in the US, it explores European initiatives and the development of the movement within Europe. This movement is closely interconnected with library labs and in particular with European contributions to the International GLAM Labs Community. It is within networks such as these that the emerging role of AI within the cultural heritage and DH communities is starting to gain traction.

The intention of this chapter was to provide an introductory guide to assist you in navigating the complex, geographically diverse, and multilingually interconnected landscape of DH and digital cultural heritage in Europe. By offering an overview of key initiatives, points of contact, inspirational examples, and suggestions on how to get involved, we hope that readers were introduced to a number of vantage points to help navigate this rich and multi-faceted European terrain.

References and Recommended Readings

Ali, Dilawar, and Steven Verstockt. 2021. “Challenges in Extraction and Classification of News Articles from Historical Newspapers.” In The Book of Abstracts for What’s Past Is Prologue: The NewsEye International Conference, edited by Amanda Maunoury, 8-9. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5167375.

Ames, Sarah. 2021. “Transparency, Provenance and Collections as Data: The National Library of Scotland’s Data Foundry.” LIBER Quarterly 31 (1): 1-13. https://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10371.

Ames, Sarah, and Stuart Lewis. 2020. “Disrupting the Library: Digital Scholarship and Big Data at the National Library of Scotland.” Big Data & Society, November 23, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720970576.

Austrian National Library. n.d. “About [ONB Labs].” Accessed July 16, 2023. https://labs.onb.ac.at/en/about/.

Brooks, Mackenzie, Margaret Heller, and Eric Phetteplace. 2013. “Library Labs.” Reference and User Services Quarterly 52 (3): 186-190.

Candela, Gustavo, María Dolores Sáez, MPilar Escobar Esteban, and Manuel Marco-Such. 2020. “Reusing Digital Collections from GLAM Institutions.” Journal of Information Science, August 24, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551520950246.

European Commission. 2021. “Commission Proposes a Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage.” Last modified November 15, 2021. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-proposes-common-european-data-space-cultural-heritage.

EuropeanaTech AI in relation to GLAMs Task Force. 2021. “AI in Relation to GLAMS Task Force: Report and recommendations.” [Added to website September 2, 2021]. Accessed July 19, 2023. https://pro.europeana.eu/files/Europeana_Professional/Europeana_Network/Europeana_Network_Task_Forces/Final_reports/AI%20in%20relation%20to%20GLAMs%20Task%20Force%20Report.pdf.

IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium). n.d. “About IIPC.” Accessed May 19, 2024. https://netpreserve.org/about-us/.

Laursen, Ditte. 2020. “Developing Legal Agreements for Research-Access to a Web Archive: A Danish Story.” Presentation at WARCnet Meeting, virtual, November 5, 2020. Accessed July 13, 2023. https://pure.kb.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/20849972/20201105_Laursen_Developing_legal_agreements_for_research_acces_to_a_web_archive.pdf.

Mahey, Mahendra. 2018. “Building Library Labs around the World – The Event and Complete Our Survey!” British Library, Digital Scholarship Blog (blog), September 11, 2018. https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2018/09/building-library-labs-around-the-world.html.

Mahey, Mahendra. 2019a. “Labbers of the World Unite to Write a Book in 1 Week through a Book Sprint.” British Library, Digital Scholarship Blog (blog), September 20, 2019. https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2019/09/labbers-of-the-world-unite-to-write-a-book-in-1-week-through-a-book-sprint.html.

Mahey, Mahendra. 2019b. “The World Wide Lab: Building Library Labs – Part II.” British Library, Digital Scholarship Blog (blog), February 28, 2019. https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2019/02/the-world-wide-lab-building-library-labs-part-ii.html.

Mahey, Mahendra, Aisha Al-Abdulla, Sarah Ames, Paula Bray, Gustavo Candela, Sally Chambers, Caleb Derven, Milena Dobreva-McPherson, Katrine Gasser, Stefan Karner, Kristy Kokegei, Ditte Laursen, Abigail Potter, Armin Straube, Sophie-Carolin Wagner, and Lotte Wilms. 2019. Open a GLAM Lab: Digital Cultural Heritage Innovation Labs. Book Sprint, Doha, Qatar, September 23-27. https://glamlabs.io/books/open-a-glam-lab/. This book has been translated into:

• Arabic: مختبرات الابتكار في المؤسسات الثقافية. http://hdl.handle.net/10576/13484
• Bulgarian: да отворим GLAM лаборатория. https://clada-bg.eu/images/PDFs/web_ISBN_9786192450939.pdf
• Russian: Откройте GLAM – лабораторию. http://hdl.handle.net/10576/17196
• Spanish: Open a GLAM Lab http://hdl.handle.net/10045/110281.

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VanSant, Camey. 2021. “Princeton DH Center Joins DARIAH as Cooperating Partner.” DARIAH-EU, February 8, 2021. https://www.dariah.eu/2021/02/08/princeton-dh-center-joins-dariah-as-cooperating-partner/.

Wittmann, Rachel, Anna Neatrour, Rebekah Cummings, and Jeremy Myntti. 2019. “From Digital Library to Open Datasets: Embracing a ‘Collections as Data’ Framework.” Information Technology and Libraries 38 (4): 49-61. https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i4.11101.