During the Digitisation Days, on 20 May, the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) hosted an interesting and fruitful Round table workshop on the future of research and funding in digitization and the possible roles of Centres of Competence.
Some 30 librarians and researchers joined this workshop, and discussed the following topics:
- What research is needed to further the development of the Digital Library?
- How can Centres of Competence assist your research or development?
- In digitisation, are we ready to move the focus from quantity to quality?
- What enrichments, e.g. in Named Entity Recognition, Linked Data services, or crowdsourcing for OCR correction, would be most beneficial for digitisation?
- What’s your take on Labs and Virtual Research Environments? What would you like to do in these types of research settings? What do you expect to get out of them?
The preliminary outcomes of the workshop show that the main goal for institutions is to give users unrestricted access to data. During the workshop, the participants discussed the many layered aspects of these three topics, i.e. ‘users’, ‘access’, and ‘data’. Moreover, the participants gave their view on the following questions in relation to these topics:
- What stops us from making progress?
- What helps us to make progress?
- And what role could CoCs play in this?
The outcomes of the workshop have been documented and will be used as a starting point for the roadmap to further development of digitisation and the digital library, which will be produced within the Succeed project. This roadmap will serve to support the European Commission in preparing the 2014–2020 Work Programme for Research and Innovation.
Sieta Neurburg