The final session of the afternoon consisted of a panel discussion with the entire audience. The panel consisted of Aly Conteh (The British Library), Alenka Kavčič-Čolić (NUK National and University Library of Slovenia), Tomasz Parkoła (PSNC Supercomputing Centre), Andreas Parschalk (University of Innsbruck) and Jasper Faase (Koninklijke Bibliotheek). All have much experience in digitisation projects in one role or another and are thus very suitable to fire questions at as an audience. Many participants took advantage of this opportunity and a very interesting discussion unfolded.
For the complete discussion, please open the Audio file
Static versus dynamic
One of the topics which was discussed at length was the input of volunteers through crowd sourcing. The OCR on the websites of the libraries is not optimal and most libraries notify their users with a warning on the website. However, many people would be happy to correct these mistakes, but why is this not yet possible? The panel explains that it is not the unwillingness of the libraries to involve the public in such work, but that the priorities during the last years lay on digitising as much content as possible and making it available online. For these large digitisation projects, static infrastructures were set up to show the collections. Changes to this infrastructure are necessary to make it dynamic and allow changes to the material. This is clearly work for the future!
Social programme
After a very interesting afternoon, the audience was invited to drinks in the foyer of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and some even joined the dinner that was hosted in a nearby restaurant overseeing the Hague and Rotterdam. We were very pleased with such an involved audience and enjoyed the day thoroughly and we hope to see everyone back as a member of the Centre of Competence!
