TPDL 2024

Christine L. Borgman

Distinguished Research Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies, Emerita
Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
https://christineborgman.info/ 
christine.borgman@ucla.edu

Title: Libraries, Digital Libraries, and Data: 30 years of Development in Central Europe

Abstract: The late 1980s and early 1990s were turbulent times in Central Europe, as the Berlin Wall and the Kremlin fell, and war erupted in Yugoslavia. Lifting the ‘Iron Curtain’ revealed crumbling infrastructure, both physical and technological. Inside most of the elegant national, university and public library buildings of Central Europe were card catalogs and minimal information technology. The few online catalogs were based on local technologies and served local communities. Digital library development in Central Europe was most advanced in the former Yugoslavia, and of these states, Slovenia was most advanced in cataloging and networking. Thirty years hence, as Slovenia celebrates the 250th anniversary of the NUK, this is an opportune moment to reflect on the evolution of digital libraries. In the early 1990s, concerns focused on technical standards such as MARC and Unicode, shared catalogs, implementing modern systems, networking, developing local knowledge and expertise, and retrofitting old buildings. Merging, migrating, and sustaining access to bibliographic records were core challenges. Concerns of today focus on distributed access to digitized and born-digital resources, interoperability, and open access to knowledge. Creating, managing, exploiting, and sustaining access to research data and to cultural heritage materials are among the challenges ahead. This talk will explore lessons learned from 1990s work to automate libraries in Central and Eastern Europe that inform theory and practice in digital libraries for the 21st century. .

Bio: Christine L. Borgman conducts research in scientific data practices and information policy. Her publications in information studies, computer science, communication, and law include more than 250 journal articles, scholarly papers, and three award-winning books from MIT Press: Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (2015); Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (2007); and From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World (2000). For most of the 1990s, Prof. Borgman was engaged in digital library research, policy, and practice in Central and Eastern Europe. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Hungary, conducted research for the World Bank and other agencies, and served as a Board Member of the Open Society Institute’s Regional Library Program. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Computing Machinery, she has held visiting posts at Oxford, Harvard, and several European institutions. Professor Borgman is a member of the Library of Congress Scholars Council and the Board of Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Her honors and awards include the Paul Evan Peters Award from the Coalition for Networked Information, Association for Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE; Award of Merit and the Research in Information Science Award, both from the Association for Information Science and Technology; and a Legacy Laureate of the University of Pittsburgh.

Maarten de Rijke

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

m.derijke@uva.nl

Title: Searching for Climate Impact

Abstract: Climate change is a far-reaching, global phenomenon that will impact many aspects of our society. The evidence base for observed climate impacts is expanding, and the wider climate literature is growing exponentially. Systematic reviews and systematic maps offer structured ways to collectively identify and describe this evidence while maintaining transparency, attempting to ensure comprehensiveness and reduce bias. The IPCC Working Group II (WGII) assesses the impacts of climate change, from a world-wide to a regional view of ecosystems and biodiversity, and of humans and their diverse societies, cultures and settlements.

In the talk I will start by explaining what the information need is that the IPCC WGII has. I will then describe where we are with the main methodology that we have for addressing this need, systematic reviews. I will discuss what the available resources are, which include technologies and repositories that might be put to work in this setting. Finally, I will highlight some of the challenges that come with putting these technologies to work for IPCC assessments.

Bio: Maarten de Rijke is a Distinguished University Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Information Retrieval at the University of Amsterdam. His research is focused on designing and evaluating trustworthy technology to connect people to information, particularly search engines, recommender systems, and conversational assistants. He is also a co-founder and the scientific director of the Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence (ICAI), a national collaboration between academic, industrial, governmental, and societal stakeholders aimed at talent development, research, and impact in AI.

Maud Ehrmann

Digital Humanities Laboratory, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

https://people.epfl.ch/maud.ehrmann
maud.ehrmann@epfl.ch

Title: Media Archives Across Borders – The Impresso Projects

Abstract: The availability of newspaper and radio archives in machine-readable formats has improved preservation, accessibility, and opened up new opportunities for automatic processing and exploration. In the case of newspapers in particular, text and image processing techniques are now being used to enrich collections with semantic annotations, enabling deeper content exploration. Despite these advances, current digital portals still fall short of meeting the needs of historical research. Exploration frameworks remain fragmented, confined to digital archive silos with country-based institutional portals, and digital media silos, where enrichments and exploration capabilities are typically limited to single language and media type. Moreover, these portals often offer only passive exploration of static collections, whereas historical research requires iterative comparison and association of multiple objects of study. As digital tools increasingly shape all phases of historical research, historians are also calling for new methods and tools to critically analyse data, tools, and interfaces.

Impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past is an interdisciplinary research project that aims to pioneer new approaches to exploring media archives for historical research. In its first phase (2017-2020), the project developed a scalable infrastructure for Swiss and Luxembourg newspapers, featuring a powerful search interface that helped popularise the use of text mining-based enrichment for the retrieval and exploration of newspaper articles - now almost a standard practice. The second phase, starting in 2023, broadens the scope and envisions a comprehensive connection between media archives, aiming to enable the joint exploration of historical newspaper and radio content across temporal, linguistic, and national boundaries in order to support data-driven historical research in transmedia and transnational perspectives.

This talk will introduce Impresso 2 and review the evolution from the first to the second project. We will discuss the specific challenges to connecting newspaper and radio from legal, processing, historical, and design perspectives, our efforts to adapt text mining and exploration tools to historical material derived from different modalities, and our approach to conducting comparative and data-driven historical research using semantically enriched sources, accessible through both graphical and API-based interfaces.

Bio: Maud Ehrmann is a research scientist and lecturer at the EPFL Digital Humanities Laboratory in Lausanne. She holds a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Paris 7 Denis Diderot and her research interests span natural language processing and digital humanities, with special focus on historical document processing, information extraction and knowledge representation. With backgrounds in both NLP and the humanities, she particularly enjoys working in interdisciplinary contexts and often acts as an intermediary between computer scientists, humanity scholars, engineers and representatives of cultural heritage institutions. In recent years, she has focused on content mining of historical newspapers with, among others, the project Impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past projects and the HIPE evaluation campaigns.