The opportunistic librarian: A Leuven confession discusses the role of libraries in supporting digital humanities. It provides examples of how KU Leuven University Library supports digital humanities through projects involving digitization, text analysis, and more. The library aims to focus on digitization projects, grant support, collaborating in digital humanities projects, training, and its role in scholarly communication. This allows the library to reinvent its mission and better support research through new opportunities in digital humanities.

1. The opportunistic
librarian:
A Leuven confession
DemmyVerbeke

2. Libraries
and DH
acrl.ala.org/dh
(Posner 2013)

3. Why the
Digital
Humanities?
(Spiro 2011;Vandegrift –Varner 2013)
1. Provide wide access to cultural information
2. Enhance teaching and learning
3. Transform scholarly communication
4. Make a public impact
5. Enable manipulation of data

4. Leiden University Library (1610)

5. Joe & Rika Mansueto Library,
University of Chicago
Saltire Centre, Glasgow Caledonian University

6. The
collaboration
triangle
Humanities research
Information
technology
Information
management
DH

7. R&D in
libraries
(Nowviskie 2013,
Nowviskie 2014)
“When a library can both support basic digital
scholarship needs through distributed services and
create a critical mass of staffing and intellectual energy
in something like a center (however conceived), it has
set the conditions for the advancement of knowledge
itself, through the fulfillment of research desires yet
unknown, un-expressed.”
(Nowviskie 2014)

9. Centre of expertise
for:
Plagiarism
Copyright
OpenAccess
Digital Humanities
Academic
Bibliography &
Institutional
Repository
Reference librarians
A library
supporting
research

10. Institutional
context
 since November 2011: DHTask Force,Arts Faculty (vice dean of
research, faculty librarian, head of the faculty’s computer
department, research support officer of the faculty, and all
interested researchers)
 2014: 3 new academic positions:Tenure track professor in DH
(Arts Faculty), Computer Science for DH (Department of
Computer Science), Human-Media Interaction (Institute for Media
Studies)
 2015: Advanced Master in Digital Humanities

11. A library
supporting
DH
White paper “Digital Humanities en/in KU Leuven
bibliotheken“ of the Library Council of the Humanities
and Social Sciences Group
(February 2013)
intention to focus on:
 digitisation projects
 supporting relevant grant applications
 partnering in DH projects, from inception to completion (and
beyond)
 providing training in DH tools
 playing an expert role in the field of scholarly communication

12. Project example
Portable Light
Dome
(“Mini-dome”)
www.arts.kuleuven.be/info/ONO/
Meso/digitalisatie

13. Project example
RICH -
Reflectance
Imaging for
Cultural
Heritage
www.illuminare.be/rich_project

14. Project example
Europeana
Photography
www.europeana-photography.eu

15. Project example
OCR/NER for
17th-, 18th-
and 19th-C
Dutch books
Funding:
SUpport action Centre for CompEtEnce in Digitisation (www.succeed-project.eu)
Team:
 Digitisation services of University Library (Diewer van der Meijden, Mark
Verbrugge, BrunoVandermeulen)
 LIBIS (Sam Alloing)
 Arts Faculty Library (DemmyVerbeke)
 Student workers (Jolien Berckmans, Els Meskens)
Support:
• INL (Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie)

16. KU Leuven
& succeed
goals
End goal:
 integration of OCR in digitisation workflow at KU
Leuven
 integration of NER in digitisation workflow at KU
Leuven
Specifically:
 learn from digitising textual material with a view to OCR
(rather than as a representation of the book as physical
object)
 understand OCR possibilities
 learn how to enrich textual material with NER
 develop workflows, identify infrastructure problems,
etc.

17. KU Leuven
& succeed
corpus
13 books from the pretiosa collection of the Gulden Librije:
- translations from Latin
- monolingual Dutch (so without Latin original)
- books with comparable, simple typefaces (no Gothic)
- books that have not been digitized yet
Augustinus, Stad Gods (1876-8); Augustinus, Belydenis (1741); Boëthius,
Vertroostinge der wysgeerte (1703); Horatius, Over de dichtkunst (1866);
Horatius, Hekeldichten en brieven (1728); Nepos, Leevens van doorlugtige
mannen (1796); Nepos, Leeven der doorluchtige veld-ooversten (1726);
Ovidius, Treur-digten (1814-5); Ovidius, Treur-gesangen (1692); Seneca,
Christelycke Seneca (1705);Tacitus, Vande ghedenkwaerdige geschiedenissen
der Romeinen (1645);Vergilius, Wercken (1737);Vergilius, Aeneis (1662)

18. KU Leuven
& succeed
tools
ABBY Finereader Engine SDK 11 – OCR
User PatternTrainer ofABBY Finereader – train OCR
IMPACT historical lexicon for Dutch, integrated as a FineReader external
dictionary – improve OCR
Aletheia – build ground truth
ocrevalUAtion – compare OCR results
NER tool for Europeana Newspapers – NER
NE AttestationTool – manually correct NER
NERT – build training & test set

19. Conclusion
“This is one of the great opportunity spaces that
the Digital Humanities opens up, giving
archivists, librarians, and curators a chance to
not simply enlarge but completely re-envision
their communities, publics, and missions.”
(Burdick et al. 2012, 48-49)

20. References
@viroviacum
demmy.verbeke@arts.kuleuven.be
Anne Burdick and others, Digital_Humanities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012)
Christian Clausner, Stefan Pletschacher and ApostolosAntonacopoulos, ‘Efficient OCRTraining Data
Generation with Aletheia’, in Proceedings of the 11th International Association for Pattern Recognition
(IAPR)Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS2014)
<www.primaresearch.org/www/assets/papers/DAS2014_Clausner_OCRTrainingDataGeneration.pdf>
William A. Kretzschmar and William Gray Potter, “Library Collaboration with Large Digital Humanities
Projects,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 25, no. 4 (2010): 439–445 <doi:10.1093/llc/fqq022>
Bethany Nowviskie, “Skunks in the Library: A Path to Production for Scholarly R&D,” Journal of Library
Administration 53, no. 1 (2013): 53–66 <doi:10.1080/01930826.2013.756698>
Bethany Nowviskie, “Asking for It,” 2014 <http://nowviskie.org/2014/asking-for-it>
Miriam Posner, “Digital Humanities and the Library: A Bibliography,” 2013
<http://miriamposner.com/blog/?page_id=1033>
Jennifer Schaffner and Ricky Erway, “OCLC Research Report: Does Every Research Library Need a Digital
Humanities Center?,” 2014 <www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2014/oclcresearch-digital-
humanities-center-2014-overview.html>
Ben Showers, “Does the Library Have a Role to Play in the Digital Humanities?,” 2012
<http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2012/02/23/does-the-library-have-a-role-to-play-in-the-digital-
humanities>
Lisa Spiro, “Why the Digital Humanities?,” 2011
<http://digitalscholarship.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/dhglca-5.pdf>
MicahVandegrift and StewartVarner, “Evolving in Common: Creating Mutually Supportive Relationships
Between Libraries and the Digital Humanities,” Journal of Library Administration 53, no. 1 (2013): 67–78
<doi:10.1080/01930826.2013.756699>