Conference Agenda

EThOS is digital repository containing a near-complete aggregation of all doctoral theses ever awarded by UK Higher Education institutions, consisting of over 600,000 records from over 140 institutions. The EthOS collection offers a significant opportunity to diversify the forms and sources of knowledge production in a digital era. This presentation focuses on a project building impact from the knowledge and research of UK doctoral theses, making them accessible for research and community organisations, developing a prototype of a Search Tool which has performs clustering and text summarisation. The summarisation algorithm crawls through each thesis identifying important phrases and stitching them together to form new sentences that are quickly readable.

Using researched examples from the EThOS collection we explore the ways in which the new Artificial Intelligence tool can enable the creation of a virtual global community, although there are contradictions inherent in this. EThOS presents opportunities to surface themes and construct knowledge on an almost infinite range of topics, drawing on the theses which date back to 1650 and cover all disciplines. The examples highlighted construct the nature of the virtual and real community engendered through EThOS and raises issues of participation, ownership and exclusions in open research repositories.

The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) is enhancing heritage science data management and dissemination through its innovative BALaT+ platform. This initiative aims to unify diverse data sources into a single, FAIR digital platform, offering an in-depth context for each heritage object. BALaT+ tackles the integration of varied, heterogeneous datasets, typically found in KIK-IRPA’s ‘intervention files’, which are managed across different systems. Elasticsearch is used as the indexer responsible for managing the aggregated data and making it searchable. The development of BALaT+ involved addressing the complexities of presenting a holistic context for research conducted on heritage objects, leading to a tailored in-house development approach. This process was marked by continuous adaptation to technological advancements and reassessment of methodologies to manage and present heritage data effectively. Different repositories seemed possible candidates until we finally settled on one that satisfied our requirements. This proposal aims to document KIK-IRPA’s journey towards developing BALaT+ and the valuable lessons we've learned along the way.

The release of DSpace 7 with all the new technologies and features it implements, represents a momentous change, opening up the application to new and broader perspectives. In particular, it makes the product much more attractive to the cultural heritage domain. As a result, several organizations are starting to implement or migrating Digital Libraries to DSpace 7 or to the most recent version 8. Based on 4Science's experience in managing more than twenty DSpace-based Cultural Heritage projects, this contribution aims to present the challenges of starting a Digital Library based on DSpace, both from scratch or migrating data. The presentation will also illustrate how creating a DSpace-based Digital Library can take such applications to the next level, allowing to explore and analyze documents in relation to other documents and to all the information helping to define their context, or rather their different contexts (historical , geographical, cultural, etc.) and providing tools to communicate digital cultural heritage in different ways for different audiences.

Canopy IIIF is an open-source static-site generator designed for fast creation, contextualization, and customization of discovery-focused digital scholarship and collections websites using IIIF APIs. Leveraging a single IIIF Presentation Collection as its transparent data source, Canopy generates a browsable, searchable, customizable, and contextually driven static site using Next.js without duplicating content or copying assets.

Traditionally, creating digital exhibits applications required advanced technical experience and back-end infrastructure complexities. Canopy “makes easy” the creation of digital exhibits for libraries, archives, and museums by providing user-experience focused components which bring IIIF resources to life. Canopy provides a straightforward method to curate works from multiple sources and provide additional perspectives and context beyond included descriptive metadata. A rich viewing experience through a static site backed by the IIIF standard ensures accessibility with minimal cost and technical expertise.

This presentation will demonstrate the concept of a IIIF Collection, how to harness familiar Markdown syntax to effortlessly adapt Canopy UI components, and guide attendees through deploying and hosting their Canopy site. The presentation will give attendees the knowledge and autonomy required to effectively implement a Canopy generated static site for their specific use cases.