17:15 Colloquium of the ETH Library: Realising the full potential of digital collections
Dr Marco Humbel from the University College London shows the infrastructural challenges faced by memory institutions with their massive digitised collections.
17:15 Colloquium by the ETH Library
Thursday, 30 November 2023, 5.15 p.m.
Collections as Data infrastructures: Perspectives from the United Kingdom
Dr Marco Humbel, University College London
ETH Zurich, Campus Zentrum, Leonhardstrasse 21, 8092 Zurich, LEE E 101 or live online.
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Libraries, archives and museums are digitising their collections on a massive scale. This results so-called Collections as Data. With these Collections as Data comes the need to make use of them: be it for data-driven research, for more economic efficiency or for new creative projects. In this context, Dr Marco Humbel will explore the question of what forms of infrastructure we need in order to fully exploit the potential of Collections as Data.
The Sloane Lab – Perspectives and challenges of memory institutions
In the UK, the £18.9 million “Towards a National Collection” (TaNC) programme is currently underway. This programme is currently funding five “Discovery Projects” to explore how such Collections as Data infrastructures could look like.
One of these Discovery Projects is the external page Sloane Lab. The aim of the Sloane Lab is to provide digital access to the information that describes Sir Hans Sloane's extensive collection.1 In his lecture, Marco Humbel will introduce the ongoing research of the Sloane Lab project. He will focus on the perspectives and challenges of memory institutions when participating in collection as data infrastructures.
1: Information about the historical and colonial context of Sloane's collection is available at external page https://sloanelab.org/.
Marco Humbel is a research fellow for the external page Sloane Lab project at the Department of Information Studies at University College London (UCL). His research interests include:
- Open Access and Collections as Data,
- archives of social movements,
- digital tool criticism for technologies, such as Named Entity Recognition, in the cultural heritage domain.
He completed a vocational education as an Information Specialist at the ETH Library, holds a BSc in Information Science from the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons and a MSc in Digital Humanities from UCL. His PhD dissertation was titled “The Digitisation and Open Access Politics of Social Movement Archives” (UCL).
The 17:15 Colloquium by the ETH Library offers a platform for further education and discussion of topics related to libraries, museums and archives. The formula: a 30-minute lecture + a 30-minute discussion = inspiration for our daily working lives.