On 23-24 November 2023, the Jagiellonian University hosted an international interdisciplinary conference entitled: “Digital Authoring of the Berlin Collections in the Jagiellonian Library - Challenges and Perspectives”. The conference was organized as part of the flagship project “European Heritage in the Jagiellonian Library: Digital Authoring of the Berlin Collections. Core Facility (DiHeLib),” within the strategic programme Excellence Initiative at the Jagiellonian University.
The project itself concerns the Autograph Collection, part of the famous manuscript collection housed at the Jagiellonian Library from the so-called ‘Berlinka’, the former Prussian State Library in Berlin. The flagship project aims to catalogue, digitise, and study the manuscripts using artificial intelligence tools. Three Jagiellonian University units are involved in the project: the Faculty of Philology, the Jagiellonian Library and the Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Computer Science, and their competencies correspond to three platforms: the Archival and Philological Platform, the Digitisation and Infrastructure Platform, and the Knowledge Modelling and Analysis Platform. More information about the project can be found at: https://dihelib.id.uj.edu.pl/en_GB/start.
The thematic scope of the November conference was closely related to the goals of the flagship project, and the range of issues covered in the speeches and discussions was broad. On the one hand, they focused on digitisation as a process related to the specific institutions and collections, that is, the problem of improving access to historical collections, the organisation and optimisation of digitisation procedures, and digitisation as an ecosystem and life cycle. The challenges faced by managers of these processes were also discussed. On the other hand, many IT issues related to AI tools were addressed: the question of data modelling in cultural heritage institutions, the application of network science to data modelling, and the specific solutions used in existing digital humanities projects such as Brenner-Archiv, Wittgenstein Archive or DigiPhil were presented. There was also a presentation of the DiHeLib project, a discussion of issues related to the cataloguing of part of the Humboldt legacy from the Autograph Collection, and a humanistic reflection on the impact of digitisation on the literary canon.
In addition, the conference participants had the opportunity to attend a presentation of the most valuable manuscript collections from Berlinka and participate in a working group that is developing the IT solutions used in the project to create a digital catalogue and knowledge base to facilitate manuscript research.
Among the experts who shared their knowledge and experience were:
- Carolin Schreiber, Remigiusz Stachowiak and Martin Kaun (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin)
- Lorna Hughes (University of Glasgow)
- Sonia Wronkowska (National Library of Poland, Warsaw)
- José Tomás Palma Méndez (University of Murcia)
- Martin Atzmüller (University of Osnabrück)
- Joseph Wang-Kathrein (University of Innsbruck, Brenner-Archiv)
- Paweł Zarychta and Iwona Piechnik (Jagiellonian University, DiHeLib)
- Jörg Paulus (Bauhaus University in Weimar)
- Zsófia Fellegi and Gábor Palkó (ELTE University, Budapest)
- Alois Pichler and Rune Jensen Falch (The Wittgenstein Archive, University of Bergen)
- Rebecca Hirsch (University of Edinburgh)
- Klaus Kempf (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)
