Projet de recherche EF/212/KBRVirtualLab (Action de recherche EF)
Belgium’s National Scientific Library- KBR, is responsible for preserving historical & cultural objects and for ensuring & providing access to the public. The proposed Virtual Lab allows KBR to develop an infrastructure to facilitate data-on-demand services for the public and researchers to generate data corpora from available KBR data. This includes the technical & practical development of authentication & authorisation for users, to implement APIs to query & export KBR’s data, with support from BELNET. Providing collections as data affords digital humanities research on cultural heritage collections, allowing us to pose different questions to understand our history. E-infrastructures provide opportunities for facilitating access & use of these collections. The KBR Virtual Lab is a contribution to DARIAH and the open data directive, by developing an infrastructure for Belgian & European researchers to access KBR’s collections as data. This infrastructure will contribute to the establishment of KBR’s Digital Data Strategy (2022-2024) and implement the feasibility studies of data.kbr.be & goals of the Digital Research Lab to facilitate text and data mining on the collections. It also contributes goals in the future Action Plan (2022- 2024) in supporting digitisation and facilitating KBR’s data as FAIR - findable, accessible, interoperable & reusable. The Virtual Lab can be used as a best practice for other federal science organizations in considering how to make collections as data available to users, and integrate data-on-demand services to automate the compiling of data corpora.
