Reusing Bibliographic Content: My Experience at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Humanities in Poznan

Introduction

ATRIUM’s Transnational Access Scheme grants offer fully funded placements across Europe for researchers. It offers the possibility to visit a country and work at a research host institution during a period of 1-2 weeks. I found this project by chance and I knew I wanted to try. I think these experiences enrich not only your academic and professional CV but also you as a person since you have the opportunity to know another culture, language and people.

First of all, I found out about ATRIUM’s TNA on social media when I was finishing my lessons late in April. My background is based on the publication and reuse of bibliographic metadata. I found a host organisation offering this kind of data, the Polish Literary Bibliography/European Literary Bibliography (IBL–PAN) at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. I also discovered that the code created as part of my work could be hosted and run in cloud infrastructures provided by institutions such as the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Humanities (eHum PSNC), at the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center which was also a host institution. I thought this could be an excellent combination of rich data and a cloud environment. In addition, I did not know much about Poland as a country and this could also be an opportunity for networking.

Day 1

We started at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences with an introduction by Tomasz Umerle, Cezary Rosiński and Arek Margraf. The introduction was followed by a presentation by Professor Iwona Kasperska describing her work based on Digital Humanities. Next, I introduced my work concerning the reuse and publication of digital collections suitable for computational use based on the Collections as data principles and the International GLAM Labs community . I have to admit that I was excited and the first meeting was very productive and successful!

Day 2-5

The following days were devoted to the exchange of knowledge, issues, interfaces, infrastructures, etc. First, the European Literary Bibliography project was introduced as the main database to be used during my visit. I learned how the database was built, as well how the data could be extracted in order to be reused.

Arek Margraf introduced the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center and how I could use this infrastructure for the output of my visit. I planned to create a Jupyter Notebook collection that could be run in cloud services such as the ones provided by PSNC. We noticed that this could be an excellent idea when working with large datasets. I discovered that they had the same issues in terms of metadata, enrichment and reuse that I experienced in my previous work at the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes . I shared with them the knowledge and ideas that I had in order to improve and enhance the project. Several ideas emerged based on Wikidata, Collections as data, FAIR and CARE principles. In parallel, I started to work on the extraction of the datasets and the implementation of the reproducible code.

Day 6-15

I started the next 2 weeks at PSNC. Just after lunch we had a tour of the center, specifically the digitisation lab, the digital sound lab and the quantum center. It was amazing to see the quantum computer and the impressive work that they do!

During the last part of my visit I focused on the implementation of the Jupyter Notebook collection to show how to transform the extracted datasets as Collections as data. While finalising the work I drafted a research article describing all the steps , considering that this could be a nice and valuable output of my visit. In order to assess our results, we had a last meeting with Professor Iwona Kasperska. We presented her all the work that we did in order to check its value for DH researchers. We had a very interesting meeting in which we shaped potential DH research scenarios thanks to her help and knowledge.

Conclusions

The ATRIUM TNA Scheme is an excellent opportunity for networking with other professionals. Thanks to the advice of the host institutions, I had the opportunity to visit the Enigma Cipher Centre , the European Solidarity Centre and several cities in Poland such as Gdansk, Sopot, Torun and Wroclaw. I would like to thank the host institutions for their kindness, time and interest. I really enjoyed the learning and sharing experience!