Danish Research Library Associations annual meeting will this year be held in Aarhus on the 17th – 18th of September. The associations board has chosen to take in two good old friends to frame to topic of the meeting: The library system and the library space.
It looks like a good program and I’m happy that the library space is back on the program. It has been absent for some years in the danish library discussions but it’s not like it’s become less relevant in that period. Some questions regarding this matter comes to mind:
- Is a physical library space still relevant in a time were the library collection is highly digital?
- And if yes: for what reasons and for what purpose?
- Are we building libraries for collections? Or for people?
- Is traditional study environment like tables and chairs a core library task? Isn’t it something everybody could do?
- Can the library space be used in other ways to support research, education and learning?
Just to name a few. I’ve been invited to talk about both the traditional and what I like to call the intelligent library space. In the talk on the traditional library space I will outline the principles that we have for the space development at The Faculty Library of Social Sciences spiced up with examples of how this is carried out in practice.
The talk on the intelligent library space will focus on our work with Digital Social Science Lab – both a physical library learning lab and a platform to support research, education and learning at faculty and university. The services is centered around data and the tools and skills to archive, handle, share and analyze them. Examples of these tools could be NVivo, Atlas.ti, Open Refine, Gephi and Python. The ‘intelligent’ part is grounded in the embedding of relevant skills to the lab – it’s more than just a physical room for students and researchers to use on there own: there will be a highly activity on instructions, workshops and events. This topic will also be presented as a poster. Poster will be presented together with Library Lab Fellow Michael Svendsen – see the poster on Zenodo here:
Looking forward to present and to get inspired by all the good work and discussions on these topics. Full program here (in danish)
See you in Aarhus!
Digital Social Science Lab in the making
The Library Lab 
[…] The two perspectives is what I call the traditional and the intelligent library space. […]
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[…] What is the purpose of the academic library building when it’s no longer filled with a physical collection of books and journals? I had the pleasure of presenting two different perspectives on the development of the physical academic library space at The Danish Research Library Association’s annual meeting in Aarhus on the 17th and 18th of September (slides can be seen at the bottom of this post). The two perspectives is what I call the traditional and the intelligent library space. […]
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