In 2025, it will be 600 years since a university was founded in Leuven, the forerunner of today’s KU Leuven. In anticipation to these festivities, KU Leuven Libraries, in collaboration with UCLouvain, is putting its academic collection in the spotlight. Thanks to the efforts of the past months and years, images of 2025 rare books published by Leuven professors have now been uploaded to the Lovaniensia platform. However, this enormous growth – in May 2020, about 400 works were available digitally – is not the only reason why it is worth surfing to this website. There are also extra pages with information about the Old University of Leuven (1425-1797) and its various faculties, and the professors’ page was supplemented with biographical descriptions of some 130 professors (with even more extensive records for each professor in ODIS). In addition, via the filters it is now clear which works have been digitised internally or externally. And last but not least, thanks to a collaboration with Google Books, all works from the Leuven collection are now provided with an ocr layer, so that each work on the platform is now textually searchable.

William Wyndaele, historicus en donateur van het Bibliotheekfonds Letteren, schonk zijn privécollectie van ongeveer 2000 hoofdzakelijk moderne wetenschappelijke publicaties aan KU Leuven Bibliotheken. De schenking betekent een welgekomen verrijking voor onze collecties, in de eerste plaats de collectie Geschiedenis, maar ook de collecties Klassieke Studies, Humanistische & Neolatijnse literatuur, Kunstgeschiedenis, Oosterse Studies en Theologie & Religiewetenschappen.

KU Leuven and the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) are accepting applications for the full-time FED-tWIN position, “POP Heritage – Popular Heritage Lost & Found. A new approach to the online exploration and curation of the Belgian mass market heritage (20^th-21^st Century).” 50% of this full-time position entails a tenure track position at the KU Leuven Arts Faculty in Cultural Studies with a focus on digital cultural heritage, data analysis, and data visualization in the field of Belgian popular literature. The other 50% position is offered by the KBR. The successful candidate will work half-time at KU Leuven (as a tenure track ZAP) and half-time at the KBR (as a contractual SW2 Workleader). The evaluation and selection of the candidate will be carried out by a committee of representatives from both institutions.

This project will be developed within the framework of the FED-tWIN – Program of sustainable research cooperation between the federal scientific institutes (FSI) and the universities. The supervisors of the project are Sophie Vandepontseele, Director of Contemporary Collections at the KBR, and Prof. Fred Truyen, Professor at the Arts Faculty (Research Unit: Literary Studies, Research Group: Literary Theory and Cultural Studies) and Program Director of the POC Digital Humanities.

The job entails both research and education duties. Candidates need to be well-versed in digitization techniques and methods, data structures, and visualization techniques applied to the Humanities. The researcher preferably has 6-8 years of experience as a postdoc or as an employee at an archival institution after having obtained their PhD.

Please see the full job vacancy text for more details about the position, desired competencies and qualities, and the application procedure.

Applications are accepted up to and including Thursday 24 February 2022. The appointment is expected to start on the first of October 2022.

In 2021 KU Leuven Libraries Artes is participating in 5 Evidence Based Acquisition Projects. This results in over 100.000 e-books being accessible for a period of 12 months. At the end of this period, a smaller selection of titles will be acquired (perpetual access) by the library according to collection profiles and in consultation with the academic staff, and (this is why the acquisition method is called evidence based) reinforced by usage statistics. When the EBA Project ends, the library is free to engage for another term of 12 months, thus keeping the larger (not purchased) EBA-collection accessible.

Started in January 2021

Cambridge University Press: full collection* of e-books HSS (CUP + publishing partners)
Cambridge Core – Journals & Books Online | Cambridge University Press (kuleuven.be)

Taylor & Francis (Routledge): defined set of a limited number of preselected titles
Home | Taylor & Francis Group (kuleuven.be)

New from April 2021 onwards

de Gruyter: full collection of e-books (de Gruyter + publishing partners)*
De Gruyter (kuleuven.be)

Brill: full collection of e-books
Brill | Over three centuries of scholarly publishing (kuleuven.be)

Benjamins: full collection of e-books
Books | John Benjamins (kuleuven.be)

*not included: HTML text books, Cambridge Companions, Cambridge Histories

Library Central Services is working hard in order to make all individual titles accessible through Limo. There may, however, be a delay of up to one month in adding newly published titles. In the meantime, those titles can be accessed directly on the publisher’s platform.

On 6 and 7 May 2021, the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) – together with several institutions including KU Leuven – will hold an international webinar on Old Books and New Technologies: Medieval Books and the Digital Humanities in the Low Countries. It will bring together researchers from libraries, archives, and museums, and university faculties with an interest in how the medieval book is contextualized by new technologies, with particular emphasis placed on the intersection of the medieval book and Digital Humanities. The languages of the conference will be English, Dutch, and French. For more information, keep reading!

This event is free and will include many interest talks (including two keynotes) from researchers across Belgium and the Netherlands, including from the Faculty of Arts and KU Leuven Libraries.

From the event website: “Over the course of the Middle Ages, what was called the Low Countries developed an original written culture. It is known to us through sources in Latin, in Middle Dutch and in Old and Middle French. At first centred in the Benedictine and Cistercian abbeys of Egmond and Friesland in the North or the Dunes, Ghent and the closely connected chain of Lobbes – Gembloux – Liège in the South, it increasingly became a town phenomenon following the development of the largest and most dense urban conglomeration in the European Middle Ages both with large towns like Ghent, Bruges, Tournai, Liège, Brussels, Antwerp, Leuven, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Utrecht and a series of smaller cities scattered over the area, all with their convents, and, consequently, books.

In the 15^th century, the production of luxury manuscripts for the Burgundian court and its environment flourished in Bruges, Ghent, Oudenaarde, Brussels and Tournai, which gave rise to the development of an important pictorial culture. At the same time, the presence of towns, cathedrals and chapters all over the area gave rise to the rise of the famous French-Flemish school of polyphony, the works of which often have come down to us in beautifully executed manuscripts.

The urban character of the region in the later Middle Ages was essential in the development and expansion of such phenomena as the Devotio moderna or early Humanism. When the latter was essential in the spread of Latin schools and the amount of 15^th-century editions of classical Latin authors in the IJssel region, the first found its expression in a proper network of convents and libraries, which is highlighted by the ‘Red Cloister Register’, the famous collective catalogue compiled in the early sixteenth century.

All this produced an important heritage of medieval books, manuscripts and incunabula as well as the sources for their history up to the eighteenth century (old library inventories, pre-modern bio-bibliographical sources, accounts of literary journeys, etc.).”

You can view the program here and you can register for the event here.

This hybrid round-table and workshop is co-organized between LECTIO, KU Leuven, and the University of Utrecht. Event dates: 11-12 May. Registration deadline: 30 April 2021.

Over two days, participants will have the chance to try a hands-on approach to network analysis, with a mix of practical workshops and presentations of ongoing projects (by LECTIO members). The keynote speakers will be prof. Dirk Van Miert (University of Utrecht), presenting the ERC project “Sharing Knowledge in Learned and Literary Networks – The Republic of Letters as a Pan- European Knowledge Society” and Prof. Bart Thijs (KU Leuven) on “Recognizing Patterns: the application of Deep Learning in Network Analysis”. More information below!

Programme – 11 May (Teams)

16:00-16:10

Welcome session by the workshop organizers

16:10-16:45

Margherita Fantoli, KU Leuven Institute LECTIO
Introduction to network analysis

17:00-18:00

Dirk van Miert, University of Utrecht – Keynote lecture
A network perspective of the Republic of Learning: expectations, problems, solutions, results and recommendations

Programme – 12 May (Teams & in person)

09:30-10:15

Mark Depauw, KU Leuven Institute LECTIO (fully booked*)
From relational databases to network analysis: the case of Trismegistos

10:15-11:30

Yanne Broux, KU Leuven (fully booked*)
Hands-on session: using Gephi

12:00-13:00

Bart Thijs, KU Leuven Institute Leuven.AI – Keynote Lecture
Recognizing Patterns: the application of Deep Learning in Network Analysis

For more information about the event, including registration information and abstracts of each of the talks, check out this link.

*The hands-on portions of the event are full, but it is still possible to get on a waiting list.

Starting Tuesday 9 February 2021, there will be a monthly series of interesting symposia hosted by the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Limerick. While specifically organized under the guise of Early Modern History, these virtual events will be useful for people across a wide range of skill levels and periods of specialization.

To give some context, the four sessions will cover network analysis, text analysis, databases, and geographic information systems (more commonly called GIS), respectively. Obviously, while those topics are useful specifically to historians, they can also be relevant to people studying literature, or urban development, or indeed someone who is studying protest movements. So I would urge the DH Master’s students of KU Leuven and anyone else interested in these topics to register for these events!

The seminars will be held in English and include a range of scholars and library staff from Ireland, England, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Switzerland. Click on the link here for more information from the University of Limerick about how to register!