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.

This spring, the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) together with ULB, Ugent, VUB, and UCL will continue their Digital Heritage Seminar series. This spring edition will focus on image processing, hosting three speakers who share their experience with digitization and extracting data from digitized cultural heritage collections.   

The following provides a brief overview of the dates and topics. Please visit the links to read more and to register for the events: 

Tuesday 22 February, 14:00-15:30

Speaker: Thomas Smits, University of Antwerp
“The Visual Digital Turn: Computer Vision and the Humanities”
Full event description and registration details here. 

Tuesday 15 March, 14:00-15:30 

Speaker: Apostolos Antonacopoulos, University of Salford, Manchester, UK
“Understanding information-rich documents: experiences with historical England & Wales censuses”
Full event description and registration details here. 

Monday 11 April, 14:00-15:30 

Speaker: Clemens Neudecker, Berlin State Library, Berlin, Germany
“New Tools for Old Documents – Layout Analysis and OCR with Deep Learning and Heuristics”
Full event description and registration details here.

On 13-14 December 2021, VIEW, the KU Leuven Core Facility for Heritage Science and Digitisation Technologies, will be organizing a two-day workshop with the Portable Light Dome system.  

The Portable Light Dome system is a dome-shaped structure allowing the automated capture of objects from a fixed position with varying light angles. In total, 228 captures are made in five different spectra: IR, red, green, blue and UV. After processing, interactive visualization of the topography is possible with the five individual spectra or a combination of three (RGB or false color). An open source online tool has been developed for the visualization and dissemination of these datasets: Pixel+ viewer.  

The workshop will be a combination of lectures, demonstrations, visits, and hands-on work with the Microdome, the software, and the viewer. Participants will have the opportunity to work with KU Leuven’s heritage, rare book, and manuscript collections. 

The workshop is geared toward heritage scientists, technical art historians, museum collection researchers, manuscript scholars, book and bookbinding historians, book and paper conservators, object conservators, curators, archaeologists, historians, epigraphists, imaging specialists, photographers. 

Practical information: 

13-14 December 2021 

Location: Book Heritage Lab and Imaging Lab, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium 

Workshop fees:  

• General participants: 800 Euro 
• Discounted fee for early career researchers (up to 5 years after completion of PhD): 600 Euro  
• Discounted fee for undergraduate, graduate, or pre-PhD participants: 400 Euro 

More details regarding the program and registration can be found on the workshop event page. 

If you are interested in registering or learning more about the workshop, please contact view@kuleuven.be.  

Tropy, a sister project of the Zotero bibliography manager, is an open source program for managing and annotating research images and PDFs. For a thorough introduction to all of Tropy’s useful features, check out this recording of a webinar about Tropy that we announced earlier.

Looking for a simple but powerful tool to organize images for your research? Tropy is a free and open source program that is very much worth considering. You can attend a free webinar on Tropy on February 24:

This webinar will offer an introduction to Tropy, a free desktop software that allows you to organize and describe photos of archival research material. Directed toward historians, social science researchers, and students, the session will cover the basics of getting started in Tropy, recording relevant information about your materials, and annotating and tagging sources. Learn how to bring order to your research process—and spend more time using your research photos, and less time searching for them. To learn more about Tropy and download the application, visit tropy.org.

Registration: Introduction to Tropy: a Digital Tool for Organizing Archival Research Photos