As part of our blog series, “Stories from the Research Trenches,” we often invite researchers and colleagues to share their personal experiences. For this installment of the series, we are delighted to have our colleague Marleen Marynissen from KU Leuven Libraries Nexus Research Data Management team sharing about her recent Erasmus+ experience in Barcelona.

A Journey of Collaboration and Learning: My Erasmus+ Experience in Barcelona

In October 2024, I had the opportunity to participate in the Catalan University Libraries Erasmus Staff Week in Barcelona. This five-day event, held from October 7^th to 11^th, brought together library professionals from across Europe to collaborate, exchange experiences, foster collaboration, and explore the evolving role of university libraries in the field of open science.

The week kicked off with an international coffee break and an icebreaker activity, setting a friendly and collaborative tone for the days ahead. Hosted by the Consortium of University Services of Catalonia (CSUC), the event provided a platform for participants to introduce themselves and share their expectations. It was also very interesting and inspiring to see how CSUC facilitates shared services and infrastructures among Catalan universities and research centers, enhancing their efficiency. The first day concluded with a guided tour of Barcelona – allowing us to discover the city’s vibrant culture.

The next day we went to the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), where we explored the research support services offered by the libraries. We learned about the Library’s Research Café, user training programs, and cultural programming in collaboration with UPCArt. This day also featured the first round of participant presentations, including my own presentation titled: Empowering Open Science, promoting FAIR dataset publication through documentation and metadata enhancement.

On the third day, we visited the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), where we focused on teaching support services. We were introduced to La Factoria, a support service for digital production managed by the library and IT. The day also included engaging presentations and discussions.

At the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), we delved into open education and citizen science initiatives. One of the highlights was a collaborative task focused on creating an open educational resource, which allowed us to explore the opportunities and challenges of open education in practice. After visiting the UAB’s facilities and enjoying several participant presentations, we concluded the day with a social dinner.

On the final day we had a session to reflect on our shared experiences and key takeaways. The program concluded with a visit to the Catalan National Library.

The Catalan University Libraries Erasmus Staff Week in Barcelona was an unforgettable experience. Each location we visited enriched the program by showcasing its unique approach to library services and open science. The participant presentations offered fresh perspectives and it was really nice to meet and exchange ideas with colleagues from across Europe. Of course, the beautiful and dynamic city of Barcelona added an extra charm to the entire event. This week was a perfect blend of learning, networking, and cultural discovery, and I am grateful for the chance to be part of it.

As part of our blog series, “Stories from the Research Trenches,” we often invite researchers and colleagues to share their personal experiences. For this installment of the series, we are delighted to have our colleague André Davids from KU Leuven Library of Economics and Business share about his recent Erasmus+ stay at the University of Mannheim. André talks specifically about the opportunity to explore Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools, a topic that Faculty of Arts researchers often seek advice about. Read about André’s experience learning about various OCR software options, his takeaways on how they do things at the University of Mannheim, and his impressions about the city itself.

Meanwhile, somewhere else: Erasmus+ in Mannheim

Hello, I am André, and in March 2023, as part of the Erasmus+ program, I spent five days at the University of Mannheim. Why did I choose Mannheim? In the context of my work at the Library of Economics and Business, where I am involved, among other things, with OCR (Optical Character Recognition), it quickly became clear after some online research that they are very actively engaged in that field there.

I was warmly received at the library by Stefan Weil, one of the most active current developers of the OCR software Tesseract. He told me a lot about the university and the city, but also introduced me to the world of Linux, Ubuntu, Debian. In addition, I was able to experiment with various OCR software (Tesseract, eScriptorium, Pero-OCR) and received more information about the OCR-D Project.

In Mannheim, they primarily work on the further development of open-source software. Additionally, they offer support to students and researchers in using this software. Once a month, they organize an open online OCR consultation hour in collaboration with the University of Heidelberg, where anyone can ask their OCR-related questions. The “clients” are mainly researchers, but also library staff from other universities.

Also interesting to mention: The library has a room, the ExpLAB, which is dedicated to brainstorming, Design Thinking, etc. This room is fully equipped for brainstorming sessions, but also has Eye-Tracking Stations, Virtual Reality glasses, etc., which can be used by both students and staff.

This Erasmus+ experience not only enriched my knowledge about OCR but also about the city and university. Although Mannheim is a well-known city, I didn’t know much about it myself. Due to its architecture, it was chosen by the Allies in 1940 as a place to experiment with air raids and complete city destruction. As a result, there wasn’t much left of the city after World War II, and it had to be rebuilt. After long debates, the Baroque Palace (Barockschloss) was also rebuilt. Luckily so, because in 1967, the University of Mannheim could establish itself there. This building, with its width of 450 meters, is the second-largest baroque palace in Europe, after Versailles (but – and this is important – it has one more window than Versailles).

Navigating the city was quite a challenge since the city center has no street names but has been divided into squares since the 17th century. The most striking street is the one in front of the university, the “Kurpfälzer Meile der Innovationen” (Palatinate Mile of Innovation), which has 42 bronze plaques on the ground honoring famous innovators such as Carl Benz (automobile), Karl von Drais (precursor to the bicycle), Werner von Siemens, and others. Maybe an idea for KU Leuven?

What stuck with me most in terms of their work culture is the Teams channel called “Mittagessen” (lunch). This is where colleagues arrange lunch plans. This is also how I met a colleague who, as a student, did Erasmus at KU Leuven. I still don’t fully understand their working hours. Apparently, they work 40 hours a week, but I was always the first one there and one of the last to leave… Maybe they calculate time differently there. Everywhere is different, but a lot is still familiar. I look back very positively on my trip to another library and can highly recommend it to everyone.

Also interesting to see is the university library’s introductory video:

The common way readers use library catalogs is to find out whether they have access to a particular resource through the library they are using. Catalogs of academic libraries thus provide information about what publications a student or staff member of a particular university has access to, and how they can access it – either by providing details about the location of a physical copy or by providing a link to the electronic version.

But what is the role of the catalog of academic libraries in an Open Access world, especially now that more than half of new journal articles appear in Open Access and more and more scholalry monographs are published openly as well? If the catalog only lists what the library is paying for, then it is no longer doing its job since students and staff members actually have access to a whole lot more than what is in the catalog (namely all Open Access publications as well). If, on the other hand, the catalog lists everything that students and staff members have access too, then it becomes massive, because it should incorporate all Open Access materials as well. It also becomes rather useless since the catalog of let’s say Leuven would not be that different from the catalog of let’s say Leiden – so why would we spend any time and energy keeping separate catalogs?

Of course, if you rethink the catalog of an academic library as a curatorial instrument listing publications which subject specialists have selected as particularly relevant for a specific research community – regardless whether these are publications behind a paywall or not – then they still might make sense. Or maybe we need to think further and conclude that managing a catalog is no longer the way to fulfil the traditional, curatorial role of the library, thus acknowledging that academic libraries’ role in both discovery and fulfillment have diminished and it is high time to focus on other tasks?

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.

The following is the redacted text of a statement given by Demmy Verbeke at the “The Diamond Open Access Model: what impact on research?” webinar organized by Academia Europaea Cardiff, KU Leuven Libraries and the Young Academy of Europe on March 28, 2022. 

Academic libraries have a responsibility in the context of Diamond Open Access on at least two levels.

For more than a decade now, librarians worldwide have played a role in promoting OA, explaining the various options to make academic work freely available to all, highlighting the pros and cons of the various routes towards OA, etc. This advocacy work is lately more and more interwoven with talking about funder compliance or talking about things like block grants, OA funds and read-and-publish deals. However, we need to be very careful that the latter does not turn librarians into salesmen for the publishers with whom their universities have this kind of agreement. The thing that we always need to remember is that academic librarians do not work for publishers; they work for their institutions and serve the scholarly community, so they need to talk about the diversity of OA possibilities. They owe it to their profession to provide an analysis which is as objective as possible of the pros and cons of various OA approaches so that authors can make up their own mind about whom they want to entrust with the dissemination of their research results.In that context, it is important that librarians also talk about Diamond OA and give the full picture. For instance by not only talking about the main thing that scholars associate with Diamond OA, namely that this is an approach to scholarly publishing which does not charge fees to either authors or readers, but also to stress the second element of the characterization used in the recent Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, namely that these are community-driven, academic-led and academic-owned publishing initiatives. This is important, because this makes an essential difference in the financial model behind initiatives of this sort and is the reason why scholars, funders and institutions alike should not only foster Diamond OA but should even prioritize it over other approaches.

The second responsibility is to not only talk and inform about Diamond OA but also to financially support it. Personally, I have very little patience for the argument “we do not have the budget to support Diamond OA programs”. Most university libraries in the Western world have multi-million budgets, whether they receive additional block grants for OA or not. I find it hard to believe that it would be impossible to find a few grand in that budget for Diamond OA. I do, however, understand and sympathize completely with the realization that we need to rethink our budgets in order to make room for Diamond OA. Both acquisition and cataloguing processes of libraries are still completely geared towards either the traditional model of publishing behind a paywall or towards publishers who have found a way to shape their OA offer in such a way that it almost appears as business as usual, for instance through read-and-publish deals. As a result, there is a big risk that library budgets are completely hoovered up by a combination of buying paywalled content and spending money on the privately-owned, for-profit approach to OA. This means that, if libraries want to financially support Diamond OA, they need to either prioritize it in the sense that they first spend available budget on Diamond OA, then on paywalled content, then on for-profit OA; or that they need to make much clearer distinctions in their budgets and need to separate a percentage for Diamond OA, a percentage for paywalled content and a percentage for for-profit OA. The added task is that they also need to stick to that division. If the price tag of either of those three categories increases – and, by the way, I guarantee that the price tag for for-profit OA will increase – then they cannot move around money from one category to the other without first having a thorough discussion that this implies a policy change.

I consider both responsibilities for academic librarians in the context of Diamond OA as an obvious continuation of the role they have been playing in the field of scholarly communication for generations. Librarians are not in the business of telling researchers what to do and how to distribute the results of their work. But that does not cancel out the fact that researchers turn to librarians for guidance in this, either by making explicit appeals to the expertise within libraries to provide support and advice, or implicitly by observing which choices libraries make in their collection building and adapting their own publishing practices to this. Similarly, research libraries have a long tradition of funding the market for academic publishing. Library budgets pay for the acquisition of monographs, for standing orders for series and for subscriptions to journals and databases. So it is natural that these same libraries are now called upon to act as funders for publishing in OA. And just like librarians were entrusted to make wise budget choices in a traditional system of acquisition of content behind a paywall, they should now be entrusted to make wise budget choices in how to support OA publishing. I, for one, am convinced that librarians will ensure much better value for money, and thus do a much better job for their institutions and the scholarly community which they serve, if they favor academic-led approaches towards OA without author fees over for-profit approaches towards OA based on publication-level payments.

Until 25 May 2021 KU Leuven users have trial access to two new sources on the Brill Scholarly Editions platform:

Eustathius of Thessalonica: Commentary on the Iliad

This is the online version of the complete critical edition by Marchinus van der Valk of Eusthathius of Thessalonica’s Commentary on the Iliad, composed during the latter half of the twelfth century CE, published in hard copy by Brill between 1971–1987.

Eustathius of Thessalonica: Commentary on the Odyssey

This online publication (to be completed in 2030) offers a new and complete critical edition with English translation of the Byzantine scholar and rhetorician Eusthathius of Thessalonica’s Commentary on the Odyssey, composed during the latter half of the twelfth century CE.

You are welcome to send any feedback about the trial to your Artes subject specialist.

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.