Parallel Session 3 – Advances in Information Systems
Date: Wednesday, 1 July 2026, from 11:00 to 12:30
Moderator: TBC
Location: R8
3.1) From Service Innovation to Sustainable Leadership: CRM for Tracking and Analyzing Research Consultations at the National Library of Technology, Prague
Presenters: Naděžda Firsová and Alexey Ryzhkov, National Library of Technology, Czech Republic
Reference services and research consultations have long been core information services at research and academic libraries. Many challenges, including those related to employee satisfaction and levels of staffing, can ultimately affect the quality and sustainability of such services. Taken together with rapidly changing patron behavior and needs, libraries are often forced to apply a holistic approach to the integration of modern technologies, user-centered design processes, and attention to staffing needs.
This case study discusses such a holistic approach that has driven sustainable leadership: an open source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system implemented at the National Library of Technology (NTK) in Prague. This NTK’s CRM system, launched in 2019 as a bottom-up initiative and continuously improved over time, supports consultation services by tracking patron issues (improving quality of service provision), consultants (improving effectiveness of service provision), and management-related insights (e.g., improving efficiency, human resource management).
The originality of the study lies in its exclusive focus on consultation services highly demanding in terms of staff competencies and resources and gathering broader scale of benefits not only in terms of customer relationship. With acknowledge the CRM as a recognized approach to building long-lasting relationships with patrons and stakeholders, NTK implemented the CRM system with self-developed extended functionality for specific library information services. Thus, the NTK CRM represents not only a transactional tool but rather a strategic method for building sustainable management practice.
In this evaluative-descriptive single-case study, we explore the process of systematization and optimization of NTK’s consultation services since their inception as well as the limitations and possible future directions of the system. Sustainable leadership lessons learned and described here are useful to any kind of library, and they are discussed from employee, management, and patron perspectives. For employees, the system has improved onboarding, professional development options, and simplified service provision. Patrons thus benefit from higher quality consultations. Middle management has been able to maintain service standards even in cases of team turnover and improve common understanding of individual staff capabilities and workloads. Significant additional benefits for managers have been seen in terms of reporting and evaluating services to gain a clear picture of service provision based on accessible and reliable data. At NTK, the approach has undergone continuous development by use in other activities and grant-funded projects where the CRM has been used, among other things, for managing relationships with institutions, tracking and analyzing educational activities.
The innovation of the study consists in describing the user-centered approach together with a leadership strategy focused on supporting the sustainability of service provision. This perspective enables NTK’s consultants to participate in CRM development over the long term, directly influencing and improving practices based on real evidence and data. Management plays a pivotal role in workflow improvement, encouraging staff members to engage in effective processes and fostering their professional growth.
3.2) NumaHOP: A Complete Digitization Chain to Promote Open Science
Presenters: Olesea Dubois, Sciences Po, France; Vincent Tardif, École Normale Supérieure, France
In a constantly evolving technological context, libraries find themselves at a crossroads. They face an increased responsibility to support scientific communities through reliable, open, and resilient infrastructures. The NumaHOP platform, developed at the intersection of digital library expertise and the promotion of open science, embodies an innovative solution to these challenges. It demonstrates how libraries can play a role through innovation and collaboration in the production of digital scientific data that meets FAIR principles.
NumaHOP, an open source digital content management platform collaboratively developed by French libraries, offers an integrated and efficient solution designed to optimize the entire digitization process—from document reception to dissemination and preservation—thus enabling libraries to respond effectively to evolving scientific needs.
NumaHOP’s modular architecture supports essential functionalities for modern digitization process, making it a key infrastructure to promote open science and research data principles:
- Interoperable metadata conversion: NumaHOP provides robust tools to convert library cataloging standards, such as UNIMARC and EAD, into widely used interoperable formats like Dublin Core and Dublin Core Qualified. This ensures metadata sustainability and seamless integration with various digital repositories and research infrastructures.
- Pre-digitization condition reports: The platform allows the creation of detailed condition reports for physical document « batches » before digitization, thus facilitating quality assurance and preservation efforts through precise documentation of the originals’ state.
- Automated and manual quality control: Upon receipt of digitized content, NumaHOP supports automated and manual quality controls of images and metadata. These processes quickly detect errors or inconsistencies, ensuring high-quality digital copies essential for research reproducibility and sharing.
- Sophisticated workflow and project management: NumaHOP’s workflow enables libraries to structure, monitor, and control complex digitization projects, ensuring transparency and traceability throughout the digital objects’ lifecycle. The platform is designed for collaborative use involving multiple actors, including digitization providers, librarians, and researchers.
- Comprehensive validation and export features: users can validate digitized units (images and metadata) within the platform before export to dissemination systems or long-term archives. NumaHOP produces output formats such as OCR text files (Xml-Alto), METS manifests, and generated derivative images, thus ensuring compliance with preservation and access standards.
- Automated large-scale dissemination: NumaHOP facilitates automated dissemination of digitized content through multiple channels. The users can promote and distribute their digital collections via their local digital libraries while simultaneously sharing content with external platforms like Internet Archive or Omeka S, thereby expanding their audience and researcher access.
Support for open standards and digital sobriety: By relying on free software, open standards, and interoperable formats, NumaHOP enables users to reduce dependency on proprietary systems, promote reuse, and implement environmentally respectful digital infrastructures.
Case studies will illustrate successful implementations in French university libraries, highlighting practical benefits from using NumaHOP for improved interoperability, efficiency, and workflow governance. These examples will showcase integration with other open tools like Omeka S and discuss participatory development practices that strengthen resilience in constantly evolving research environments.
In conclusion, NumaHOP demonstrates how research libraries can play a leading role in building responsible, transparent, and sustainable digital infrastructures that foster researcher autonomy in digital data production. Its set of functionalities addresses the main challenges libraries face today, offering a reproducible model for international scientific communities committed to ethical and efficient preservation and dissemination of knowledge.
3.3) DSpace Reimagined: AI-Powered Search and Accessibility
Presenter: Piotr Masalski, PCG Academia, Poland
This presentation will provide a demo-driven overview of an AI enhancement layer for DSpace, designed to be deployed alongside existing repository installations without disrupting core functinalities or standard maintenance and update processes.
The presentation will cover two tightly connected capabilities:
- AI-Driven Search and Retrieval
The presentation will demonstrate an AI-driven discovery interface that augments traditional DSpace search while preserving familiar user workflows. Users can seamlessly switch between classic Solr-based search and an AI chat mode via a simple toggle, enabling both keyword precision and conversational exploration within the same interface.
In AI mode, users submit natural-language prompts and receive context-aware, AI-generated responses grounded exclusively in repository metadata and full-text content through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Results are transparently supported by citations and direct references to repository items, reinforcing trust and traceability. The interface supports iterative exploration by allowing users to ask follow-up questions, refine prompts, and progressively narrow or expand their query without restarting the search process.
To further support discovery and inclusivity, the system can recommend relevant authors based on repository content relationships and offer text-to-speech (TTS) output for AI responses, improving accessibility for users with visual impairments or reading difficulties. Together, these features transform repository search from a static retrieval mechanism into an interactive, explainable, and accessible discovery experience while remaining fully integrated with DSpace collections and governance models.
- AI-Powered Accessibility and Document Conversion
The second part of the presentation focuses on AI-powered document processing designed to improve accessibility, preservation, and reuse of repository content. As a first step, deposited files, regardless of their original format, are normalized and converted into a high-quality HTML representation. This HTML then serves as a stable, preservation-friendly intermediate format for further processing.
Using advanced AI-based OCR and document understanding, the system extracts structured, machine-readable text from the PDF, including support for multilingual content, non-Latin scripts, and complex or degraded scans. Once processed, the content can be automatically converted into additional accessible formats such as screen-reader-optimized PDF, ePub, electronic braille, audio file or other derivative formats tailored to user needs and accessibility requirements. The document can be also automatically translated to other languages, which greatly improvesvissibility of publications and thair availability for international users.
This approach ensures WCAG-aligned accessibility, enables reliable full-text indexing and AI-based discovery, and significantly increases the long-term archival value of repository materials. By establishing a single, consistent conversion pipeline, repositories can systematically improve access for users with disabilities while simultaneously preparing content for advanced AI search, reuse, and preservation workflows.
The proposal will also briefly outline the technical architecture, recent development milestones, planned roadmap and implementaiton process, including recommended preparatory steps such as use-case definition, content audits, and pilot planning.