Session 5: Building Communities: bolstering the library network

5.1: Academic Libraries and Citizen Science: Identification and Valorisation Issues

Presenter: Raphaëlle Bats, URFIST Bordeaux, University of Bordeaux, France

As can be attested by the creation of the academic label ‘Science With and For Society’ in 2021, the 2022 calls for citizen science projects from the National Agency for Research and the citizen science indicator established by the Academic Sustainable Development & Social Responsibility label, the French universities interest in citizen science keeps being reinforced. Open science is clearly stated at the core of these policies and the French Law on Research Programming mentions the importance ‘to enable the advent of a more open science to citizens leading to a reconsolidation of the democratic link at the closest of the local levels’ (Law on Research Programming, 2020).

Nowadays, the last cornerstone of open science – citizen science – is subject to greater attention, as recommended by UNESCO (2021). The transition context calls for renewing citizen involvement in scientific progress. In addition, the context of the rejection of science increases the will of researchers to raise awareness among citizens through participation in their projects and to pass the results on to the greatest number of people.

However, these projects and their results remain difficult to identify and disseminate to citizens (Bats, 2022): the projects are poorly covered, the SAPS labelled institutions find it difficult to list ongoing participative projects, the European Citizen Science Association’s directory lists only 8 of the French projects. Low visibility questions the possibility to spread collectively produced knowledge.

Yet, isn’t there a role here for academic libraries to work on facilitating a real circulation of citizen science project outcomes? So far, they focused their actions on training (CSWG LIBER, 2021), interfacing between internal and external partners (SKS, 2021) and events passing on participative projects (Mumelaš et al, 2022). Thus, we may assume that reinforcing the role of libraries entails the ability to identify citizen science publications so they can be spread to students, researchers, citizens and decision-makers.

Starting from a bibliometrics experimental work meant to identify publications related to citizen science projects at the Bordeaux University and comparing it to thesauri used in other institutions, we identified the most used terms and marking spaces (acknowledgements, titles, keywords, full text) and we built connexions between them and citizen science projects types. We also compared the terms used by either researchers or students in bibliometrics analyses, bibliographic searches and interviews.

These studies show that the variety of participative projects leads to diverse lexical usage and publication formats. It also shows that all citizen science publications are not identified as such. This study enabled us to build a bibliometrics research plan and a thesaurus for institutions looking to identify citizen science publications and to offer researchers a list of publication recommendations.

This thesaurus opens trails to work on promotion projects for these publications and to favour citizen science acknowledgement for citizen and academic scientists. Working along with citizen science stakeholders will help academic libraries in reinforcing their position as focal points for interdisciplinary knowledge and as an intermediate between academic circles and society.

5.2: Research Libraries in Open Urban Sustainability Hubs

Presenter: Christian Peer, Technical University of Vienna, Austria

A prerequisite for sustainable development is that transformative knowledge and action can unfold in cooperative processes. In the applied research project “Open Urban Sustainability Hubs” (OPUSH), framework conditions and ways are being investigated and developed to address the following central question: How can sustainable developments in democratically constituted societies be co-developed and co-supported by local urban communities?

OPUSH focuses on making knowledge about sustainable transformative action more visible and comprehensible via existing knowledge infrastructures such as libraries and museums, and in particular on making knowledge production more inclusive and participatory, as well as making these knowledge sites and networks in the city more accessible to local communities. In this context, OPUSH includes Research Libraries from three different project partners; TU Wien, TU Delft and Universitat de Barcelona Research Libraries.

In the international and transdisciplinary project partnership, infrastructural prerequisites and framework conditions for open scientific work will be researched over a period of three years and measures to strengthen these infrastructures will be developed. In four cities, namely Barcelona, Rotterdam The Hague Metropolitan Region, Tallinn and Vienna, cooperation between science, library, museum, city administration and civil society will be established in order to test Citizen Social Science approaches in these local Open Science environments.

Following on the existing work done within the LIBER network to strengthen Open Science and Citizen Science within Research Libraries (Wyler and Haklay 2018, LIBER 2018), OPUSH is proposing some new conceptualization of the intersection between urban sustainable development, open and citizen science and the potentials of Research Libraries as knowledge infrastructures.

This prospective and conceptual work will be presented in the form of a paper and a presentation detailing how the research libraries can be relevant knowledge hubs to deploy new research frameworks, while addressing the challenge of OPUSH to establish local research collaborations and to evolve in inter- and transdisciplinary learning processes.

5.3: Community for All? Knitting, Coding and Digital Inclusion as a Community Engagement Strategy for University Libraries

Presenter: Karoline Liv Vildlyng,  The Royal Danish Library, Aarhus University, Denmark

In the digital age, the path to knowledge is increasingly paved with data, digital networks and emerging technologies, leading to high demands of digital literacy, especially amongst university students. Yet, female and male students across the EU report vastly different degrees of digital confidence and perceptions of own skills, with only up to 3% of young women aspiring to work with ICTs professionally (Women and Men in ICT, EIGE:2018). This gender gap presents us with new and increasingly pressing questions: specifically how can we, as research and university libraries, work towards digital inclusion and digital accessibility of our digitized archives and collections, for all students?

This paper presents an ongoing project that responds to the questions posed above. Through an explicit focus on digital inclusion and by utilizing community building as both a strategy and a goal, The Royal Library at the University of Aarhus launched – in the spring of 2022 – the first library-run workshop in text mining with digitized, archived historical sources, aimed specifically at female and female-identifying students: Knit & Code. Knitting as a craft is experiencing a substantial renaissance in Scandinavia, especially among young women aged 18-29. The knitting communities are large and growing at Scandinavian universities and represent an apt opportunity for engaging a predominantly female and female-identifying community with the library’s digital initiatives through novel teaching approaches.

Knit & Code is a unique teaching initiative in the university library context in Denmark, teaching computational text analysis within a knitting framework. Both knitting and coding are types of work that combine loops, repetitions, binary data and the communication of functions through variables such as text, numbers and symbols. Knit & Code recontextualizes known, but complex phenomena like data, front-and backend design, APIs and programming languages through concrete knitting examples and storytelling.

Based on the feedback given by more than 100 participants, as well as current research in the field of digital inclusion, we have formulated four overall themes for a gender inclusive and community-minded approach to teaching digital methods in research libraries:

1. Community building – building social infrastructure for students with shared interests to continue the process of learning digital skills that have been started in the workshop, ensuring that students can continue to engage with the material with peers in social and safe social spaces
2. Mastery – through a reconceptualisation of existing skills as the foundation for acquiring new skills
3. Creating a shared vocabulary – of relevant terms and abbreviations, ensuring increased accessibility for understanding and engaging with new material
4. Close contact and 1-on-1 help – with the instructor running the workshop

The themes represent ongoing and emerging work and are intended both as inspiration and as grounds for debate. The goal is that explicit focus on gender, the utilization of unconventional forms of teaching within the library, as well as reconceptualization of existing skills like knitting, can create an increased experience of digital literacy amongst the user group and be a step towards a more inclusive library space.