• Angelika Zirker

  Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Tübingen, Germany

• Regine Tobias

  Chief Library Director, University of Tübingen, Germany

  The role of the library at the university

• Sibylle Meissner

  Managing Director, Tübingen School of Education, University of Tübingen, Germany

  Tübingen - Our profile and the role of collections in academia

• Michael Derntl

  The Role of the University of Tübingen's Digital Humanities Center in Promoting Access, Sustainability, and Digital Competencies
  Kevin Körner, Glaucia Peres da Silva, Esther Fink, Ann-Kathrin Steiner, Luke West

  Exploring Virtual Worlds Together: The Multiplayer Serious Game Platform Graveler for Multimedia Knowledge Transfer in GLAM Contexts
  Kevin Körner, Stefan Krmnicek, Luca Dreiling

  Immerse in Your Collections: Virtual Reality Case Studies from GLAM Institutions Using the ExPresS XR Framework
  Dorothee Huff, Mireille Murkowski, Fabian Schwabe

  Travelling through Data: Julius Euting's Oriental Diaries in the Digital Age
  Thorsten Trippel

  Text+ in Practice: FAIR Access to Language Corpora and Lexical Resources in a Federated Infrastructure
  Anne Kremmer, Annika Vosseler

  Tracing Origins and Confronting Legacies. Provenance Research at the Museum der Universität Tübingen MUT
  Edda Schwarzkopf, Carola Lorea

  The OMnibus of MANTRAMS. A mobile-first, immersive digital archive of multimedia material on mantras in Global Southern Asia

• Samuel Wagner

  Vice-President, University of Tübingen, Germany

• Richard Ovenden

  Richard Ovenden, OBE, Head of GLAM, Bodley’s Librarian and the Helen Hamlyn Director of the Oxford University Libraries, UK

Does Reading Matter (Anymore)?

• Convener

  
  Ann Okerson

  Director, Offline Internet Consortium, USA

• Joy Connolly

  President, American Council of Learned Societies, USA

  The Arts of Attention and Invention

  The corporate forces of news media and social media present human reliance on AI as, if I may use the phrase, a fork in the road. Some will say yes to Large Language Models and join in the imminent transformation of work, knowledge, or human life; others will say no and become nostalgic defenders of a lost age. "There is no alternative," as Margaret Thatcher liked to say of capitalism. I will talk about the ways humanists are confronting LLMs in real life - with nuance, with alternatives, and with keen awareness of our need to articulate the value of the skills imparted by reading and writing that LLMs cannot replace, including sustained attention and creative invention (the first step in forming an argument in ancient rhetorical education). It is time to meet the TINA rush to incorporate AI into every classroom and research project with serious arguments about the value of reading and writing as tools for thinking and community building.

• Chris Bennett

  Commercial Director, Cambridge University Press

  To be defined

• Lukas Griessl

  Post-Doctoral Researcher, University of Tübingen, Germany

  I knew that reading the texts wouldn't do me much good anyway.": Ethnographic Perspectives on Generative AI and Changing Practices of Reading in Academia

  The rise of generative AI (GenAI) tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT in various aspects of academic life has set in motion profound transformations of many everyday academic practices. One domain particularly affected by GenAI is the way we explore knowledge and engage with academic literature, especially the practices of searching for, reading, and working with texts. Drawing on empirical data collected within the project "Hybrid Epistemic Practices" at the University of Tübingen, which ethnographically examines how the introduction of GenAI is transforming the qualitative social sciences and humanities, this presentation provides ethnographic perspectives on these ongoing transformations. In dialogue with the panel's question, "Does Reading Matter (Anymore)?", we turn to how students and academic staff actually use GenAI in their everyday academic lives and how they describe and reflect on the changes introduced by GenAI. The material is based on a large set of ethnographic interviews and AI-based media diaries in which students and staff shared their concrete practices, feelings, and reflections on how generative AI reshapes, among other things, their engagement with academic texts and reading practices at the University of Tübingen.

• Marjorie Levine-Clark

  Professor of History and Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives & Community Relationships, University of Colorado, Denver, USA

  From Books to Bits: Reimagining Victorian History for Today's Students

  At the University of Colorado Denver, our mission is to "make education work for all," striving to reach a diverse student body of about 50% first-generation college students and 50% students of color. These students are pulled in multiple directions by jobs and families and distracted by social media, and, increasingly, by artificial intelligence. This paper uses my spring 2026 revision of "Victorians and Victorianism," a course I last taught 20 years ago, as a case study to explore how we might respond to these pressures. Although it is disheartening to move away from book-length readings in an intimate, once-a-week history course, my pedagogy has been revitalized through considering how to use "bits" rather than books to develop students’ confidence and curiosity as readers. Through a variety of short primary sources, academic articles, and excerpts, students confront the interpretive challenges of analyzing novels, government documents, images, journalism, maps, and historians' work – learning what each type of source can and cannot tell us about the past. Simultaneously, the course treats AI itself as an object of study: students analyze the limitations and distortions in LLM-generated responses and complete handwritten in-class syntheses each week to ensure their historical thinking remains grounded in their own reading and interpretation. In scaffolded final projects, students reflect directly on how studying Victorian history sheds light on a contemporary issue that matters to them – an approach that encourages intellectual investment and hopefully reduces reliance on AI shortcuts.

• Karla Pollmann

  ​President, University of Tübingen, Germany

Collection as Data

• Convener

  
  Angelika Zirker

  Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Tübingen, Germany
  Convener

  
  Natalie Maag

  Head of the Library of the German Literature Archive, Marbach, Germany

• Hanna Fischer

  Professor of German Linguistics, Research Center Deutscher Sprachatlas, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany

  From Historical Survey Sheets to Computational Dialectology: The Wenker Collection as Research Data

  This paper presents a major historical linguistic collection within German dialectology: the more than 57,000 survey sheets ("Wenkerbögen") compiled for Georg Wenker's Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reichs in the late nineteenth century. These documents constitute one of the earliest large-scale, systematic dialect surveys in Europe, yet their analytical potential remained limited for decades due to their handwritten format. Recent digitization efforts have made the entire collection available as high-resolution scans, forming the basis for a dedicated web application designed to transform this corpus into usable research data. At the core of this application is a citizen-science workflow through which volunteers collaboratively transcribe the historical questionnaires. This approach not only accelerates the creation of machine-readable data but also enables transparent quality control. The app provides map-based access that visualizes the spatial distribution of the sheets. Furthermore, the Wenkerbögen are linked to the linguistic-geographical information system SprachGIS and, through this connection, are embedded within the Text+ research data infrastructure, enabling interoperability with other resources and services.The presentation demonstrates how this collection—long difficult to access—has been transformed into a dynamic data resource. Several recent research outcomes illustrate the novel analytical possibilities arising from the digitized and transcribed Wenker materials, including linguistic variables previously not considered as well as cultural and socio-demographic information that has not yet been systematically explored. These enriched data support new computational approaches to dialect change. By framing the Wenker collection as "collections as data," the talk highlights both the methodological challenges and the emerging research opportunities that result from the convergence of heritage collections, citizen science, and digital humanities.

• Gaetan Rappo

  Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Japanese History, Faculty of Culture and Information Science, Dōshisha University Kyoto, Japan

  Data Mining and Text Reuse in the Collections of Japanese Buddhist Texts

  This presentation outlines the current state of a computational workflow designed to analyze Japanese religious corpora dating from the 9th to the 16th centuries, specifically Buddhist and Shinto collections. The ultimate objective is to provide a clearer, long-term picture of doctrinal evolutions that transcends traditional sectarian boundaries. The methodology is designed to be flexible, often beginning directly with the processing of manuscripts to create digital editions grounded in Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. Utilizing tools such as the Versioning Machine to visualize textual variants, this philological foundation supports subsequent data mining tasks. The analysis combines text mining techniques such as topic modeling with vectorization strategies for text reuse detection. By synthesizing these approaches, the project aims to establish a framework for mapping the complex intertextuality and shifting doctrinal landscapes within Japan's historical religious texts.

• Sarah Schnitzler

  PhD candidate in Literary and Cultural Theory and a Researcher in Fan Fiction at the DLA in Marbach, Germany

  Adding extra tags to prevent future confusion: Fan Fiction Paratext and/as Library Metadata

  Fanfiction as a medium is characterised by its sprawling, ephemeral nature in the digital space. Fans who produce and consume fanfiction have themselves implemented a system of metadata, specifically designed for the needs of transformative fan activities, to allow for maximum accessibility of their content. The poster child of this networked metadata system is indubitably the platform Archive of Our Own (AO3). Designed to fit the specific needs of its userbase, the AO3 has standardised a process of tagging and categorising a work of fanfiction from the moment of uploading. Any work is thus catalogued within the digital archive according to a set of suggested criteria, as well as any additional information a writer may feel the need for. Made possible by the archive's volunteer group of so-called "tag wranglers," who continuously order and connect the tags in use as the archive expands, the interface is highly searchable and accessible. The AO3's metadata system thus allows not only for free browsing according to an infinite combination of criteria, but even for serendipitous discovery.For any efforts to archive works of fanfiction, such as the collection initiated by the library of the German Literature Archive Marbach (DLA) in October 2025, the resultant metadata presents a unique opportunity and challenge. In a collecting institution such as the DLA, any archive material needs to be catalogued and made accessible for researchers. This process is often standardised and mirrors (international) norms and guidelines. DLA metadata thus permits synchronicity with systems such as the GND (the Integrated Authority File managed by the German National Library). When the material entering the archive's collection is a work of fanfiction, the fan constructed metadata system and the system implemented by an institution such as the DLA collide. This collision raises questions: Do the needs of a fanfiction platform like the AO3, which its metadata is uniquely designed to fulfil, overlap with the needs of a library collection? And if so, can this overlap be utilised productively in order to facilitate and enrich the archiving process or even to generate knowledge for future strategies of cataloguing? It is by answering these questions and exploring this overlap that we can discover the value fanfiction collections present for archiving processes and library cataloguing.

• Megan Bushnell

  Researcher in linguistic data, Oxford Text Archive, UK

  Mobilising the Oxford Text Archive in the Development of Computational Linguistic Tools

  The Oxford Text Archive is one of the oldest repositories of digital literary and linguistic data. Founded in 1976 at the dawn of text encoding, the archive boasts over 70,000 deposits, featuring digital editions of texts, linguistic corpora, lexicons, dictionaries, semantic networks, and language analysis tools, from a variety of time periods and languages. With the advent of AI, this massive dataset has new potential uses for the development of large language models and AI tools – especially regarding responsibly sourced, quality data. However, work needs to be done to investigate how to effectively harness this data, given its previously stated diversity, and how this diversity can be a strength, especially for generating tools to benefit lesser-resourced languages and historical varieties. This presentation outlines initiatives the Oxford Text Archive has led to expand its holdings and to explore how its data might contribute to new research. In collaboration with its CLARIN partners, the Oxford Text Archive has been working to strengthen the volume and quality of data made available for lesser-resourced languages of the UK, leading to the creation of a new CLARIN centre for Digital Resources for the Languages in Ireland and Britain (DR-LIB). In collaboration with the DR-LIB Centre, the Oxford Text Archive has recently carried out a pilot project, 'Unlocking AI for the Languages in Britain and Ireland', which aims to improve the available digital resources for lesser-resourced languages in the UK and adapt training resources using new and enhanced language models. This presentation will discuss lessons learned from both the DR-LIB centre and 'Unlocking AI' project, and will outline future plans for supporting the development of computational tools for lesser-resourced and historical languages.

Preserving Integrity: Collective Actions for Trust and Impact

• Convener

  
  Michael Levine-Clark

  Dean of Libraries, University of Denver Libraries, Colorado, USA

• Emilie Hardman

  Curatorial and Archival Practice Director, JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services, ITHAKA, USA

  From Distribution to Stewardship

• Cristina Blanco-Sancho

  Senior Director of Product Management, Academic AI, Clarivate, USA

  How Infrastructure, Metadata, and Analytics Shape Trust

• Stephen Rhind-Tutt

  President, Coherent Digital, USA

  Using AI for Increased Efficiency and Functionality

• Terry Oaks Gallaway

  Executive Director, SCELC, USA

  The Consortium as a Trust-Building Organism

Collection development under constraint: coordination, collaboration, and partnership in a «coopetitive » world

• Convener

  
  Julien Roche

  University Librarian and Director of the Libraries, University Lille, France; LIBER President

• Stephanie Chancy

  Caribbean Partnerships Librarian, Director of Operations Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA

  When Cooperation is the Key, an Introduction to the Digital Library of the Caribbean

  For more than two decades the Digital Library of the Caribbean has endeavored to build partnerships, advance capacity building among partners, and encourage the preservation of Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora research resources. Over the years these efforts, which take many forms, have established dLOC as a non-extractive organization that fosters mutually beneficial relationships, while serving as a centralized access point for Caribbean research material. In the session, dLOC's Director of Operations introduces the organization, its operating model, and post-custodial approach to collection development. The presentation highlights the cooperative nature of the partnerships where all partners have a voice, all contribute to its sustainability, and all come together to give an international user base free access to collections that focus on the Caribbean and its diaspora.

• Grégory Miura

  Executive Director, CollEx-Persée consortium / Campus Condorcet, Paris, France

  CollEx-Persée in a Networked World: Can Federated Infrastructures Balance Access, Sovereignty, and Permanence? A Case Study in Coopetitive Collection Development Under Constraint

  This intervention critically examines CollEx-Persée as a federated yet flawed experiment in balancing access, sovereignty, and permanence within today's constrained academic ecosystem. While it breaks from legacy consortium models through distributed governance and collective innovation, it remains caught between transformative potential and structural constraints—fragmentation risks, ephemeral resource dependencies, and uneven standard adoption. By incubating shared practices such as collaborative cataloging and open archiving, CollEx-Persée redefines collection development, yet its success hinges on addressing funding instability, institutional disparities, and the digital divide. Far from an idealized vision, this case study grounds its analysis in the complexities of coopetitive dynamics, offering a sober yet forward-looking perspective on the possibilities and limits of federated infrastructures in an era of scarcity.

• Brian Hole

  CEO of Dromologics, London, UK, and founder of Ubiquity Press.

  Opportunities and principles for Libraries to collaborate for more impact in publishing

  Academic publishing doesn't change quickly, yet it is probably entering its greatest period of change since the advent of the internet. Developments in open science, publishing and funding models, and especially AI all provide opportunities for a stronger and more innovative role for libraries in publishing, both independently and in collaboration with other partners. The speaker will discuss these topics and suggest principles on which such collaboration can be centred, based on his extensive experience.

• Jérémie Roche

  Director of institutional relations at Cairn.info, France

  Under pressure - Collaboration and innovation in francophone scholarly publishing

  Just over twenty years ago, several independent (and competing) francophone publishers made a bold and unusual decision. Rather than going at it alone, they decided to join forces and launch a common online platform to offer digital versions of their journals: Cairn.info. The platform has since grown significantly, now gathering publications by close to 400 scholarly publishers, from all over the French-speaking world. Since its inception, Cairn.info's faced challenges - some unique, others similar to those faced by publishers of all sizes, all over the world. How can one achieve a representative collection from a truly equal and collaborative perspective? How can one invest, innovate and make a difference while under significant pressure, in a small linguistic area and target market? What can small(er) francophone publishers learn from their much bigger, international counterparts? The presentation will answer these questions, and more, through several milestones in Cairn.info's history, from initial catalog development to a current foray into generative AI, from innovative commercial models to international partnerships.

• James O'Donnell

  University Librarian, Arizona State University, USA