Open & Networked – The German Digital Library at the Librarians‘ Day 2018 in Berlin

By Claudia Effenberger (specialist unit for library/service centre, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek)

The 107th Librarians’ Day took place in the Estrel Congress Center in Berlin from 12 June to 15 June. Under the title “Open & Networked”, this year’s event once again offered a wide range of information and training for librarians. With a lecture, consultation hours and a booth, the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek also took part once again.

Questions upon questions – our consultation hours at the booth

We were available at the booth at any time. For the lunch breaks, we had set two thematic priorities: the Ingest-Clinic for all questions around workflows and the data ingest to the DDB as well as DDBstudio, the tool for the independent creation of virtual exhibitions.

The Ingest-Clinic offered the possibility to contact us for concrete and very detailed data issues. By viewing the data together, we were able to solve some problems and clarify open questions. Thus, there are no more obstacles for the delivery of data. 

DDBstudio offers data partners the opportunity to creatively publish their inventories on the DDB’s website with more content-related context. The existing layout (https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/content/journal/ausstellungen) is complemented by a further, more modern layout. The works concerning this are in full swing, and there is great interest. We look forward to many creative and interesting exhibitions which will emerge in the future. 

The best comes at the end – a view behind the scenes

Under the title “System change under the hood – the new basic architecture of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek”, Uwe Müller (managing director for technology, development and service at the DDB) and Stephan Bartholmei (responsible for innovation and product development at the DDB) demonstrate how the DDB has prepared itself for the future. The lecture was hold on Friday morning at 9 am, and it found great interest. 

 

Stephan Bartholmei reported on how the DDB system was fundamentally renovated and equipped with modern technologies “under the hood” within the “DDB 2017” project. This, in particular, includes the distributed NoSQL database Apache Cassandra and the distributed compute framework Apache Spark. Apart from a better scalability for the faster recording of new data and their regular update, it particularly becomes possible now to implement completely new scenarios of use – such as the addition of object-related enrichments to the DDB’s data base through automatic procedures, editorial processes or crowd sourcing approaches, the connection of objects to “virtual collections” as well as statistical analyses on the total inventory or parts thereof. These scenarios were, in part, already implemented and tested within the scope of the project. Dr. Uwe Müller stressed that the main part of the potential arising now would still have to be enhanced in the coming years. 

We are a little sad that the Librarians’ Day is over again. For also this year, we were glad to receive a lot of positive feedback. “I enjoy browsing the DDB privately, I can do this for hours.” Our varied contents are not only used for business purposes by the colleagues, the DDB also enjoys great popularity privately. In addition, there are many supporters among our visitors: “It is nice to see that the significance of the DDB has meanwhile arrived in people’s minds.” Thank you, we think that, too. 

We are pleased that we can draw such a positive conclusion with regard to the Librarians’ Day 2018. Thank you for the many visits and interesting discussions at the booth. We will see us at the Library Congress in Leipzig next year!