Digital research services at the National Library of Latvia: from digital collections to data mining

• In Event: Activizing heritage through digitalization, exhibition, and interdisciplinary research

Abstract

Digitization of the collections of the National Library of Latvia (NLL) was started in the beginning of the 21st century. Today, 80-90% of the periodicals and sections of other collections are digitized and accessible to the public. In the past several years, the focus has been gradually shifting form the efforts of mass digitization with the aim of preservation to the development of new services that improve access and enable new modes of digital discovery and scholarship. This paper concentrates on two initiatives: the creation of the integrated search engine National Digital Library (https://lndb.lv/), which aims to encompass the resources of all major heritage institutions of Latvia, and the formation of digital infrastructures for in-depth text analysis and visualization of the digital collections of books, periodicals, and transcribed manuscripts. The research services currently provided by the NLL include creating text corpora on demand and providing text analysis and visualization in Jupyter Notebook environment; other services are being tested. To assist the error-prone process of developing new services, the NLL has created the Latvian Prose Counter (proza.lnb.lv) – an interactive website that allows to explore various quantitative parameters of 19th and 20th century Latvian prose fiction. It is a demonstration tool that informs users about the possibilities of textual analysis but, from a developer’s perspective, the Prose Counter serves as an outlet for testing and cultivating various functionalities that are candidates for becoming new core services in the Latvian National Digital Library.

Short Bio

Anda Baklāne is a curator of digital research services and a researcher at the National Library of Latvia. She is a lecturer at the University of Latvia where she teaches courses “Digital humanities and social sciences” and “Computer analysis of text and data visualization”. Her main research interests include methods of digital text analysis, 20th century and contemporary Latvian poetry, and conceptual metaphor theory.

Author

• Anda Baklāne, National Library of Latvia