Projects

NAKI III - Programme to Support Applied Research and Development of National and Cultural Identity of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic

Orbis Pictus - reviving the book for the cultural and creative sector

The holdings of Czech libraries contain vast amounts of information, dominated by textual information. However, illustrative information (drawings, maps, diagrams, graphs, photographs, tables, etc.) is also an essential part of our cultural heritage. Thanks to OCR and full-text search systems, digitisation opens hidden textual cultural heritage to the public. The project aims to open the illustrative content of digital libraries to the public similarly and enable its use in the creative industries. Through machine learning methods, it will be possible to identify illustrative elements in digitised documents, categorise them, add contextual data to facilitate their retrieval, and thus expand the range of digital library services. The outputs will include a tool for finding different depictions of the same people and creating a database of them.

The Written Treasure of Dissolved Monasteries in Bohemia

Monasteries have been the cultural centres of our country since the early Middle Ages and our written tradition originated in them. The dissolution of many of them during the Josephine reforms at the end of the 18th century meant that the surviving written treasure of these houses, which still form an essential part of the national, historical, and cultural heritage, was looted and destroyed. The books (manuscripts and prints) and archival materials (mainly documents, official books, and records) were transferred from the dissolved monasteries to the newly established Public and University Library (today's NLCR) in the Klementinum. Much of the archival material was moved to the Family, Court, and State Archives in Vienna and is now stored in the Czech National Archives. The joint project of the NLCR and the National Archives aims to integrate the written holdings and collections virtually, provide tools for studying monastic history in the Czech lands, and present the preserved source wealth of monastic archival and library collections using computer technology and exhibitions. The result will be a specialised public database and interactive map serving as research platforms for experts and the wider public. The development of the written treasure of Czech monasteries will be demonstrated through the example of selected religious houses and orders, with particular attention paid to women's convents. The research and its results will be presented in exhibitions on women's monasteries dissolved during the Josephine reforms and on the act of dissolving monasteries.

Roots and Fruits of European Science in Czech, Moravian and Silesian Historical Library Collections

This project of the consortium of the National Museum (NM), the National Heritage Institute (NHI), the National Library of the Czech Republic (NLCR), the Library of the CAS, v. v. i. (LCAS), and the Museum of Art Olomouc (MAO) builds on the experience of all participating institutions in researching historical book collections and focuses on researching the libraries of scientists and scholars, on the phenomenon of scientific literature in private libraries of individuals, families, and nobility, and in institutional libraries. The focus and aim of the research is to map the acquisition practice, reception, and work with books in the field of scientific literature and to present the results of the project through eight exhibitions with a critical catalogue and four audiovisual documentaries with a professional script accompanied by several peer-reviewed articles. The survey of historical book collections will be carried out mainly in the collections of the NM, in chateau libraries managed by the NHI and the NM, in the oldest part of the library collection of LCAS, in the historical and reserve collections of the NLCR, in the Moravian Regional Library (MRL), in the Archbishop's Palace Library in Kroměříž, and in the Scientific Library in Olomouc (SLO). For comparative reasons, an analysis of the Zittau historical collection, now divided between the Christian Weise Bibliothek in Zittau and the Staats-Landes- und Universitätsbibliothek in Dresden is also included. The project also includes applying and using two previously certified methodologies in practice: the methodology for preventive care of historical library collections in the specific conditions of the NHI and the methodology for registration of book provenance and book owners. The long-term results will be new records of book and library owners (scientists and scholars) for the Provenio database, the expansion of specific information in records related to scientific literature in private, family, and institutional libraries, and the implementation of new functionality to link more closely the database and the Provenio.net web portal.

Smart Digilink - machine learning for the digitisation of printed heritage

Czech libraries have extensive collections of monographs and periodicals that are gradually deteriorating due to wear and tear and paper decay. Despite intensive efforts to save printed originals through restoration, the key tool for the preservation of cultural heritage and the information contained in them is digitisation, which significantly reduces the mechanical wear of the originals and, at the same time, makes their information content available to the general public. However, the capacity of digitisation workflows in individual libraries is limited by the manual intensity of the digitisation process. Therefore, fewer pages are digitised in libraries each year than are added to the collections. Many older documents are gradually deteriorating. In many cases, some documents are already entirely inaccessible to users to protect them from complete decay. The project aims to develop tools using machine learning in the digitisation process and to use these tools to partially automate the digitisation workflow to make it significantly more efficient with the help of modern software. The result will be usable at digitisation workplaces of large Czech and foreign libraries, either as a stand-alone installation or as a remote service provided by the NLCR or another institution. These include software tools and methodologies for aligning and scaling captured images and tools supporting machine generation of structural metadata.

The use of plasma for the treatment of library collections

The development of a methodology for applying technologies using low-temperature plasma in the preservation and restoration of materials in library collections, and their disinfection or sterilisation using plasma. The programme will also verify the safety of plasma technologies for the materials to be treated.

Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (TACR)

The Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (TACR) supports cooperation between research organisations and the business community. Within its programmes, it selects and then funds applied research and innovation projects, one of which is Czech Book Illustration in the Early Modern Period.

Czech Book Illustration in the Early Modern Period

The project processes and makes available illustrative material in old prints registered in the Czech National Retrospective Bibliography databases. It also uses digital technologies to study the visual and material culture of the early modern period in the Czech lands. Based on the primary research results, image material will be collected in memory institutions and, according to the newly created manual for description and recording of book illustrations, image data and descriptive metadata will be entered into source databases and evaluated. The result will be a multifunctional web interface entitled E-Illustrations, which will make this hitherto little-known material accessible to a broader public and provide new tools for research, education, and popularisation activities in the history of book culture.

LINDAT-CLARIAH-CZ

The Digital Research Infrastructure for Language Technology, Arts and Humanities belongs to the LINDAT-CLARIAH-CZ, a project aimed at processing, storing, and making available the data and corpora available to the participating institutions.
The LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ Large Research Infrastructure is the Czech national node (distributed among 17 participating partners from 15 institutions) of the pan-European research infrastructures CLARIN-ERIC (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure), DARIAH-ERIC (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and EHRI-ERIC (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, under development). LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ collects, processes, annotates (manually and automatically), and preserves linguistic, multimedia, and other data related to the Czech language environment, including from a historical perspective. It also provides open access to these data and to technologies relevant to the humanities and social sciences and related interdisciplinary research (such as formal and computational linguistics, translation studies, lexicography, psychology, sociology, neurolinguistics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence). Arts and humanities applying digital methods include literature and literary studies, history including oral history resources and research on the Holocaust and genocides of the 20th century, historical bibliography, culture and cultural studies, art history, philosophy, film and film history, including new media and their analysis, visual arts, musicology and music history, ethnology, folklore, archaeology, Egyptology, and interdisciplinary fields in combination, including in combination with modern technologies. LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ has significantly contributed to developing the CLARIN DSpace data repository, which it provides to collaborating organisations nationally and internationally. The infrastructure makes digitised data resources in these fields available in open mode to the scientific community at large, including the software services needed to use these resources effectively. Educational activities are also part of the infrastructure programme.