Dávid Baranko is a librarian, project manager, and coordinator of the Libraries for Slovakia consortium at the Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information. He is responsible for the SmartLab initiative – a nationwide network of 50 creative-educational spaces in libraries across Slovakia, bridging the gap between technology, education, and community engagement. He also leads the Smart Education in Libraries project, offering innovative training opportunities for librarians through international cooperation.

Presentation: Smart Laboratories and Smart Education in Slovak Libraries – Innovation for the Future
This presentation explores the SmartLab initiative – a nationwide network of creative-educational spaces in Slovak libraries that integrates STEAM education, digital literacy, and practical innovation. It also introduces the Smart Education project, which brings cutting-edge training opportunities for librarians through cross-border cooperation with the Czech Republic.

Discover how Slovak libraries are evolving into Smart Education Centers, equipping users with maker technologies, robots, and construction kits. Learn about the challenges and successes of implementing SmartLabs, their impact on communities, and the future of library-driven innovation.

Illyria Brejchová is a digital curator and developer with first-hand experience building data repositories in the arts and humanities in the Islandora system as part of the Digitalia MUNI ARTS infrastructure. The infrastructure aims to not only secure the long-term preservation of research data, but also to enrich their metadata, and provide tools on top of the repository facilitating new types of research in digital humanities. Thanks to Illyria’s education in both computer science and library and information science she is involved in the entire development process from the initial stakeholder interviews and metadata modelling to implementation and user testing. She has a particular interest in data integration and linked data. She is involved in the projects LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ and EOSC CZ.

Presentation: Digitalia MUNI ARTS: A Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities
Humanities researchers need sustainable repositories to store, manage, present, and integrate their research data following FAIR principles. The Digitalia MUNI ARTS infrastructure has been helping research teams achieve this goal at the faculty level for the past six years. The team has developed a workflow for building highly customized user-centred repositories in the Islandora Digital Assets Management System. This presentation will introduce this workflow and discuss the processes of requirement specification, domain modelling, data migration, user interface creation, and user testing on the use case of archaeological datasets in the Archaeo3Data repository.

Prague University of Economics and Business fellow and researcher focused on the intelligence studies, particularly on the CI, TECHINT, OSINT domains. Dr. Jan Černý‘s research activities cover topics on external data and information environment analysis of enterprises, early warning systems, surface web & deep web investigations, search strategy and tactics, and digital forensics. He also deals with public librarianship management, specifically on the role of libraries in today’s competitive environment.

Neil Jefferies is Executive Director of the Open Preservation Foundation, a Director of Data Futures GmbH and a Digital Innovation Specialist at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. He is a co-creator of the International Image Interoperability Framework and the Oxford Common File Layout, Community Manager for the SWORD protocol and a member of the Bit List Council for the Digital Preservation Coalition. His research interests include knowledge and information models, APIs for enhancing access to digital resources, digital preservation and long-terms access, and the mechanisms of digital scholarship. He teaches on various topics on Oxford’s MSc in Digital Scholarship and the Digital Humanities Summer School.

Presentation: Why Open Infrastructure is Essential for Long Term Access
Digital preservation for long-term access to information is an exercise in mastering the art of the exit strategy. Unlike physical materials, digital materials exist in an environment characterized by rapid change. Obsolescence, of software, hardware, systems and organizations, represent existential threats to the survival of knowledge. However, the primary risks to materials, aside from human error, accrue out of the transitions necessitated by obsolescence.

Open Infrastructure, comprising Open Source Software, Open Standards and Open Information Resources, can help mitigate these risks and increase the likelihood that long-term access goals can be realized. While an organization need not, and probably will not, rely entirely on Open Infrastructure for its digital preservation needs, the tactical deployment of open components can be highly effective.

Riitta Koikkalainen makes her living an information specialist in The National Library of Finland, as an expert on scholarly publishing and communication. As a part of her job, she coordinates the work of the Kotoistus, service in-between internationalisation and localisation. Current editor-in-chief of Tietolinja. Riitta is also one of the founders of the philosophical magazine niin & näin and a member of it’s editorial board. From the very beginning of her life in academia she has had a strong interest on the sociology of knowledge. There are no meanings outside social interaction, at least such that could be (re)presented purely as such. And this makes the world a very interesting place. You can find her on Twitter @Riitta_AK, and on Mastodon @RiittaK@mastodon.social

Anthony Leroy is a software engineer at the Libraries of the Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) since 2011.He is in charge of the digitization infrastructure and the digital preservation program of the University Libraries. He coordinates the activities of the SAFE distributed preservation network, an international LOCKSS network operated by seven partner universities. He is also actively involved in various research data management activities at ULB.Anthony is an engineer in electronics and telecommunications with a PhD in microelectronics (ULB) and has been a researcher for almost ten years in collaboration with several industrial partners.

David Minor works at the University of California, San Diego, where he is the Director of the Research Data Curation Program in the UC San Diego Library. In this role he helps define and lead work needed for the contemporary and long-term management digital resources. His position includes significant interaction with stakeholders on the UC San Diego campus, throughout the UC System, and national initiatives. His program also includes management of Chronopolis, a national-scale digital preservation network.

Dr. Norman Meuschke’s main research interests are methods for semantic similarity analysis and their application for information retrieval. Beyond his core research, he is interested in applied data science and knowledge management challenges and the application of blockchain technology to tackle these challenges.

His research spans the fields of:

• Information Retrieval (esp. for text, images, and mathematical content)
• Natural Language Processing
• Plagiarism Detection
• Citation and Link Analysis
• Blockchain Technology
• Information Visualization

Petr Žabička is an expert in library automation with experience in digitisation, digital libraries, and machine learning. As an associate director at the Moravian Library, he is responsible for research and development projects. Currently, his activities focus on implementing machine learning technologies to enhance access to digitised documents. He has been involved in the PERO project, which aimed to improve the accuracy of digitised texts through the application of machine learning algorithms to optical character recognition (OCR). Previously, he led projects related to map digitisation, online access to digitised maps, and the development of the Czech library portal Knihovny.cz.

Anastasia Zhukova has completed her Engineering degree (Diploma in Information Technology) at Moscow Aviation Institute (National Research University) and proceeded with her Master’s studies at the University of Konstanz with a focus on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. She compiled her master’s thesis on the topic of Automated Identification of Framing by Word Choice and Labeling to Reveal Media Bias in News Articles.

Her research interests focus on two projects: identifying media bias and developing an AI assistant for plant operations. The first project is interdisciplinary research that applies cross-document coreference resolution to resolve mentions with high lexical diversity to automatically identify media bias by word choice and labeling. The second project is an industry project focusing on the domain adaptation of language models, information retrieval and information extraction in the low resource setup.

Anastasia’s prime interest lies in the areas of:

• Applied Natural Language Processing
• Cross-document coreference resolution
• Domain adaptation of language models
• NLP for the low-resource languages, e.g., German
• Information visualization