We're setting sail for Denmark! Along with colleagues from the UK, Austria, Belgium, Egypt, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Qatar, Spain, Sweden and the USA, we will be mooring at Copenhagen's Black Diamond, waterfront home to Denmark's Royal Library, for the second International Building Library Labs event: 4-5 March 2019.

For some time now, leading national, state, university and public libraries around the world have been creating 'digital lab type environments'. The purpose of these 'laboratories' is to afford access to their institutions' digital content - the digitised and 'born digital' collections as well as data - and to provide a space where users can experiment and work with that content in creative, innovative and inspiring ways. Our shared ethos is to open up our collections for everyone: digital researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators, and everyone in between.

BL Labs has been running in such a capacity for six years. In September 2018, we hosted a 2-day workshop at the British Library in London for invited participants from national, state and university libraries - the first event of its kind in the world. It was a resounding success, and it was decided that we should organise a second event, this time in collaboration with our colleagues in Copenhagen.

Next week's participants, from over 30 institutions, will be sharing lessons learned, talking about innovative projects and services that have used their digital collections and data in clever ways, and continuing to establish the foundations for an international network of Library Labs. We aim to work together in the spirit of collaboration so that we can continue to build even better Library Labs for our users in the future.

Our packed programme is available to view on Eventbrite or as a Googledoc. We still have a few spaces left so if you are interested in coming along, you can still book here. As well as presentations and plenary debates, we will have eight lightning talks with topics ranging from how to handle big data to how to run a data visualisation lab. To accommodate our many delegates, with their own interests and specialisms, we will break out into 12 parallel discussion groups focusing on subjects such as how to set up a lab; how to get access to data; moving from 'project' lab to 'business as usual'; data curation; how to deal with large datasets; and using Labs & Makerspaces for data-driven research and innovation in creative industries. 

We will blog again after the event, and provide links to some of the presentations and outputs. Watch this space! 

Danish-themed images trawled from our British Library Flickr Images set: pages 37, 126, and 15 of Copenhagen, the Capital of Denmark, published by the Danish Tourist Society, 1898. Find the original book here.

Posted by Eleanor Cooper on behalf of BL Labs