Imprisoned by the Print Mind? Rethinking Libraries in the 21st Century

Despite substantial investments in digitization, library-curated datasets remain conspicuously underrepresented in the landscape of research infrastructures and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). This keynote will trace the conceptual inertia, rooted in centuries-old notions of the book as a physical object and the library as a temple of knowledge, as one possible way of understanding the persistent disconnect between the resource-rich platforms libraries produce and the evolving methodologies that define today’s digital humanities. By identifying the conceptual and operational barriers that hinder alignment, the talk will explore how we could reimagine library practices, expand digital services, and ultimately forge stronger collaborations with scholars. Can we shed the atavistic baggage of print culture and embrace the library’s potential as a dynamic, data-driven engine for 21st-century research?