About the GLAM labs community
A Gallery, Library, Archive or Museum (GLAM) Lab is a space to experiment and innovate on-site and on-line with digitised and born digital collections and data organisations curate. The international GLAM Labs community is a voluntary group of people connected to cultural heritage and other organisations that support access and experimentation to the digital collections and data they curate and provide access to.
History
The International GLAM Labs Community was born in September 2018 at an event on building global 'Library Labs' held by the British Library. The diverse programme brought together over 70 people from 53 institutions, 23 countries and 4 continents to discuss relevant topics and understand the landscape of GLAM Labs around the world. It was followed up by a second global Labs meetup at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen in March 2019 where similar topics where discussed in the programme.
In September 2019, 16 members of the GLAM Labs community came together in Doha in September 2019, for a five-day book sprint to write and share their experiences of establishing and operating GLAM Labs, offering guidance, examples and inspiration to others who want to Open a GLAM Lab.
A follow-up collaboration and GLAM Labs survey produced the Checklist for Publishing Collections as Data in GLAM institutions.
The voluntary community has grown to over 400 people from more than 100 institutions, in over 50 countries. Our community members are actively sharing their work — speaking at events, publishing on GLAM Lab topics, and participating in webinars, workshops, and regular meetings around the world.
GLAM Labs Non-profit Organisation
GLAM Labs has established a non-profit organisation - legal entity GLAM Labs MTÜ registered in Estonia (80659291) supporting the activities of the community when required.
Our Personal Identification Code (PIC) is 869848859 if you would like to include us in European Commission funded project proposals.
Do you want to appear in the map?
View projects & innovative initiatives that reuse digital collections by the application of computational methods such as Jupyter Notebooks.
Submit your Jupyter Notebook project.
View projects, services, innovative initiatives, thoughts and ideas that reuse digital cultural heritage collections.
AGENDA
I. 15:00-15:10 (CET) Introduction to GLAM Labs
II. Presentations (45 minutes)
Data Analysis and Visualization: ‘I get by with a little help from AI’
by Filipe Bento, University of Aveiro
Fixing the Flaws: Re-Doing OCR for Old Newspapers
by Max Odsbjerg Pedersen, Royal Danish Library
Bridging AI and Libraries: Refining & Releasing Large Scale Library Datasets
by Matteo Cargnelutti and Catherine Brobston, Harvard Law School Library
III. 15:55-16:00 Final Remarks
Please register for event by following this link*.
*The webinar is kindly hosted by the Royal National Library of Denmark and organised by Kat Hofmann Gasser (khg). Once you have registered you should receive an email from Kat (khg) confirming your registration, a zoom link for the webinar and how to add the webinar to your online calendar.
On Thursday 25 and Friday 26 of June 2026, we will hold a two day conference collaborating with the Edinburgh Futures Institute, to bring together the GLAM Labs practitioner community again to examine what GLAM Labs have achieved over the past 10 years, what challenges there have been and what future models or approaches there could be to these experimental spaces.
Through a series of workshops and talks, this event will draw up a vision for GLAM Labs Futures, imagining, predicting and projecting what the future holds for the experimental reuse of digital collections and data from cultural heritage and other organisations.
We are proud to announce that our keynote for the event will be:
Professor Melissa Terras (MBE)
Our endnote speaker will be:
Dr Tim Sherratt, Historian and Hacker
For more information, please visit the GLAM Labs Futures 20206 Event Page
AGENDA
I. 15:00-15:10 Introduction to GLAM Labs
II. 15:10-15:55 Presentations
Ellen Van Keer | Meemoo: Metadata & AV collections
Philippe Genêt | Deutsche National Bibliothek (DNB): Coding da Vinci hackathons
Stephanie Nitsche | Deutsche National Bibliothek: DNB’s user-friendly API-request and "data-dump” apps
III. 15:55-16:00 FINAL REMARKS
Web Archives Collections as Data: workshop at at the Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries (DHNB) in Estonia (March 2025) & the IIPC Web Archiving Conference in Oslo (April 2025): these workshops explored the publication and reuse of Collections as Data based on Web Archive Content.
We have released our first annual report — take a look at what the community accomplished over the past year!
Members of the GLAM Labs community organised a panel and a workshop at the 8th annual Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries (DHNB) conference. The first in-person GLAM Labs meeting in 5 years was hosted by the National and University Library of Iceland.
A new article by the GLAM Labs community offers a checklist that can be used for both creating and evaluating digital collections suitable for computational use:
