Speakers

Keynote speakers

Melissa Terras

Professor Melissa Terras (MA MSc DPhil CLTHE FCLIP FBCS CITP FRHistS FSA FHEA FREng FRSE MBE)  is the Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh's Design Informatics in Edinburgh College of Art.  Her research focuses on the digitisation of cultural heritage, including its technologies, procedures, and impact, and how this intersects with internet technologies.

Dr. Tim Sherratt

Historian and hacker who researches the possibilities and politics of digital cultural collections. He has worked across the cultural heritage sector and has been developing online resources relating to libraries, archives, museums and history since 1993. You can explore some of his experiments at Wragge Labs.

In recent years, Tim's focus has been on giving researchers the resources and information they need to explore GLAM collections as data. Much of this work is documented in the GLAM Workbench, which brings together a wide range of tools, examples, code and tutorials.

In previous lives, Tim has written on weather, progress, and the atomic age, and has worked as Manager of Trove at the National Library of Australia and Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra. He now does some consultancy work, while battling to keep his online resources alive and useful. You can find him at timsherratt.au and in the Fediverse at @wragge@hcommons.social. 

Speakers

Bea Alex

Bea is Professor at Heriot-Watt University and an expert on Natural Language Processing (NLP) applied to healthcare and digital humanities. Previously, she was Chancellor's Fellow and Senior Lecturer at University of Edinburgh, as well as Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. Her research focuses on NLP in low-resource settings, including developing language technology for Scottish Gaelic and extracting clinical information from unstructured healthcare text, such as brain imaging reports in NHS Scotland. She is a strong advocate for open data in research and for making the datasets and tools her group builds available to the wider research community.

Sarah Ames

Sarah is Digital Scholarship Librarian at the National Library of Scotland, with responsibility for Digital Research including the Library’s open data platform, Data Foundry. She has collaborated on a wide range of research initiatives bringing together digital tools and methods to explore the national collections. 

Rebecca Bailey

Jonathan Bourne

Jonathan Bourne is the founder of the AI DataLab THE 3TC, where he specialises in Document Understanding, Document Layout Analysis, and Optical Character Recognition of degraded complex documents. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, where his work covers machine learning, housing equality, and NLP.

Gustavo Candela

Dr. Gustavo Candela is an Associate Professor at the University of Alicante and a researcher. He is a globally recognized expert in the "Collections as Data" movement and Linked Open Data (LOD) frameworks, regularly collaborating on international benchmarking and the development of open-source workflows to transform traditional cultural catalogs into machine-readable datasets. 

Marie Carlin

Marie Carlin is the Coordinator of the BnF DataLab at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). She serves at the forefront of operationalizing "Collections as Data," designing cutting-edge infrastructure and managing collaborative workshops that allow academic researchers and digital humanities scholars to run text and data mining algorithms directly on the French national library's immense digital holdings. 

Sally Chambers

Steven Claeyssens

Dr. Steven Claeyssens is Curator of Digital Collections at the KB, the National Library of the Netherlands, Lecturer in the Book and Digital Media Studies programme at Leiden University, and serves as Co-Chair of the Europeana Research Community. He set up Data Services at the KB (2012), enabling access to the KB's collections as data, co-launched the KB Lab (2014) and the KB_Datalab (2024), and initiated the Datasheets for Digital Cultural Heritage project (2023), establishing a framework for standardising how heritage institutions document their datasets for responsible reuse.

Sam Donvil

Sam Donvil is Domain Manager Metadata at KU Leuven Libraries. His work builds on a long-standing engagement with open knowledge and digital heritage: after starting in the Open Access Department at KU Leuven, he worked at PACKED vzw and meemoo promoting openGLAM across museums, archives, and libraries, including co-organising initiatives such as Public Domain Day, and later at COMMUNIA advocating for the public domain in the EU policy space. 

Maja Drabczyk

Chair of the board at Centrum Cyfrowe in Warsaw, Poland. Sociologist and researcher, expert in the fields of digital cultural heritage, open science, new technologies, and copyright law. Author of reports, analyses, and recommendations on the social impact of technology and related regulations on the culture, education, and science sectors. Board member of the EUscreen Foundation and member of the Administrative Council of the COMMUNIA Association. Actively involved in advocacy networks such as Creative Commons and Knowledge Rights 21. Member of the International Advisory Committee of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme.

Karina Rodriguez Echavarria

Prof Karina Rodriguez Echavarria is a Professor of Visual Computing at the University of Brighton. Her research interests include digital innovations for tangible and intangible cultural heritage, and she leads UKRI-funded research for developing national infrastructures for arts and humanities researchers and practitioners. She is Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH) and chairs the EG Working Group on Computer Graphics and Cultural Heritage.

Jason Evans

Jason Evans is the Open Data Manager and AI Lead at the National Library of Wales and a prominent advocate for the global Wikimedia movement. He focuses on scaling up linked open data deployments, utilizing Wikidata and Wikibase to enrich metadata, correcting systemic historical gaps, and designing public-facing reparative cataloging practices. 

Nele Gabriëls

Dr. Nele Gabriëls is Domain Manager Digitisation at KU Leuven Libraries. She is responsible for the library’s digitisation workflows from concept to publication as well as for digitisation policy. She develops and manages both digitisation and development projects in collaboration with collection curators, researchers and IT. Her current work focuses, amongst others, on creating a robust framework for collections as data implementation and lab activities. Nele is a core member of the International GLAM Labs Community.

Katrine Gasser

Katrine Gasser is Chief Consultant at the Royal Danish Library, where she works within development, infrastructure, and computational research teams. She is celebrated as one of the principal international co-authors of the landmark textbook Open a GLAM Lab, which provides foundational strategic frameworks for cultural institutions establishing experimental data spaces. 

Megan Gooch

Dr. Megan Gooch is the Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the University of Oxford. Bridging professional museology with academic research, she spearheads large-scale collaborative public engagement programs, digital skills development initiatives, and cross-sector crowdsourcing projects for GLAM data. 

Olga Holownia

Dr. Olga Holownia is a Senior Program Officer for the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) at the Council on Library and Information Resources, who has worked extensively across international networks. She leads programmes, outreach, and research engagement, including the Web Archiving Conference. In her current role, she drives the Web Archives Collections as Data (WACAD) initiative and the creation of a virtual web archiving lab.

Alba Irollo

Dr. Alba Irollo works at the Europeana Foundation, where she is responsible for the research-related area of the common European data space for cultural heritage, the European Union’s leading infrastructure for cultural heritage data, which leverages experience of Europeana. The research area connects the cultural heritage sector with academia and research, fostering a ‘Collections as Data’ approach, coordinates the Europeana Research Community and also contributes to the development of the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage, as a working environment for research and innovation in cultural heritage.

Johannes Knüchel

Johannes is a Project Manager at the Austrian National Library (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek). With his ONB Labs colleagues, he is working towards facilitating data access to the physical collections of the library for researchers, students, and artists. He is also helping to orchestrate symposia such as “Newspapers as Datasets,” and managing various internal projects. 

Andrea Kocsis

Dr. Andrea Kocsis is a digital humanities lecturer and researcher specializing in spatial data analysis, GIS, and the computational preservation of industrial and maritime history. Her research uses semantic mapping and digital geography to analyze how local collective memories are visually represented and preserved online. 

Olexandr Konovalov

Dr Olexandr Konovalov is a lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, where he is leading the Research Software Group, focused on interdisciplinary computational research and development of underpinning research software, training in scientific computing, and studies in research software aspects. Olexandr is a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, a national UK facility to cultivate best practices of working with code and data. He is an Instructor and an Instructor Trainer for The Carpentries, a global volunteer-based organisation whose members teach foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide. He is also the founder and coordinator of the Ukrainian Carpentries Community.

Joseph Nockels

Joe Nockels is Lecturer in Digital Humanities (Information Studies) at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on the digital representation, presentation and analysis of physical cultural heritage, specifically looking at Automatic Text Recognition’s impact on our collective information environment. He is a trained archivist, with stints working at the National Library of Scotland, Library of Congress, and National Trust.

Will Lamb

Professor William Lamb holds a Personal Chair in Gaelic Ethnology and Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. He specialises in descriptive grammar, speech recognition and language technology for Scottish Gaelic, and his Scottish Gaelic: A Comprehensive Grammar (Routledge, 2024) is recognised as the foremost grammatical treatment of the language. He collaborates frequently with archives, the BBC and digital repositories (e.g. Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches) to transcribe and preserve vulnerable community-generated oral and textual histories, work funded by the UKRI, Bòrd na Gàidhlig and the Scottish Government. 

His commentary has appeared in Nature, The Times and across the BBC. Two recent open-data projects include Opening the Well, a crowdsourcing platform for transcribing Scottish Gaelic folklore recordings, and Hidden Heritages, which has transcribed and made searchable over 5,500 Irish and Scottish folktales from manuscript and printed sources, many indexed by tale-type. 

Kirsty Lingstadt

Kirsty Lingstadt is the Director of Library, Archives and Learning Services at the University of York, where she focuses on the strategic development of digital infrastructure for learning, teaching, and research. Her leadership focuses on access to digital collections, digital making, scholarship, and sustainable preservation. She previously held senior leadership roles at the University of Edinburgh, Historic Environment Scotland, and within local government, bringing extensive experience in managing institutional digital transformation and cultural heritage assets.

Mahendra Mahey

Mahendra Mahey is a Research Data Analyst (Humanities) at Tallinn University, a Junior Researcher at the Estonian National Museum in Tartu, Estonia, a PhD candidate at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. He is also Principal Investigator on the RODEO project (RespOnsible Digitalisation in EstOnia), supporting Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts (SSHA) in Open and Responsible Research and Innovation  and co-creating pathways for responsible use of High-Performance Computing (HPC).

He previously helped establish and manage British Library Labs (BL Labs) which supported innovative use and experimentation with the Library’s digital collections and data through projects, competitions, awards, and community engagement. He established and is still part of an international GLAM Labs network (https://www.glamlabs.io/) and co-authored a handbook to help Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums establish and sustain successful digital innovation labs, Open a GLAM Lab (2019) which has been translated into 6 other languages.

Sebastian Majstorovic

Sebastian Majstorovic is a digital historian, open data consultant and the founder of the Save Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) and Data Rescue Project (DRP) initiatives . He focuses on web archiving, rapid-response digital emergency preservation, and building resilient geospatial databases to protect endangered global heritage from geopolitical conflicts. 

Ewan McAndrew

Simeon Newbatt

Simeon Newbatt is the Makerspace Manager at the University of Edinburgh’s Main Library. With 13 years’ experience leading open access making spaces and delivering experiential workshops, he champions creative freedom, exploration, and skills development across both digital and traditional crafts. Beginning his career in the third sector before moving into higher education, he has supported a wide range of learners and projects. This cross-sector experience underpins his strong commitment to advancing equity and diversity within the making environment.  

Rubén Ojeda

Rubén Ojeda has been part of the Wikimedia movement for 17 years and has been Project Manager at Wikimedia Spain since 2016. He works with various institutions, training their staff in Wikimedia projects and the values of free knowledge. He promotes and supports processes for the release of data and content, and coordinates activities to integrate these institutions as active agents of open knowledge.

Ismael Olea

Ismael Olea is an Almería-based technologist, Wikimedian in residence at LaOficina Producciones Culturales, and long-time free/libre open-source software advocate. Active in the commons since 1994, he coordinated TLDP-ES/LuCAS, helped found Hispalinux and local Linux user groups, and has worked across FLOSS strategy, electronic publishing, Linux distributions, Spanish-language linguistic resources, Wikidata and OpenGLAM. His current work develops digital cultural-heritage knowledge graphs, including a cinema-history archive for Almería and the Very Small GLAM concept using Wikibase and affordable open technologies. 

Rania Osman

Dr. Rania Osman is the Head of The Information Institutions and Professional Skills Department at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt. She leads advanced technological research in digital library architectures, interoperable semantic catalogs, and the preservation of multi-lingual Middle Eastern and Mediterranean digital assets. 

She  leads many translation projects; developing Arabic versions of the 23rd edition of DDC and the 5 formats of MARC 21 and recently developing an Arabic version of the RDA Toolkit and she is also The National representative member for Africa in the RDA Board and Chair of the committee of Standards in the AFLI.

Giulia Osti

Dr Giulia Osti is a Research Ireland-funded research scientist at University College Dublin, working at the intersection of digital preservation, AI, and data science. Formally trained in archaeology, she currently focuses on the Collections as Data movement and the contemporary challenges of preserving platform-mediated, born-digital materials. Within the GLAM community, she has contributed to the development of the documentation framework "Datasheets for Digital Cultural Heritage Datasets."

Federica Papiccio

Federica Papiccio serves as Collections Information Data Coordinator at the National Galleries of Scotland, where she works as part of the systems team on data enhancement, migration, and collections system configuration tasks. Her day-to-day involves mapping data between systems (she’s currently navigating the transition from CALM to Axiell Collections), writing scripts to guide how data is captured at the point of entry, and developing the documentation that helps colleagues across curatorial, conservation, registration, and research teams to work with the system in ways that are consistent, sustainable, and true to the complexity of the collections themselves. She is also a part-time doctoral candidate at the University of St Andrews, researching GLAM crowdsourcing and citizen science, with particular attention to the integration of user-generated content into collection management systems of all kinds.

John Peel

Collections Information Manager at Manchester Museum, part of The University of Manchester in the UK. He has 22 years’ experience in the creation, improvement, and management of museum and gallery data, with extensive expertise in data publication and reuse across different contexts. His current work includes leading a consultation on Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) and Indigenous Data Sovereignty, shaping more responsible and ethical approaches to how collections data is governed, shared, and used.

Abigail Potter

Abigail Potter is the Senior Innovation Specialist for LC Labs at the Library of Congress. She led the development of LC Lab’s AI Planning Framework, the LC Labs experiment process, and the AI4LAM DC Chapter. 

Mirjam Raaphorst

Mirjam Raaphorst is coordinator of Dataservices at the KB, national library of the Netherlands. She works on several projects to improve the findability and usability of the KB-collections-as-data for people, organizations and machines, aiming to encourage the digital collections’ reuse for academic research and cultural heritage. These projects include the KB datasetregistry, a protected research environment (KB_Datalab) and the development of a tool for creating datasheets and envelopes (SideDoc). 

Karina Rodríguez

Kirsty Ross

Dr Kirsty Ross (she/her) is the industrial liaison for the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. She is a microbiologist turned public engagement professional, who co-founded the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility in Open Knowledge Network (IDEA Network for short) in April 2021. She is especially interested in the application of the Wikiprojects within higher education, whether for teaching, research, or knowledge exchange projects, as well as in the impact of academic research on multi-lingual Wikipedia.

Anna-Maria Sichani

Shani Evenstein Sigalov

Dr. Shani Evenstein Sigalov is an educator specializing in Technology & Learning, researcher, lecturer and Open Knowledge advocate, recently completing serving 6 years on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. Her research focuses on the intersection between Education, Technology, Innovation and Openness, with a special interest in the epistemology of Knowledge Systems - how knowledge is consumed and produced, and how literacies are developed to support these processes.

She currently serves as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Digital Humanities Research Hub, University of London, leading AI-BRIDGES, a project dedicated to creating bridges between institutional data, Linked Open Data platforms, like Wikidata & Wikibase, and AI. The project explores harnessing AI toward Cultural & Academic heritage preservation and accessibility, and also serves as a convening space to ensure institutions, initiatives and individuals work together (rather than duplicate efforts) in order to address the pressing issues the world is dealing with in relation to AI and Open Knowledge. 

Frederik Truyen

Frederik Truyen is Full Professor at the Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven, where he works on digitalization, photographic heritage, and e-learning. He coordinates CS Digital and the innovation action DigitGLAM and specialises in data modelling and metadata for cultural heritage, building on extensive experience with international networks such as Photoconsortium (founding member and former president), the Europeana Network Association, and CLARIAH-VL. His research focuses on the digital transformation of cultural heritage institutions, which he also brings into his teaching on online publishing and digital cultural heritage.

Daniel van Strien

Daniel van Strien is Machine Learning Librarian at Hugging Face, where he works to make the Hugging Face Hub the best place for working with cultural heritage data — from publishing large-scale GLAM datasets to benchmarking how well OCR and vision-language models actually handle digitised collections. Previously at the British Library, he founded the BigLAM initiative and writes regularly on libraries as AI training data and what responsible machine learning looks like for the GLAM sector.

Ines Vodopivec

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ines Vodopivec is a distinguished digital heritage leader, book historian, and the Secretary General of AI4LAM (Artificial Intelligence for Libraries, Archives, and Museums). She has spent over a decade driving the digital transformation of cultural heritage institutions globally, previously serving as the Deputy Director of the National and University Library of Slovenia. Dr. Vodopivec holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Ljubljana and acts as Vice Dean and University Professor at Nova University's Faculty of Slovenian and International Studies. A prominent voice in European open science policy, she serves on the Management Board of the Europeana Network Association, the IFLA Digital Humanities Committee, and was previously also in the UNESCO Memory of the World National Committee. Her current research focuses on deploying trustworthy, ethical, and sustainable AI applications for digital transformation in the cross-sectoral cultural heritage field. Her work is related to major institutions in the sector, like Stanford University Libraries, Harvard, National Library of Norway, Library of Congress, and the British Library.

Gavin Willshaw

Gavin Willshaw is the Digital Collections and Making Services Manager at the University of Edinburgh, overseeing collections digitisation, digital collections access and the uCreate makerspace.

John Woitkowitz

Dr. John Woitkowitz is Head of the Stabi Lab and Deputy Head of Research Services at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Germany. His work focuses on leveraging digital cultural heritage for research and teaching through research infrastructure, data services, and capacity-building across data and tool literacy. His interests include the implementation of collections-as-data, responsible data curation and digital storytelling. A historian by training, John earned a PhD at the University of Calgary and researched the histories of science in the circumpolar world in Canada, England and the United States.

Chiara Zuanni

Chiara Zuanni is a full professor in Digital Cultures and Digital Humanities at the University for Continuing Education Krems and is the Chair of the European Association for Digital Humanities. She has a background in archaeology, and completed a PhD in Museology (University of Manchester), and an Habilitation in Digital Humanities (University of Graz). Her research focuses on the creation and mediation of knowledge in museums with digital media.