On 12 and 13 May 2022, the EOD Network and EODOPEN partners gathered in Lisbon for the first face-to-face meeting after the pandemic period. Nearly 50 participants from 17 institutions of 12 European countries were kindly hosted by the National Library of Portugal. As the event took place just after the 15th anniversary of the eBooks on Demand service (EOD), the EOD Network and EODOPEN project partners had the great opportunity to discuss the progress achieved so far and to align on upcoming activities.

The meeting started with the close meeting sessions of different working groups. The WG5 and WG6 session focused on copyright issues and the digitization of materials in various formats, and the WG4 leaders presented their overview on the ongoing testing regarding the digitization practices in partner organizations. Comparing their results will be the basis for finding good practices in digitization to help each partner to improve their processes and to create different delivery formats for users of mobile devices, as well as blind and partially sighted people.

The general meeting started in the afternoon with a short overview on 15 years of the eBooks on Demand service, which has resulted in many developments of the EOD digitisation service and continues to function as a self-sustaining network of 38 libraries across Europe. Since the beginning of the EOD service in 2007, almost 36,000 books - in total more than 5 million pages - have been digitised and delivered, and more than 2,000 reprints have been created on demand and are available on Amazon.

Silvia Gstrein, the coordinator of the EOD Network and EODOPEN project from the University of Innsbruck, Austria looks back: “After two and a half years, it was a great pleasure to have a real-life meeting again and to share experiences face-to-face”. Speaking about the future she continues: “15 years of the EOD service and growing numbers in orders show that the EOD service will continue to be an important part of library services”.

The meeting was followed by the presentations from the Czech Moravian Library about the PERO OCR project, which, based on machine learning, improves optical character recognition (OCR) for manuscripts, old prints and old newspapers. The teams of the National Library of Széchényi, Hungary and the National Library of Sweden gave a brief insight to the cooperation process with EUIPO (European Union Intellectual Property Office) and their out-of-commerce portal, as well as on upcoming national workshops on copyright clarification.

On the second day the meeting continued with the workshop on the Omeka S digital exhibition platform, presented by the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. This frequently library-managed resource serves as a tool to open library collections, by telling stories, for a wider community for experiential learning. Also, the community digitization laboratory was introduced. Its main goal is to involve the public in the digitization process and to share best practices in digitization so that everyone can digitize their own materials, e.g family archives, old photographs or private collections as a part of cultural heritage.

The meeting ended with the show cases and good practice dissemination examples presented by the University of Tartu Library, Estonia and the Zeit.shift - Tyrolean newspaper project with citizen science aspects introduced by the partners from the University of Innsbruck, Library in Austria.

Next project meeting which will be hosted by the University of Greifswald Library and is planned to take place in the beginning of September.

May 23, 2022