Getting together in Hamburg for the BiblioCon and further exchange of ideas

For this year’s BiblioCon, the largest library congress in the German-speaking countries, BALTIC UKH’s project team organized a panel on experiences and best ideas in engaging users in (co-)creating library spaces and services for the future. We did so with two experts from experimental spaces, the DH Lab and the Extended Library. The Digital Humanities community is used to working collaboratively and the DH Lab, a joint venture of the Faculty for the Humanities at the University of Hamburg and the State and University Library, offers the much-needed space for the community to meet, share and collaborate as well as provide infrastructure. The Extended Library of the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg centres around the new role of libraries in a digital age and provides a space that not only serves as an archive for knowledge but also supports artistic knowledge production, while simultaneously remaining relevant as a social space within an art academy.

The discussion during the panel centred around crucial aspects of those processes: reaching ones target groups, managing the time allocated for the process and insights in the actual uses of the already existing spaces and resulting implications for further changes. We received positive feedback on our hands-on panel and Jamie Johnston collected new input for the toolbox. We appreciate the invitation and support from Bibliothek & Information International for the international speakers. It is a great collaboration network and platform to distribute our project’s findings in the future.

The conference provided us with a perfect opportunity for an additional partner meeting, to chat and discuss the upcoming steps and necessary organizational aspects. This led to advances in the planning process for the partner meeting in Riga in November paired with focus group interviews as part of the toolbox and the subsequent evaluation reports. We also started with a tentative planning of the final conference in Copenhagen in June 2025 discussing expectations, target groups, venues and a possible programme.

The Biblioteca Baltica Symposium taking place in Warsaw in October 2024 was an additional topic. We are organizing a panel on the project to further discuss (co-)design processes for innovative spaces and services in libraries.

Of course, we also used this opportunity to socialize and catch up, since some of us had never met in person, while others had only met once in August 2023 for the kick-off. Therefore, we were very grateful for this rather spontaneous and unexpected opportunity for exchanging and promoting our project.

As a last activity, some of the project team visited three innovative and open spaces in Hamburg: The Extended Library, the Pop-up library at the HIBS Learning Center of the University of Applied Sciences (HAW) as well as the Freiraum at the MK&G. We shared experiences of the planning and implementation processes and fostered our productive cooperation regarding the co-creation of innovative learning and meeting spaces.

Following these eventful days, our working schedules are coming back to normal. We are looking forward to our monthly digital partner meetings, the progress in our local pilots, the next reporting phase and summer vacations!

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