SSHOC at LIBER 2021 Conference - Onboarding Citizen Science and the role of research libraries: barriers and accelerators

This year, the LIBER 2021 Conference is a special one indeed. That’s because LIBER organisation is celebrating its 50th anniversary and this year also marks the 50th conference that they have run. Over the years LIBER conference has served as a vibrant hub for research libraries from all over Europe. Hence, this is a milestone to be celebrated and LIBER is very excited to welcome you at their upcoming (virtual) conference!
The conference will be digitally co-hosted by the University of Belgrade Library in Serbia. As such, the aim of this conference is to recreate and showcase LIBER community network, while at the same time hosting the conference online ensuring the safety of all conference participants.

You can visit LIBER virtual poster exhibition here and make sure to cast your vote for your favourite poster by filling in this form!

Post Event Report

Onboarding Citizen Science and the role of research libraries: barriers and accelerators

This workshop will be building on the outcomes of the session “Citizen Science: What it means for SSH and how can multidisciplinarity be achieved?” that took place during the conference “Realising the European Open Science Cloud: Towards a FAIR research data landscape for the social sciences, humanities and beyond.” in November 2020. The session provided an overview of what Citizen Science is, how research libraries have an essential role to play in its deployment through the BESPOC model and other means, acting as knowledge broker and facilitator among others. At the same time, several Citizen Science and crowdsourcing projects/activities were presented. At the panel session, possible collaborations were uncovered and the organisation of a potential second event was suggested with the prospect of addressing the relation and interaction between EOSC, Research Libraries and Citizen Science.

Objective 

The overarching aim of this workshop is to raise the awareness of the challenges and opportunities in libraries’ involvement with Citizen Science in SSH. It aims to explore the extent to which research libraries can serve as a bridge between researchers and citizens.

An approach based on the sharing of best practices (presentation of case studies by invited speakers), the involvement of participants in the reflection of the respective roles and training needed, complemented by an open discussion, will shape the overall experience. One of the outputs of this workshop will be the production of actionable recommendations (e.g., short report, guidelines) for research libraries, and the SSHOC/SSH communities. We will also propose an outline of the workshop and training sessions (for librarians, researchers, and citizen scientists) that would help participants in implementing those guidelines.

This workshop will be an opportunity to create synergies by involving several projects with which LIBER is directly involved or closely connected (e.g., REINFORCE, INOS, ESCAPE, ESFRI Cluster project).

* This workshop is being recorded. By joining the session, you are consenting to be recorded.

Speakers

Alessia Smaniotto - Project Manager, OpenEdition Center (EHESS)

Alessia develops citizen science projects and services for the OPERAS community and works for OpenEdition Center, a French research center developing a comprehensive digital publishing infrastructure at the service of scientific information in the Humanities and Social Sciences (www.openedition.org). She is trained in philosophy, journalism and sociology in Italy and France and she holds a PhD in Philosophy of Social Sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Before reinvesting her skills in research and scientific communication, she worked as a journalist in public and private media in Italy and was a trainer at the Master of Journalism in Turin. She is particularly involved in reflections on scholarly communication and knowledge exchange between different stakeholders.

Iris Buunk - Communication & Engagement Officer, LIBER

Dr Iris Buunk is presently the Community Engagement and Communications Officer at LIBER. s responsible for stakeholder engagement activities related to European projects SSHOC, INOS and reCreating Europe, and will support the communications and various outreach activities. She holds a PhD in Information Sciences from the Center for Social Informatics within the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland. She has extensive experience in knowledge sharing and information dissemination. Before joining LIBER she worked as a research assistant at the Haute Ecole de Gestion in Geneva, as a research librarian at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Economics, at the University of Geneva, as a research assistant to support a European project (FP6) with the audio archives of the Swiss National Radio, and as project coordinator in Information Literacy at the rectorate of the University of Lausanne. She has also solid experience in teaching within the fields of social media and Information Literacy.

Anne Kathrine Overgaard

Anne Kathrine Overgaard is Head of External Projects at the Faculty of Health Sciences at SDU and co-founder of SDU Citizen Science Knowledge Center.

Thomas Kaarsted - Deputy Library Director, Univ. Library of Southern Denmark

Originally the managing director of a publishing house, Thomas Kaarsted joined the University Library of Southern Denmark in 2008 and was appointed Deputy Library Director in 2013. He is on LIBER’s Conference Programme Committee and is active in the Citizen Science Working Group.
Thomas has since worked on a number of strategic community-/society-based projects on a national and international level and — together with Anne Kathrine Overgaard, also a member of the Citizen Science Working Group — co-founded the Citizen Science Network at the university.
The network advocates on Citizen Science, aims at building strong ties between the library and the Faculties while also adopting the role as project managers on a number of Citizen Science projects in close collaboration with researchers. He is also the manager of a national Danish project that investigates the possible roles of research libraries within the field.

Tiberius Ignat - Director, Scientific Knowledge Services

Tiberius Ignat is the Director of Scientific Knowledge Services. He runs in partnership with UCL Press and LIBER Europe a series of workshops - Focus On Open Science. After being an individual member of LIBER, he became a LIBER Associate. Tiberius is a member of the European Citizen Science Association and Citizen Science Association (US) and sits on the Scientific Committee for OAI, the CERN - UNIGE Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication.
Tiberius was part of the organising committee of the Sorbonne Declaration on Research Data Rights. He is currently doing research on internet tracking in a project which involves citizen scientists.
He has a PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of Bucharest.

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