CLARIN & Research Libraries: A Very Short Introduction

The Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure or CLARIN is a research infrastructure initiated to make digital language resources and tools from all over Europe and beyond accessible through a single sign-on online environment. CLARIN supports academic researchers as well as students, journalists and citizen-scientists interested in digital language resources, such as parliamentary records, social media data, newspaper archives and spoken corpora. In 2012, CLARIN received the status of European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) and as of 2016 CLARIN is recognized as an ESFRI Landmark. [1]

Research libraries have always played a vital role in CLARIN. National libraries actively participate in several of the 25 national CLARIN consortia. Clearly, libraries are some of the largest providers of digital resources used by linguists, historians, literary scholars and other researchers engaged in the (digital) social sciences and humanities. In addition, many libraries encourage digital scholarship by offering analytical tools, training and data management support. [2]

On a supranational level, CLARIN has a number of partnerships with large cultural heritage infrastructures. In 2017, CLARIN signed a Memorandum of Understanding with LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries. The goal of the Memorandum is to engage in and share information about policy and advocacy activities of mutual interests such as copyright regulations, identification of opportunities for joint capacity building and planning, and cooperation on user involvement in the design of services. [3] In addition, CLARIN and LIBER are jointly developing training material in the context of the European project SSHOC (Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud).

CLARIN is also a partner in the Digital Service Infrastructure of Europeana, an EU platform for digital cultural heritage. As a result of this partnership, a selection of Europeana records can be found in CLARIN’s main search engine, the Virtual Language Observatory. These records include newspapers from Austria, Finnish travel brochures and audio recordings of Romanian poetry. [4]

CLARIN ERIC continues to explore new ways to strengthen its relations with research libraries across the world and is very open to suggestions for further collaboration. 

References
[1.] Koenraad De Smedt, Franciska de Jong, Bente Maegaard, Darja Fišer, Dieter Van Uytvanck, ‘Towards an Open Science Infrastructure for the Digital Humanities: The Case of CLARIN’, Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (DHN), 2018, pp. 139-151; Franciska de Jong, ‘CLARIN: Infrastructural Support for Impact through the Study of Language as Social and Cultural Data’, in: Bente Maegaard and Riccardo Pozzo ed., Stay Tuned to the Future. Impact of the Research Infrastructures for Social Sciences and Humanities, Leo S. Olschki Editore, Florence 2019, pp. 121-129.
[2.] John W. White and Heather Gilbert ed., Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries, vol. 7, Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, Indiana, 2016.
[3.] Memorandum of Understanding between LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche) and CLARIN ERIC, https://office.clarin.eu/v/CE-2017-0997-MoU-with-LIBER.pdf.
[4.] Twan Goosen and Nuno Freire, ‘Bridging the Europeana and CLARIN infrastructures: Cultural heritage data for the social sciences and humanities’, CLARIN.EU [weblog], 13 September 2017, https://www.clarin.eu/blog/bridging-europeana-and-clarin-infrastructures