Abstract:

Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) institutions have published and provided access to information resources in digital format. Following the British Library Labs set up, and inspired by the International GLAM Labs community, many Labs have recently been created in order to the reuse of digital collections in innovative and creative ways. In general, Labs provide a section in which digital collections are provided as datasets including newspapers, images, text, manuscripts, maps, paintings and metadata.

In this context, new methods have been proposed to address the publication of digital collections as datasets amenable to computational use as well as innovative and collaborative methods for the edition and curation of materials. The Jupyter notebook -- an interactive computing environment to create executable documents-- has emerged as an innovative tool to create and share executable documents including code, narrative, text, images and charts. Thematic workshops based on collaborative environments such as Wikidata can be useful to understand the concept of collaborative edition and understanding open content.

In this sense, this paper aims to explore the connection of open digital collections with educational audiences who could make significant use of them regarding subjects in Computer and Multimedia Engineering degrees. Several approaches are focused on education regarding GLAM institutions such as the Library of Congress, British Library and Biblioteca Nacional de España.

Our study strongly suggests that GLAM institutions, and in particular Labs within GLAM institutions, provide digital collections amenable for computational use that are useful for education. The use of Jupyter notebooks as a pedagogical tool facilitates the use and understanding of the digital collections based on reproducible and cloud environments. Future work includes the exploration of the use of Jupyter notebooks in non technical degrees such as Digital Humanities and History.

Keywords:

Active learning, GLAM Labs, Computational access, digital collections, digital humanities.