BIRDS 2025

First Workshop on Building Innovative Research Systems for Digital Libraries co-located with TPDL 2025
23rd September 2025, Tampere, Finland


The first workshop on Building Innovative Research Systems for Digital Libraries (BIRDS) takes place at TPDL 2025 as a full-day workshop. BIRDS addresses practitioners working in digital libraries and GLAMs as well as researchers from computational domains such as data science, information retrieval, natural language processing, and data modelling. Our interdisciplinary workshop focuses on connecting members of both worlds. One of today's biggest challenges is the increasing information flood. Large language models like ChatGPT seem to offer good performance for answering questions on the web. So, shall we just build upon that idea and use chatbots in digital libraries? Or do we need to design and develop specialized and effective access paths? Answering these questions requires to connect different communities, practitioners from real digital libraries and researchers in the area of computer science.In brief, our workshop's goal is thus to support researchers and practitioners to build the next generation of innovative and effective digital library systems.


Goals of the Workshop

With our highly interactive, in-person, and interdisciplinary BIRDS workshop we want to strengthen the collaboration in the community, connect domain experts with researchers in different contexts and academic states, and promote the construction of innovative research systems for digital libraries.

  • Our goals are to:
    • Provide a forum to come up with collaborations between domain experts and researchers in digital libraries
    • Identify common challenges faced by digital libraries and explore how computational approaches could help address them
    • Provide a forum at TPDL to explicitly discuss rough ideas, problems and ongoing work

Tentative Schedule

Time Agenda
9:00 - 9:30 Welcome and short introductions of all attendees
9:30 - 10:30 Panel discussion
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee break
11:00 - 12:30 Scientific speed-dating
12:30 - 13:30 Lunch break
13:30 - 14:30 Breakout group discussions
14:30 - 15:00 Summary of discussions and closing

Organizers

Christin Katharina Kreutz is a Tandem Professor for Data Science in the Humanities working as a practitioner at a GLAM institute (Herder Institute) and in academia (TH Mittelhessen - University of Applied Sciences). Recently, she co-organised the Sim4IA workshop at SIGIR 2024, the SCOLIA workshop at ECIR 2025 and was poster chair for JCDL 2024. Her general research interests are information access systems and user behaviour/simulation.

Hermann Kroll is a PostDoc at the Technical University of Braunschweig. His research focuses on effective access paths in digital libraries. Recently, he proposed a new retrieval paradigm, Narrative Information Access, for digital libraries and developed a real-world discovery system for the pharmaceutical domain. Beyond that, he published in digital libraries conferences such as JCDL, TPDL and ICADL and worked together with digital libraries, such as University Library of Braunschweig, the National Library of the Netherlands, the ZB MED in Germany and the University Library J. C. Senckenberg in Frankfurt am Main.