Athens   
2022
Tradition Meets Innovation
April 5-7, 2022 - Hybrid Event
National Library of Greece
Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center
Syggrou Avenue 364, 17674 Kallithea
Athens, Greece
Founding Sponsors: Against the Grain Casalini Libri The Charleston Company
An informal meeting of leading library and information industry participants devoted to thinking through and debating the new world order in collection development.
Local Host 2022
FIESOLE RETREAT IN ATHENS - APRIL 5-7, 2022 (Hybrid Event)

For the first time, the Fiesole Retreat travels to Greece, where we will explore the current state of learning and scholarship in the age of digital initiatives, with the background of our shared rich cultural heritage. We extend our thanks to the National Library of Greece who will serve as our co-host and will welcome us to their beautiful new facility inside the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens.

The Fiesole Retreat Series offers a unique opportunity to interact with a select group of your colleagues in a relaxed and thoughtful setting.

Speeches & Presentations

Listed in order of program schedule

Video Links - PDF Version

Program


Last update: April 1, 2022

Tuesday, April 5

 National Library of Greece at Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC)

All times are in Eastern European Time (UTC+2)
2:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Tour of the National Library of Greece
2:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Registration Open
3:00 p.m. - 3:10 p.m.
Welcome and Introduction
  • Convener
    Giannis Tsakonas
    Acting Director, Library & Information Centre, University of Patras, Greece
    Giannis Tsakonas holds a BA in Librarianship from the Department of Archives and Library Sciences, Ionian University, Greece and a PhD in Information Science from the same Department. Currently he works as Acting Director in the Library & Information Center, University of Patras. Since July 2016, he has been a member of the Executive Board of LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche – Association of European Research Libraries), while since July 2018 he have been appointed Chair of the Steering Committee on Innovative Scholarly Communication. Since July 2016, he has been elected to the Board of Directors of Hellenic Academic Libraries Link and from December 2016 to December 2019 he served as Vice President of the Hellenic General Council of Libraries, a body of the Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs monitoring the operation of Greek public libraries. From June 2019 he has been appointed representative of LIBER in the Governing Board of SCOSS, the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services.
    Innovation in Greece: a review of local projects and efforts
     Video
Preconference
3:10 p.m. - 6:20 p.m.
Session One
Innovation and Greek libraries: A Review of Local Projects and Efforts
  • Vicky Dritsou
    Digital Curation Unit, Athena RC & Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
    Vicky Dritsou is a Research Associate in the Digital Curation Unit / IMSI-Athena Research Centre and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). She is an informatician, specialized in conceptual modeling, ontologies, knowledge representation and management systems. She has worked in APOLLONIS, the Greek Infrastructure for Digital Arts, Humanities and Language Research and Innovation. She also serves as an Associate Lecturer in Systems Modeling and Knowledge Organization at the Department of Informatics of Athens University of Economics and Business. Previously she has worked as a research associate for the Foundation of Research and Technology (FORTH) in Crete and for Polo GGB, a spin-off of University of Perugia in Italy. Her research interests include semantic databases and information access, graph databases, knowledge representation and management systems, conceptual modeling.
    The Greek Landscape of Digital Humanities Initiatives
     Video
    Over the last decade the Greek landscape of digital humanities has undergone considerable reframing. At the time of intense digitization, a significant number of cultural heritage institutions from across the country digitized and documented their collections, making them available online or locally for use by both specialists and wider audiences. This wave of digitization projects by Greek libraries, archives, museums, universities, ministry ephorates and publishers, have been instrumental in fostering the growth of major research and teaching resources online, as well as in providing the foundations for national digital infrastructures. The transformative effect of digitization and, more recently, of academic-led initiatives (projects and infrastructures) on Greek scholarship has appeared as the aftermath of increased access to primary and secondary resources, facilitated management of data, and enhanced reuse of digital cultural assets. Digital tools have not only transformed our engagement and interaction with the past, but they have also reshaped arts and humanities research, prompting a new community of digital humanists within, across and beyond Greece. Focusing on the example of APOLLONIS, the Greek Infrastructure for Digital Arts, Humanities and Language Research and Innovation, this talk will present the challenges and the significant shifts the Greek landscape of digital humanities has been going through over the last years.
  • Nikolas Sarris
    National Library of Greece, Greece
    Dr Nikolas Sarris is a book and paper conservator at the National Library of Greece. He has been a lecturer of book and paper conservation at undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Greece and a book conservator at the British Library. He worked as the supervisor of the conservation laboratory at the monastery of St John Theologian, Patmos, Greece, where he also organized the "Patmos Workshops on Conservation and Historic Bookbinding". He was a member of the St Catherine's Library Conservation Project team since 2001 and the Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation for conservation and training projects at the National Library of Egypt, Cairo. He collaborated with the Ethio-SPARE project on the preservation and on-site conservation of Ethiopic manuscripts in Tigray, Ethiopia and with UNESCO on preservation training in libraries of Iraq. He has lectured widely on the topics of book conservation and archaeology of bookbinding. He received his PhD from the University of the Arts London on the study of tool decorated bookbindings from the Monastery of St Catherine in Sinai, Egypt.
    A conservation documentation system at the National Library of Greece
     Video
    Documentation is an integral part of the process of conservation and preservation of library materials, for which conservators are often against the challenge to utilise in technologically and digitally enhanced environments. This paper presents the holistic system that has been designed and developed for the Conservation Department of the National Library of Greece, as it aims to address the multifold tasks present within large institutions and to meet the state-of-the-art of documentation.
  • Ifigenia Vardakosta
    Head Librarian, Harokopio University of Athens, Greece
    Ifigenia Vardakosta is Head Librarian in the Library and Information Centre of Harokopio University of Athens. She holds a Phd in Information Science from the Department of Archives, Library Sciences and Museology in Ionian University. She attended a variety of seminars and workshops and has written a number of research papers that have been presented at national and international conferences. Ifigenia is a founding member of Hellenic Economic Libraries Network, and the Greek Academic Geographical Libraries. She is a member of the Map and Geoinformation Curators Group (MAGIC) and she serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Map and Geography Libraries.
    Getting on the Map: Greek Libraries and Users' Modern Geographical Information Needs
     Video
    Human life and activities (politics, environment, transports, economy etc) are related to a geographical location, making geographic information inseparable from daily life of every citizen around the globe. Libraries, especially those of the western world, have developed those functions and services necessary to enable users to access and manage the essential for their education and research activity geographical information. The commitment of geographical libraries to the continuous improvement of their services is also reflected in their integration in similar scientific associations and collaborative structures. The presentation aims to communicate the "Geographical Libraries Group" as a response of the Greek academic libraries to the users' growing need for access to geographic information, both print and digital. The current presentation, after a short introduction to the Map/GIS Libraries in the western world, will focus on the reasons that led to the Group's implementation and present its members. Greek Academic Geographical Libraries Group fundamental goals and purposes will be highlighted while the actions that have already been accomplished will be pointed out. Finally, some upcoming actions of the Group will be presented.
  • Marina Mavromichali
    Library & Information Center, Ionian University, Greece
    Marina Mavromichali is a Librarian at the Ionian University Library and Information Center. She is a graduate of the Department of Archives & Library Science and holds a MSc. in Information Sciences - Information Services in Digital Environment. She was involved in managing and curating the collections of Corfu Art Gallery. She was also School librarian in the Athens College Elementary School Library, participating in the design and implementation of Information Literacy and Reading Promotion programs. She has been appointed staff of the Cataloguing Department of the National Library of Greece, participating in the Library's transition and relocation at Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center as member of working groups on digital services, intellectual property, accessibility and as a coordinator of the National Library's E-Reading Room service.
    Eftychia Koufakou
    National Library of Greece, Greece
    Eftychia Koufakou is a Systems Librarian and coordinator of the Electronic Reading Room service at the National Library of Greece. She is a graduate of the Department of Library Science and Information Systems of the Technological Educational Institute of Athens and holds a MSc. in Information Science - Library Management and Organization with an emphasis on new Information Technologies. She has worked as a librarian at the Library and Information Center of Harokopio University Athens, participating in the design, development implementation and administration of the Library's digital services.
    The National Library of Greece Electronic Reading Room: An Initiative to Promote Electronic Reading Habits in Greece
     Video
    The National Library of Greece (NLG) Electronic Reading Room (ERR) is a completely new, innovative for Greece, digital service, that provides the Library's authenticated readers with the ability to search and download Greek-language trade electronic books for a limited time remotely via the Internet. The service was designed with a view to update and at the same time improve NLG digital services. It was developed in the context of the NLG relocation to the new premises at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC) and was exclusively funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. ERR was officially launched in November 2018 as a two-year pilot project and is available free of charge to all Greek citizens and holders of Greek Social Security Number (SSN). Currently, it holds 2,534 unique titles from 14 of the largest e-book Greek publishers. Taking into consideration that the e-book industry in Greece is still in an embryonic stage and although almost 140 publishers are currently active in the field, electronic titles account for barely 10% of total book production and only for 1% of sales, NLG undertook the initiative to implement a free digital service that aims not only to familiarize readers with the e-book, train them in the use of the necessary software and hardware and educate them on intellectual rights of publishers and creators, but also encourage publishers to expand their investment in e-book publishing, provide more available titles in this format and thus expand the Greek e-book market. During the period of ERR pilot operation, NLG staff has been continuously collecting all the necessary usage statistics and investigating user satisfaction, in order to evaluate the service, in terms of the collection offered and the methods regarding compensation of publishers and other intellectual rights holders. The aforementioned, as well as all the procedures followed, over a two-year period of research, design, development and presentation of the service to the public will be described below. NLG trusts that as one of its most innovative digital services, ERR will constitute the stepping-stone towards a new digital era for the Library, as well as the means for promoting open access to information and knowledge in general.

4:45 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. - Break

  • Lia Ollandezou
    Coordinator, HEAL Link Consortium/Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Library & Information Center, Greece
    Lia Ollandezou is the coordinator of the steering committee for electronic resources for the national consortium HEAL-Link (Hellenic Academic Libraries Link). Her role entails primarily strategic and advisory tasks, policy making, licensing strategies and negotiations with a number of major academic publishers and providers. Main areas of work are electronic information resources and related areas. She is coordinating several activities and projects, such as negotiations on Open Access conditions, new pricing models, perpetual access, etc. Further to negotiations and licensing, she is involved in new projects for the academic community funded by the Ministry of Education and supported by HEAL-Link, such as the national academic infrastructure for research data. Lia is representing Greece in the High-Level Group on Big Deals at the European University Association. She holds a degree in Library Studies, a MA in Information and Library Studies from the University of Aberystwyth, Wales and a MA in Art, Law & Arts Management from the International Hellenic University, Greece.
    Transforming the Greek Academic Libraries Landscape: Past Growth, Current Characteristics and Future Developments
     Video
    HEAL-Link is the National Greek Consortium operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Education & Religious Affairs, serving all academic and research institutions (43 members in total). The services offered by HEAL-Link have played a catalytic role in the national research and academic output and have changed the users’ attitude towards the library services in general. The scholarly communication has been altering for almost 10 years. What was obvious in the past for academic library consortia, in terms of providing tools and services (i.e. electronic content), has been transformed in a rapid way. Negotiations with scholarly journal publishers are now the pathway to openness and equity. Although the primary goals for HEAL-Link were the establishment of common policies on journal subscriptions and the promotion of the growth in its journals collection in a sustainable way, the rising trend is now shifting to a more demanding rationale: authors that strive for publications, since publishing is related to the research assessment and their career, mandates for Open Access (OA) publications from funding agencies, a major concern for equitable economic conditions, a global demand for a rapid timeframe for the OA transition. HEAL-Link endeavors to respond to this situation and to support the fully Open Access paradigm by setting new benchmarks within the academic community. The presentation will examine the key defining factors for the OA transition, the alignment of the stakeholders (i.e. libraries, University leaders), the budget constraints, the engagement of the academic community and all the elements that are playing a catalytic role to a sustainable agreement between the consortium and scholarly publishers.
  • Nikolaos Mitrou
    National Technical University of Athens, Scientific Coordinator of the "Kallipos" project, Greece
    Nikolaos Mitrou received his diploma degree in Electrical Engineering (1980) from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), the MSc degree in Systems and Control (1981) from UMIST, Great Britain, and the PhD degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering (1986) from NTUA. He is a full Professor with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NTUA since 2000. He has been the leader and/or prime researcher of many European and national projects in the fields of Broadband Telecommunications, Mobile and Multimedia Communications, Knowledge Representation & Management and has published numerous articles and conference papers in these fields. He served as the Chairman of the Hellenic Academic Libraries Link (HealLink) in the period 2010-2016. Since 2013 Prof. Mitrou is the Coordinator of KALLIPOS, a large-scale project for producing Open Academic digital textbooks (repository.kallipos.gr).
    KALLIPOS: The Greek Venture in the OERland
     Video
  • Natalia Manola
    Research Center "Athena", Greece
    Open Science in Greece Fostering Collaborations and Synergies
     Video
6:20 p.m. - 6:50 p.m.
Panel Discussion
6:50 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.
Closing Remarks
7:00 p.m.
Drinks

Wednesday, April 6

 National Library of Greece at Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC)

All times are in Eastern European Time (UTC+2)
9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
Registration Open
10:30 a.m. - 10:35 a.m.
Welcome and Introduction
  • Katina Strauch
    Founder, The Charleston Conference and The Fiesole Retreat Series, USA
    Katina Parthemos Strauch retired as Assistant Dean, Technical Services and Collection Development at the College of Charleston in 2016 to devote herself fulltime to her businesses, Against the Grain and the Charleston Conference. She is a publisher, editor, and author and winner of many outstanding awards in librarianship. She began the Charleston Conference in 1980 and the Fiesole Retreats in 1999. She has been married to Bruce Strauch far 45 years and they have 2 children and 6 grandchildren. When younger, they spent their summers in England, France, ltaly and Greece. Now they live sedately on Sullivan's lsland, SC, and spend their days looking at the ocean.
    Rebecca Lenzini
    The Charleston Company, USA
    Rebecca Lenzini is President of The Charleston Company which publishes The Charleston Advisor and The Charleston Report, and is cosponsor/cofounder of the Fiesole Collection Development Retreat Series. She began her career in libraries in the Serials Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was Vice President and Director of The Faxon Company's Academic Division. Following her tenure at Faxon, Rebecca served as President of CARL Corporation (Denver, CO) and was one of the founders of UnCover, the original article retrieval and document delivery service which is now part of Ingenta. She is a former member of the Editorial Board of Serials, the official publication of the UKSG. Rebecca currently splits her time between Denver, Colorado and Taos, New Mexico.
    Michele Casalini
    Casalini Libri, Italy
    Michele Casalini is CEO of the family-run company Casalini Libri, which supplies bibliographical data, books and journals to libraries, and offers e-content through the Torrossa platform, thanks to its dedicated Digital Division. Following studies in Modern Languages and Literature at the University of Florence, and a period working with the publishing company La Nuova Italia, Michele specialised in the field of Information Technology and Management. He has been active member in standardization processes such as the definition of EDIFACT for the book sector and the translation of RDA into Italian. Member of several professional associations, Michele attends conferences, consultations and debates, liasing personally both with libraries and publishers. Among his recent interests is the digital transition and the current situation of HSS academic publishing, in particular the potential risks of marginalisation facing these subject areas, and analysis of collaborative measures that can contribute to preserving cultural heritage for the future. In May 2019 Michele accepted from the University of Florence an honorary degree celebrating his dedication and contribution to the field of Library and Information Science, the very first bestowal of the honour in question for merit in modern librarianship by an Italian university.
Conference
10:35 a.m. - 11:05 a.m.
Conference Opening
  • Filippos Tsimpoglou
    Director General National Library of Greece, Greece
    Filippos Tsimpoglou has a PhD in Librarianship and Information Science from Ionian University (2006), and BSc in Economics from Athens University on Business and Economics (1983). Since April 2014 he is the Director General of the National Library of Greece, charged with the preparation and transition of collections and services of NLG to its new premises at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre. His responsibilities include the organization of "idle services" of a classical National Library with a modern approach, the planning and development of infrastructure and services in order NLG to successfully address the challenges of the digital era, the creation of a series of innovative services of a public library within the NLG, acting as a standard for ecosystem of the National Network of Libraries, the establishment of the NLG to an unsurpassed center of support for Greek studies internationally. He was the Director of the Library and ex officio member of the Senate of the University of Cyprus from December 1999 to March 2014, his tasks included the development of new information services and accomplishment of strategic alliances. He inspired the creation of the Cyprus Libraries Consortium. In 2009 he led the Library to the "Three Stars EFQM Recognised for Excellence in Europe" award. From 1983 to 1999 he was working for the development of the National Hellenic Documentation Centre. He contributed to the development of a National Information System by developing the National Interlibrary Lending Network, the repository of the Greek PhD Dissertation (12.000 theses), the ARchaeological Greek Online System etc. During 2003-2008 he coordinated the project of the Hellenic Academic Libraries Union Catalogue with 5.000.000 records from 70 institutions. His thesis was published in 2008 as a book titled "Libraries collaboration. A systems approach". He is the author of numerous papers.
    NLG, the Past Meets the Future
     Video
11:05 a.m. - 11:35 a.m.
Break
11:35 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Session One
Cultural Heritage: Contemporary Challenges and Opportunities
  • Convener
    Ann Okerson
    Center for Research Libraries, USA
    Ann Okerson joined the Center for Research Libraries in fall 2011 as Senior Advisor on Electronic Strategies, working with that organization to reconfigure and redirect various existing programs into digital mode. Previous experience includes 15 years as Associate University Librarian for Collections & International Programs at Yale University; prior to that she worked in the commercial sector, and also for five years as Senior Program Officer for Scholarly Communications at the Association of Research Libraries. Upon joining Yale, she organized the Northeast Research Libraries consortium (NERL), a group of 30 large and over 80 smaller libraries negotiating for electronic information. She is one of the active, founding spirits of the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC). Activities include projects, publications, advisory boards, and speaking engagements worldwide, as well as professional awards. Recently, she led the group that completely re-wrote (December 2014) the widely used US LIBLICENSE Model License. Over the years, Okerson has also been active internationally and currently serves on the IFLA Governing Board.
  • Martina Bagnoli
    Chairperson, Europeana Supervisory Board, and Executive Director, Gallerie Estensi, Italy
    Martina Bagnoli is the executive Director of the Gallerie Estensi, Modena, Italy. Before arriving in Modena she traveled extensively and lived first in Switzerland, then in England, France and the United States. Since February 2022 she serves as the chairwoman of the Europeana Foundation. An art historian by training with over twenty years of international experience, she completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge where she earned a BA and later at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where she received a PhD with distinction. A passionate advocate of the role of art in society, Martina Bagnoli firmly believes that museums, libraries and archives are infrastructures of memory necessary for the good living and civil growth of society and that the relationship between a museum and its public is fundamental.
    Europeana: We Transform the World with Culture
     Video
    For well over a decade Europeana has been a primary force in the creation, aggregation and interpretation of digital collections. Through millions of cultural heritage items from hundreds of institutions across Europe, Europeana strives to inspire and inform fresh perspectives and open conversations about history and culture. The launch by the European Commission of a new European Data Space provides an unprecedented opportunity to expand Europeana's activities and reach. The speaker will present three projects that highlights key principles that inform the construction of a common digital space for culture: participation, inclusion, diversity and the ethical use of technology. Issues of sustainability and technological challenges will be discussed to address the complexities of Europeana's role in the European cultural digital space.
  • Maria Georgopoulou
    Director, The Gennadius Library, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece
    Maria Georgopoulou is an art historian educated at the University of Athens, Greece, the Sorbonne, and the University of California, Los Angeles, from where she received her Ph.D. in Art History in 1992. She taught at Yale University (1992-2004) where she also founded the Program for Hellenic Studies. She is currently Director of the Gennadius Library at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. Her scholarly work explores the artistic and cultural interactions of Mediterranean peoples in the medieval and early modern period. She has authored and edited several books and articles, including a monograph on Venice's Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge UP, 2001), and an edited volume on Ottoman Athens. Topography, Archaeology, History (2019). At the Gennadeion she has organized several exhibitions and major academic conferences. Dr. Georgopoulou has been the recipient of a National Humanities Center Fellowship, a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, a Fulbright Grant, a Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, and has been a Junior Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. She is an Elected Member of the Board of Directors of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL), has also served on the Board of Directors of the National Library of Greece, and is currently a member of the Scientific Board of the Laskaridis Foundation in Athens, and the Administrative Committee of the École franÇaise d'Athènes.
    Seeing Greek Culture Through the Eyes of Travelers, 16th Century and Onward
     Video
    My presentation discusses the major collections of European travelers' books in Greece. To the accounts of pilgrims, merchants, sailors, and ambassadors there were added in the sixteenth century scholars, artists, and tourists who visited the area in search of classical antiquity. It is this turn to Antiquarianism that signals the importance of Greece in the imagination of the western Europeans. This body of material has been extensively studied, primarily for the important historical information it includes, or as a special literary genre. The presentation will discuss various indexing and imaging projects conceived in the 1990s and will focus on some innovative Digital Humanities projects that have sought to create new digital platforms in order to open up this unique historical knowledge to the world at large and tie in the important historical maps of the same period.
  • Quinn Dombrowski
    Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and in the Library, Stanford University, USA
    Quinn Dombrowski is the Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and in the Library, at Stanford University, and serves as co-VP of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. Quinn has a BA/MA in Slavic Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and an MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
    Nimble Tents and Bunkers: Safeguarding Digital Cultural Heritage
     Video
    Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO), co-led by Quinn Dombrowski, Anna Kijas, and Sebastian Majstorovic, launched March 1st with the goal of archiving at-risk Ukrainian cultral heritage websites. Over the course of a week, the project scaled up to over a thousand volunteers, mostly from Europe and North America, capturing hundreds of webpages and digital objects per day using multiple sets of tools and infrastructure. SUCHO's rapid, distributed approach to web archiving stands in contrast to the methodical processes in place at research libraries, oriented towards the long term. This talk will cover lessons that research libraries can take from SUCHO to inform their own web archiving praxis. It will conclude by advocating for greater collaboration and coordination across institutions and nations to ensure the safety of global cultural heritage.
1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Lunch
2:30 p.m. - 5:20 p.m.
Session Two
Towards New Publishing Models - What's Next
  • Convener
    Julien Roche
    Director of Libraries and Learning centre, University of Lille, France
    Julien Roche served as Director of the libraries of the University of Lille – Sciences and Technologies from 2005 to 2018. Following a merger of Lille’s three universities he became, in March 2018, director of libraries at the newly enlarged University of Lille. From 2010 to 2016, Julien served on LIBER’s Executive Board. He was also Chair of the LIBER Steering Committee on Reshaping the Research Library and led the Leadership Working Group, which is responsible for two leadership programs: the Emerging Leaders programme and the LIBER Journées programme. In July 2018, he was elected as LIBER Vice-President. Julien Roche also has several national responsibilities including co-chair of the "European and international" college of the French Open Science Committee since July 2018 and member of the scientific board of the French National Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education – ABES. He authored more than 30 scientific publications in medieval history as well as in library and information science and has been an invited speaker in many conferences. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4000-2791.
     Video
  • Wilhelm Widmark
    Library Director at Stockholm University, Senior Advisor for Open Science to the President of Stockholm University, Director of EOSC Association, Sweden
    Wilhelm Widmark is the Library Director of Stockholm University since 2012 and Senior Adviser for Open Science to the President. He has a Master of Arts in literature and a Master of Arts in Library and information science from Uppsala University. Wilhelm is active in the Open Science movement in Sweden and Europe. He is the Vice-Chairman of the Swedish Bibsam consortia and a member of the Swedish Rectors conferences Open Science group. He is also a member of EUAs Expert Group on Open Science and one of the Directors of EOSC Association.
    Will There Be Any Transformation or Are We Stuck with the Transformative Agreements?
     Video
    Sweden is one of the countries that was early adopters of transformative agreements. Today we have around 25 national transformative agreements and many universities have their own agreements with different publishers. The goal for Sweden is to reach 100% Open access and we reached nearly 75% in 2021. One question is how we can reach the missing 25%. Another bigger question is about the transition. The Rectors conference in Sweden have started a group "Beyond the transformative agreements" with the mission to come up with a strategy to the consortium for negotiations after 2024. As early adaptors we think that the transition period soon should be over and that the publishers must come up with new business models to reach or demands on 100% Open access in a sustainable way. I will talk about the mission and the work of the group.
  • Pierre Mounier
    Coordinator of OPERAS, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), deputy director of OpenEdition, the French national infrastructure dedicated to open scholarly communication in the SSH, co-director of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), France
    Pierre Mounier is co-coordinator of OPERAS Research Infrastructure with Suzanne Dumouchel. Pierre supports cooperation between OPERAS members and contributes to the strategic roadmap of the infrastructure. He is trained in classical studies and social anthropology. Pierre is affiliated to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS); he is deputy director of OpenEdition, the French national infrastructure dedicated to open scholarly communication in the SSH, and co-director of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) with Niels Stern. He regularly publishes on digital humanities and open science topics, and more largely on the social and political impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
    Towards The Diamond Open Access Model. A New Challenge
     Video
    The landmark Open Access Diamond Journals Study (OADJS) published in 2021 uncovered the vast size and scope of a publication ecosystem where neither readers nor authors are charged. The estimated 17.000 to 29.000 Diamond Open Access journals worldwide are an essential component of scholarly communication, publishing 8 to 9% of the total article publication volume and 44% of Open Access publishing. Despite these obvious strengths, Diamond Open Access is held back by challenges related to the technical capacity, management, visibility, and sustainability of journals and platforms. How to effectively support the open access diamond publishing model and address the challenge in terms of collective action it represents; this is what the Action Plan elaborated and endorsed by various organisations aims at addressing in the near future.

4:00 p.m. - 4:15 p.m. - Break

  • Anne Ruimy
    Senior publisher, EDP Sciences, France
    Anne Ruimy has a Ph.D. in Global Ecology from Université Paris Sud, France (now Université Paris-Saclay). She has been working in scientific publishing for the past 15 years. In 2018, she joined EDP sciences as senior publisher, where she is in charge of the editorial development of a portfolio of a dozen of mathematics and physics journals. She is leading EDP Sciences’ Subscribe-to-Open program, which has enabled the transition of 7 journals to open access so far.
    Subscribe-to-Open, a New Open Access Publishing Model
     Video
    Invented by Annual Reviews, Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) is a business model that uses subscription payments to convert gated access journals to full open access. EDP Sciences were amongst the first publishers to adopt this model, and transitioned the first mathematics journal in the world to open access under this model in 2020. Following the success of this pilot, EDPS transitioned all its 6 maths journals to open access in 2021, under challenging economic conditions. We recently announced the transition to open access of one of the leading astronomy journals, Astronomy & Astrophysics. Anne Ruimy will present the S2O model, its practical implementation and the benefits for authors and libraries.
  • Didier Torny
    CNRS, Senior researcher, France
    Didier Torny is a sociologist, senior researcher in CNRS. He works at Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation on the political economy of academic publications, studying the making, use and critique of evaluation tools (journal rankings, biblometrics, altmetrics), the transformations of peer review and the funding models of publications. He is a project manager on these topics at the CNRS Open Science Department. He recently contributed to the OPERAS OA Diamond Journal Study.
    Contracting in the Age of Open Access Publications. A Systematic Analysis of Transformative Agreements
     Video
    Funded by the French Committee for Open Science, this sociological analysis is the first systematic study of transformative agreements. We drew up a systematic list of the 197 transformative agreements that were signed between 2010 and 2020. We coded each agreement according to different variables (duration, type of journals, publisher, etc.). After a long period of secrecy in the relationships between consortia and publishers, we were able to count 96 agreements available for reading (on web pages), which is less than half of the corpus. Second, we conducted an in-depth work of reading, coding and analysis of 64 available agreements. While the analysis makes visible the general organization of the agreements, it simultaneously shows the great diversity gathered under the term transformative agreement. This study also highlights the consequences of these new types of agreements on the economics of academic publication: despite their bold name, the transformative agreements do not in themselves guarantee a transformation of the journal publishing model in favor of open access, particularly because no contractual clause explicitly aims at this end.
5:20 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Closing Remarks

Thursday, April 7

 National Library of Greece at Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC)

All times are in Eastern European Time (UTC+2)
Conference
9:00 a.m. - 9:30 a.m.
Keynote
  • Roman Piontek
    Director of SaaS Innovation France, BeNeLux, D-A-CH, Eastern Europe
    Roman Piontek is currently Director of SaaS (Software as a Service) Innovation at EBSCO Information Services GmbH. His responsibilities include the presentation and optimisation of Software-as-a-Service products (including library-management services, discovery services, authentication solutions etc.) in large parts of Europe. He has been active in the field of library SaaS for more than a decade and the work in, with and for libraries has always accompanied his professional activities.
    Big Data and Big Systems: Tradition, Innovation, Renovation, Challenges
     Video
    We are inundated with big data—having only grown in size with the omnipresence of open access. And that very fact might trigger the sometimes erroneous impression we might live in an 'Information Society'. However, ubiquity and sheer numbers alone do not account for navigability, reliability and structure. We do not live in THE information space, there are rather innumerable and at times insufficiently connected information bubbles. I may risk the assumption that it has never been easier to uncover irrelevant information and stray so far as to hardly find one's way back—and not only when roaming the vast world of social media. This is, by the way, not a recent phenomenon at all, it has been around in its general form for a long time and will certainly not vanish. I intend to take a deeper look into the evolution of data technologies as food for thought.
9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Session Three
Delivering Humanities Scholarship
The purpose of this session is to continue to showcase the research of humanities scholars and the intermediaries who serve them with this time special reference to their outputs. Obviously, the monograph must be and is central but the six presentations range more widely from the digital humanities to metadata and infrastructure. There is an emphasis on open access, but all speakers have been asked not to forget humanities journals and their role and the enduring usefulness of the print book. Each speaker has been asked to talk about what interests them/what they think is important and given 15 minutes to do this in with no effort to achieve a comprehensive picture, but the intention is that the bigger picture will be arrived at in discussion among the group and those attending.
  • Convener
    Anthony Watkinson
    Principal Consultant, CIBER Research, UK
    Anthony Watkinson is the principal consultant of CIBER Research and is a lecturer (now honorary) at University College London. He mainly now researches in information science for CIBER and publishes extensively on topics related to scholarly communication. He is a director of the Charleston Conference and plenary chair and is co-organizer for the Fiesole Retreat. He researched in ecclesiastical history at Cambridge before moving to Oxford to run the library of New College. Most of his life he has been a publisher with senior appointments for Academic Press, Oxford University Press and the Thomson Corporation and most recently a part time post at Wiley-Blackwell. He has been awarded the Vicky Speck Memorial Award for Leadership at the Charleston Conference and an award for his contribution to scholarly publishing from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishing.
  • Ros Pyne
    Global Director Open Access and Research Bloomsbury Publishing, UK
    Ros Pyne is Global Director, Research and Open Access at Bloomsbury Academic. She has worked in open access policy and strategy roles since 2013 and has a particular interest in bringing OA to long-form scholarship and to the humanities. Ros sits on the advisory boards for the OAPEN OA Books Toolkit and the Mellon-funded Exploring Open Access Ebook Usage project and was a member of the Universities UK OA Monographs group; she is co-author of several reports on open access books.
    Open Access Challenges for Humanities Books
     Video
    Publishers and others have been exploring open access for scholarly books for almost two decades now. The field remains considerably more varied than the journals OA landscape, but still only a small proportion of books are available OA. What's worked, and what hasn't? What do we need to take into account when developing open access in a humanities, rather than an STM, context? And what have the humanities already contributed to the OA debate? How do the changes brought about by, or accelerated, by the pandemic affect possible ways forward? This talk will consider we have learnt from our first forays into open access books, and what the implications are for our future efforts to expand open access in the humanities.
  • Eleni Gkadolou
    Postdoctoral Researcher, Harokopio University of Athens, Greece
    Eleni Gkadolou is postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economics & Sustainable Development of Harokopio University of Athens. Her research focuses on historical cartography, spatial narratives, and web mapping applications for History. She holds a PhD from the Department of Geography of Harokopio University of Athens and a MSc in Applied Geography and Space Management from the same department. Eleni is a partner of Pelagios contributing with the project "Digital Atlas of the Peloponnese, 19th-21st Century".
    Pelagios - Linked Open Data Methods, Tools and Community
     Video
    This presentation offers a very brief history of the humanities linked data initiative, Pelagios. Pelagios was established in 2011 to address fundamental issues facing cultural heritage collections in a digital environment, namely discoverability, reuse, and proliferating standards. In 2019 the Pelagios Network was established as an Association of equal and interdependent Partners, any, or all of whom have their own sources of funding. The presentation will briefly mention the work of three Partners which exemplify this new decentralized model. The Oxford-based Manar al-Athar Photo-Archive are sponsoring the development of a tool for automatically georesolving (generating gazetteer URIs) for places in tabular data. Performant Software have developed a semantic tagging widget for RecogitoJS and Annotorious that connects to Wikidata, VIAF, the SRU endpoint of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the API endpoint of the JISC LibraryHub Discover service, and the API endpoint of the Digital Public Library of America. Towards a National Collection are redeveloping Peripleo as a spatial data browser to enable easy search of linked datasets.

10:45 a.m. - 11:15 a.m. - Break

  • Mike Taylor
    Head of Data Insights, Digital Science, UK
    Mike is an innovator in scholarly metrics and social impact. Prior to the development of altmetrics, he was working to understand how researchers were using emerging social media networks and other platforms to exchange information. Mike has conducted much research and has published papers and presentations on altmetrics. He is working towards a PhD with Mike Thelwall at Wolverhampton University on Open Access publishing and social impact. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8534-5985
    The Impact and Visibility of OA Books in the Humanities
     Video
    OA books show a clear advantage over their non-OA counterparts by many measures. This presentation will highlight their enhanced visibility and impact, and some of the underpinning trends that constitute their advantage. However - in general - OA books have been slow to reach the same level as journals, and - at current rates - will probably never achieve the same level of market share. We will explore some of the reasons for this, and some ways of addressing the issue.
  • Toby Green
    Coherent Digital, Director and Co-Founder, UK
    Toby, Co-Founder of Coherent Digital, has 35+ years experience in scholarly, policy and professional publishing. Previously, he held a variety of senior roles with OECD Communications/Publishing, Elsevier Science and Pergamon Press. Besides the formal stuff, Toby has wrestled with data publishing, pioneered freemium open access publishing and is now trying to tame grey literature. He is a regular speaker at publishing and librarian events in Europe and North America including: Charleston, NISO, ALPSP, OASPA, SSP, and Fiesole... Currently, he serves as expert advisor to the Open Research Community. Previously, he was a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry Publishing Board and Chair and Council Member ALPSP.
    To see a list of his publications: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9601-9130.
    Follow Toby on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tobyabgreen.
    Scholarship Beyond Books and Journals - How Digital is Changing How Research is Published
     Video
    Can a Tweet be scholarship? What about an interactive website or one with real-time traffic data? And what about research from authors who have no interest in scholarly publishing channels? Digital can democratise research and how the results can be shared but this presents challenges for the scholarly record. In this presentation, you’ll see some examples and hear about some projects that are trying to meet the challenges.
  • Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe
    Professor, University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
    Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is Professor as well as Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction in the University Library and Affiliate Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Center for Global Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Lisa has consulted, presented, and published widely on a range of topics and is a "chef" in The Scholarly Kitchen. Lisa is a board member of ORCID and the Society for Scholarly Publishing and has degrees in philosophy, library science, and educational psychology.
    Library Collections and Library Services: Infrastructures for Digital Humanities Scholarship
     Video
    For decades the library has been conceptualized as "the laboratory" for humanists. The stacks as an ecological terrain of exploration, humanists settled in among the texts, reading, taking notes, and speaking in hushed tones. Or, at least that is what nostalgia offers us? In reality, those stacks were more of a cityscape, crafted and shaped by policies, politics, and financials. This has been brought into sharp relief by infrastructure demands of the digital humanities. Questions abound. Are doing and supporting digital humanities separable? Are library collections and services for the humanities decoupling? What models exist for sustainable book publishing? What of other scholarly formats? What will be the impact of open access mandates? This presentation will suggest possible approaches for engaging productively with these and other related issues.
12:30 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Closing Remarks
  • James O’Donnell
    University Librarian and Professor, Arizona State University, USA
    Jim O'Donnell is University Librarian at Arizona State University. His academic work as a Professor of Classics includes study of the history of the written word from ancient times to the present. His new translation of Caesar, entitled "The War for Gaul", was published in 2019 by Princeton University Press.
     Video
1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Light Luncheon

In the Press

Back Talk - A Streetcar in Athens

by James O'Donnell, Charleston Hub - May 9, 2022  

Fiesole Retreat 2022 - Mia anaskopisi enos endiaferontos triimerou

EESC - April 22, 2022  

Fiesole Retreat 2022: Tradition Meets Innovation

by Leah Hinds, Charleston Hub - April 15, 2022  

The Fiesole Retreat 2022: The Role of the Library

by Michael Upshall, Thinking about Digital Publishing - April 8, 2022