ONB Labs

The ONB Labs are an initiative to open up the digital holdings of the Austrian National Library (ONB). The offer is aimed at people from the field of digital humanities and artists who want to use the rich offer of the ONB.

On the project website, selected data sets from the library collections are described, enriched with metadata and offered via APIs. The spectrum ranges from already digitized holdings (e.g. historical postcards) to documentation and access to the catalog metadata to also an interface for the Web Archive Austria, where metadata from the website crawls of the .at domain can be queried and evaluated. The datasets are also offered as Linked Open Data (LOD) and images can be accessed via IIIF. In addition to the datasets, tools for evaluation and analysis are also being developed, and source code or example applications for the datasets can be obtained from a public repository. These are mostly made available in the form of interactive Jupyter notebooks.

After registration, it is also possible to compile and save individual collections. Registered users are provided with a GitLab environment that is intended to encourage users to experiment with the datasets themselves and to share them with others.

In addition to the project website, the ONB Labs also offer events. These include symposia, competitions and web residencies.

In the past, Bring Your Project was a service that offered technical support for research questions.