The CLB’s main foreign partners are its Polish counterparts, the Polish Literary Bibliography (PLB, Polska Bibliografia Literacka) and the Polish Digital Humanities Centre (Centrum Humanistyky Cyfrowej) at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk, IBL PAN).
The partnership between the CLB and PLB was fostered through the project Future of Polish and Czech Literary Bibliography: Towards Integration and Applications in Comparative Research (investigators Vojtěch Malínek and Piotr Wciślik), which was supported by the Czech and Polish Academies of Sciences between 2017 and 2019. During the project, four or five CLB researchers and the same number of PLB or Digital Humanities Centre staff worked in the infrastructure of their foreign counterpart for one week each year. Points of connection were quickly identified and the exchange visits were used to work intensively on common tasks and publications and conduct workshops with researchers from the other country.
The most significant outcome of the CLB–IBL collaboration is undoubtedly the Bibliographical Data Working Group, which is part of the DARIAH-ERIC consortium. A joint initiative of Tomasz Umerle and Vojtěch Malínek in late 2018, the group was officially approved by the DARIAH administrators in September 2019. Its main goal is to provide a platform for the discussion of European standards among bibliographers, data researchers, IT developers and other individuals and institutions dealing with bibliographical issues. The working group currently comprises around 30 researchers from 15 different countries. More details are available here.
The close cooperation between these two institutes also prompted calls for a common platform to present their data uniformly. The outcome of these discussions was the Literary Bibliography Research Infrastructure (LiBRI) project, which is responsible for the libri.ucl.cas.cz database. IT infrastructure for the site, including a VuFind discovery system, has been provided by ICL and the partners are working on aligning their data and unifying access thesauri based on internationally persistent identifier systems (e.g. VIAF, Library of Congress subject headings, etc.). We are exploring the possibility of adding more national literary studies bibliographies to this resource. Negotiations with Hungarian and Slovak colleagues are under way.
