By Lambert Heller, for the Kula Blog
In 2025 I had the honor to be the first International Visiting Fellow at Kula: Library Futures Academy, a new initiative launched at the University of Victoria (UVic) Libraries. UVic sits on the beautiful south coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, with the Mearns Centre for Learning – McPherson Library, a modern library building, at the heart of the campus.
My own institutional home is the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB) in Hannover, Germany. Like Kula, TIB is built on the premise that an academic library should also be an active research hub. I spent most of my career building the Open Science Lab, one of several librarian research arms of TIB. My time at Kula reinforced my belief that the concept of library-led research is more relevant than ever.
I spent an unforgettable summer at the Kula Academy. As a fellow, I had plenty of opportunity to connect with librarians and staff at UVic Libraries. Of all the things I learned firsthand about their work and professional practices, two things stood out to me in particular: how effectively they integrate their research services and tailor the resulting interconnected portfolio to the specific target audiences they serve; and how committed UVic Libraries are to preserving cultural heritage, including community-led archiving.
For example, the Transgender Archives caught my attention early. UVic Libraries’ Special Collections & University Archives hosts one of the world’s largest archival collections on Trans+ history and activism, spanning over 120 years and materials in 15 languages from 6 continents. There is a strong scholarly community around it, including the Chair in Transgender Studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and Transgender Archives Metadata & Outreach Librarian Michael Radmacher at the Libraries. Both engaging the public and fostering academic engagement through creative outreach are part of their mission: Renowned exhibitions and the biennial conference Moving Trans History Forward conference spring from this community.
Another initiative, the SERSAL project, co-led by Nathaniel Brunt, Aspiration 2030/Kula Postdoctoral Fellow, also struck me as exceptional. Dr. Brunt and his project partners are building the first visual archive of the Yezidi community after the genocide committed against them by ISIS. Among other things, the work brings photographs held in Western collections back to the Yezidi community through public displays staged in the towns where they were originally taken.
Running through these projects at UVic Libraries is a strong dedication to post-custodial archiving. This practice involves supporting communities of origin so they retain custody and authority over their archival material, with institutions contributing digitization, description, and infrastructure rather than acquiring the materials themselves.
There is also a technical dimension to safeguarding cultural heritage at UVic Libraries. PhD student in Computer Studies Chloë Farr, Kula’s Graduate Fellow in Artificial Intelligence, is developing tools to evaluate open-source language models used to read historical documents that cannot be processed well with conventional OCR methods, including maps, heavily damaged newspaper prints, and handwritten texts.
Together with Christian Schmidt, who encouraged and coordinated my Kula fellowship and now serves as Kula’s Strategic Initiatives Coordinator, I ran a citizen science workshop for library staff at the Digital Scholarship Commons (DSC). To my huge surprise, the room was full of highly motivated colleagues on a Friday afternoon, and our discussion about how libraries could support participatory research kept going long after the session was scheduled to end. That kind of exchange is what the DSC, from my perspective, is built for. As part of UVic Libraries’ Advanced Research Services unit, it is more a conceptual branch for knowledge generation and dissemination than just a physical space — many of its offerings happen entirely online. But the central location and the design of the space matter. Its light-filled, flexibly programmable open floor plan, equipped with current technology, serves as a home for extracurricular learning, research offerings open to both campus and public, community-led workshops, and guest lectures, among other concepts. The DSC is where I saw most clearly how diverse scholarly contexts can contribute to a larger community—and experiencing such shared commitment to how knowledge creation and mobilization is evolving is exactly what working in a library should feel like.
What I take home to Hannover is a sense of dedication and urgency for the work that is possible when a research hub and an academic library are one. I have also found a second professional home at UVic Libraries — the Kula team and their colleagues welcomed me warmly, and the conversations we had together opened up new perspectives for me. I look forward to building this partnership between TIB and UVic Libraries in the years ahead.