Highlights from the quarterly reports of TU Wien Bibliothek 2025
2025: Quarter 4 - Vienna Art Week: Exhibition Olaf Osten | AI in Libraries | TU Wien Academic Press at Frankfurter Buchmesse and Buch Wien | EOSC Federation | BiblioDay and "Österreich liest"
Art meets technology in the Library
The exhibition “Weltverständnis?” by artist Olaf Osten at TU Wien Bibliothek is set at the interface of art and technology and is part of the VIENNA ART WEEK festival theme LEARNING SYSTEMS. Using the observational system of art, Olaf Osten questions our only partially controllable technological achievements in his exhibition at TU Wien Bibliothek and reminds us that we, the designers of the anthropocene, would be well advised to see ourselves as part of nature, instead of thoughtlessly distancing ourselves too far from it. His works raise various questions of scientific ethics: Should we be guided only by what is possible or also by what is necessary, when curiosity and inventiveness drive us into abstract spheres? How do we behave when it is difficult to predict what technological developments such as artificial intelligence will do to us?
At the opening on 11 November 2025, the artist guided more than 70 interested participants through the exhibition. Following the tour, a moderated panel discussion explored perspectives from different disciplines (geoinformation, civil engineering, art, science and technology studies) on nature and technology, discussing analogue and digital worlds, scientific responsibility and trust in science. Beside Olaf Osten and Helga Nowotny, the panel included TU Wien researchers Norbert Pfeifer and Agathe Robisson, under the moderation of Pia Graves. The exhibition is on view in the library until the middle of March 2026.
© VIENNA ART WEEK 2025 / eSeLs
Opening of the Vienna Art Week exhibition “Weltverständnis?” by Olaf Osten on the ground floor of the Library
AI in libraries
The symposium „KI in der Erschließung“(AI in metadata management) marked the start of the new OBVSG event series “BiblioVision”, combining international perspectives with discussion of ethical issues. In his keynote speech, Carlo Blum presented AI projects at Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg. After impulse presentations by Kerstin Katzlberger and Marc-Paul Ibitz (Austrian National Library) and Stefan Fink (TU Graz, Working Group on Automatic Indexing), Tobias Weberndorfer (TU Wien Bibliothek) presented our large language model for subject indexing. Presentations by Nicole Graf (ETH Library) on indexing photographs and Eva Seidlmayer (ZB MED Köln) on automatic detection of disinformation concluded the programme.
TU Wien Academic Press at Frankfurter Buchmesse and Buch Wien book fairs
TU Wien’s scientific open access publisher, TU Wien Academic Press, presented its new releases at the Frankfurter Buchmesse book fair for the first time this year at the exhibition stand of the Hauptverband des österreichischen Buchhandels (HVB). The publication “Soziales Wohnen in Wien” attracted special attention, and was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for social-ecological and communal living, opens an external URL in a new window at the end of the year.
At Buch Wien 2025, TU Wien Academic Press shared an exhibition stand with mdwPress, Innsbruck university press and the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. A highlight of the programme took place on 14 November 2025 in the Science Workshop Lounge: In a performance, newly developed interfaces were presented that turn body movements directly into sound. The subsequent book presentation of “Embodied Gestures” by Hilda Tellioglu (TU Wien), Enrique Tomás (Tangible Music Lab, University of Arts Linz), and Martin Kaltenbrunner (JKU Linz) offered in-depth insights into the research. The event highlighted the successful combination of research and science communication.
The EOSC Federation is growing
The extension of the EOSC Federation shaped this year’s international and national activities. At the beginning of November, the EOSC Symposium in Brussels made visible the progress of the first nodes and the importance of the EOSC community as a social infrastructure. The 11th General Assembly of the EOSC Association on 10 December 2025 was the first under the new president, Klaus Tochtermann. Proposals of the European Commission for financing from 2028 onwards were discussed.
The 5th General Assembly of the EOSC Support Office Austria was held on 18 November 2025 at TU Wien. In his opening address, Vice Rector Wolfgang Kastner emphasized the importance of openness and digital sovereignty. Presentations focused on activities related to communication, community and stakeholders, new partners and the development of ACONET, as well as the preparations for a national EOSC Node, which have been underway since the middle of 2025 and are coordinated by Ilire Hasani-Mavriqi (TU Graz). The process of the node candidacy is being overseen by the EOSC SOA Steering Committee, which conferred in two meetings on the governance and potential services of an Austrian EOSC Node. Beate Guba (TU Wien) was confirmed as first speaker of the Steering Committee, Andreas Brandtner (University of Vienna) is the second speaker. Barbara Sánchez Solís (TU Wien) handed over the chair of the Management Board to Dimitri Prandner (JKU Linz).
BiblioDay and “Österreich liest 2025” – successful contributions to the fuTUre fit strategy
On 22 October 2025, the Library held its first Open Day. This “BiblioDay” met with a positive response: More than one hundred staff members from the faculties and central divisions of TU Wien made use of the opportunity to learn more about library services and current projects such as the digitization of the Sitte Library, and visit the closed stacks in the three basement levels of the Main Library and the Data Visualisation Space Davis. The open exchange deepened the sense of community at TU Wien. In addition, within the programme of the “Österreich liest” literature festival, the general public had an opportunity to participate in two game sessions with the Research Group “Human Computer Interaction”, which has developed board games and card games that convey the fundamental elements of democratic behaviour.
2025: Quarter 3 - Open Science Festival 2025 | Skills4EOSC project completed | Contributions to the exhibition catalogue "Reinforced Concrete" | "Kunst zum Anfassen" in the Vienna Design Week
Open Science Festival 2025: What are future trends for the digital accessibility of research results?
How can the library help when researchers want to publish a scientific journal without involving a commercial publisher? What is the role of persistent identifiers (PIDs) in disseminating research results? These questions were at the centre of two workshops contributed by TU Wien Bibliothek to the Open Science Festival 2025 on 08 and 09 September 2025 at the University of Vienna.
For independent journals, libraries can provide infrastructures and ensure the dissemination of publications. The workshop findings were that aside from the provision of professional software and entries in relevant indexes, an integration of AI based features is at the top of the wish list, especially with a view to plagiarism assessment. TU Wien Bibliothek and Vienna University Library are already providing services for journals in a diamond open access model and will take the workshop findings on board for future development.
PIDs are crucial to the visibility and findability of research results, turning data into unique and findable publications, persons, projects or events. TU Wien Bibliothek not only provides PIDs for our own publications, but further strengthens its role within the Austrian research landscape by establishing a PID Competence Centre Austria. At the festival, the library together with the international ORCID organization set up an escape room activity to impart knowledge about identifiers through play.
Successful completion of the international project Skills4EOSC
The project “Skills for the European Open Science Commons: creating a training ecosystem for Open and FAIR science (Skills4EOSC)”, funded by the European Commission Horizon Europe programme, coordinated by Consortium GARR and supported by 44 partners in 18 European countries, reached its successful conclusion. Within TU Wien, the project management was shared by TU Wien Bibliothek and the Center for Research Data Management, with contributions from the research group Data Science. Skills4EOSC addressed the urgent need for qualified professionals within the ecosystem of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The project developed common curricula and training programmes for Open Science and FAIR data, connected emerging national competence centres and supported the EOSC Partnership Specific Objective 1.2. “Professional data stewards are available in research-performing organisations in Europe to support Open Science”.
Most of the project results are publicly available on Zenodo. Among the important results are the Competence Centre Kit, the Catalogue of Minimum Viable Skillsets, the FAIR-by-Design Methodology and the Recognition Framework. These form the basis of the development of training courses and materials, harmonise open science curricula and strengthen competence centres via the pan-European CCNet.
In the future, Skills4EOSC trainings will be available via a self-paced eLearning platform providing a comprehensive curriculum for researchers, data managers and other stakeholders. TU Wien was closely involved in developing the strategy for competence centres, developing the curriculum and preparing the Data Management Plan and the Stakeholder Plan.
Digitization: Exhibition catalogue „Reinforced Concrete - Anatomy of a Metropolis”
From 22 May to 28 September 2025, Wien Museum showed the exhibition “Reinforced Concrete – Anatomy of a Metropolis, opens an external URL in a new window”. Accompanying this 443rd special exhibition, Wien Museum published the exhibition catalogue “Anatomie einer Metropole. Bauen mit Eisenbeton in Wien 1890-1914“. TU Wien Bibliothek’s service group Interlibrary Loan and Digitization contributed 35 reproductions to this catalogue in the form of scans from journals in our library holdings. TU Wien Bibliothek is therefore named in the catalogue’s illustration listing and in the acknowledgements. Wien Museum especially praised the high quality of the scans, produced with the Library’s new book scanner.
“Kunst2: Kunst zum Anfassen” – TU Wien’s contribution to the Vienna Design Week 2025
As part of the Vienna Design Week, the research unit Three-Dimensional Design and Model Making of the Institute of Art and Design presented an exhibition of student work that demonstrates the diversity of topics within the master's programme Architecture and makes visible the concept of research-led teaching in the arts. A further example of this is the book “Zwischen Henkel und Schnabel/Between handle and spout, opens an external URL in a new window”, recently published by TU Wien Academic Press, which documents a course held in cooperation with the European Capital of Culture Bad Ischl–Salzkammergut. In the exhibition, the physical objects were complemented with digital picture material. The exhibition was on view from 30 September to 05 October 2025 in the Davis Data Visualisation Space.
© Beate Guba
Exhibition "Kunst zum Anfassen" in Davis, CC BY Beate Guba
2025: Quarter 2 - Open Science Day 2025 | Project results of "Open Urban Sustainability Hubs" | REST-GDI-AGRAR project completed | ORCID workshop
First „Open Science Day for and by researchers” at TU Wien
Under the motto “We dare to open science”, TU Wien Bibliothek hosted the first Open Science Day at TU Wien on 03 June 2025. For one day, everything revolved around open science - with presentations and discussions on topics such as open access, FAIR data, open source code and citizen science. The focus was on transdisciplinary collaboration and insights into each other’s research practice. The research project "Soil Walks” demonstrated how a walk-and-talk format combined with an interactive data platform can raise awareness of soil sealing and land use. Several contributions centred on citizen science. Thus, Markus Hollaus presented forest monitoring projects involving citizens, and discussed the potentials, challenges and limitations in connection with citizen science data. Christian Peer discussed citizen science as a transdisciplinary tool for urban transformation. Markus Huber reported on the community-led open access journal “Quantum” and the challenges of establishing a scientific publication model outside the commercial publishing world. Contributions on the FAIR principles (Tomasz Miksa), the European Open Science Cloud (Beate Guba, Chris Schubert), and open science in industry collaborations (Julia Neidhardt) completed the programme. The variety of topics and participants demonstrated the importance of the topic of open science to all faculties of TU Wien. The library is already looking forward to the Open Science Day 2026.
Promising project results of the JPI Urban Europe project “Open Urban Sustainability Hubs”
The international project Open Urban Sustainability Hubs (OPUSH), conducted by the future.lab Research Center of the Faculty of Architecture and Planning in collaboration with TU Wien Bibliothek, reached a successful conclusion. The majority of the project results is publicly accessible. Two journal articles are currently under review. With two pilot projects, TU Wien tested the suitability of citizen science for sustainable urban planning: a total of more than one hundred persons aged 11 to 84 took part in workshops on the focus topics of urban heat and participative urban planning. In 2024, the project was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Climate Change Adaptation (CliA) and the OeAD Citizen Science Award. Future plans include extending the range of services offered to TU Wien researchers and further strengthening and extending cooperation with public libraries and museums.
Successful conclusion of the project REST-GDI-AGRAR
The project „REST-GDI-AGRAR (RESilienT GeoDataInfrastructure for AGricultural & Rural ARreas)”, led by the Federal Environment Agency, reached its official conclusion at the AGIT Conference for Geoinformatics in Salzburg with a pitch on “Tools for Data Spaces” and an international workshop on terminology systems. The library contributed the content work on data models for the knowledge graph and the implementation of terminology services as a reference register for agricultural data. The resulting properties-based graphs allow display of, and search for, the spatial distribution, location specifics and origin of agricultural crops. The data resources are based on InVeKoS (AMA, EC), Sentinel and existing land use data. The service infrastructure of this pilot implementation is operated at the Federal Institute of Agricultural Economics, Rural and Mountain Research (Bundesanstalt für Agrarwirtschaft und Bergbauernfragen BAB). Future goals of this pilot include scaling to operational deployment and the migration of components into open infrastructures.
Workshop “ORCID and your digital identity as a researcher”
Many bibliographic databases create profile pages of authors in order to list citation numbers and similar information. The ORCID workshop, held for the fourth time in May 2025 for researchers of all faculties, considered the difference between ORCID and Web of Science, Scopus or Google Scholar. ORCID offers a persistent identifier that distinguishes scientists on a metadata level. In addition, the data displayed in ORCID can be curated to a maximum degree by users – which is invaluable in an era of algorithmically manufactured profile pages. ORCID can also be integrated into various scientific platforms (such as Zenodo, Overleaf or manuscript submission systems), a fact TU Wien makes use of in its TISS and ReposiTUm platforms.
2025: Quarter 1 - TU Wien Bibliothek at the Austrian Library Congress 2025 | TU Wien Academic Press annual programme | Relocation of library holdings to Book Depot Floridsdorf
TU Wien Bibliothek at the Austrian Library Congress 2025
With around 1000 participants, the Austrian Library Congress was an ideal forum for interdisciplinary exchange on topics that are redefining the role of libraries in a changing world. TU Wien Bibliothek focussed on applications of artificial intelligence. Our Large Language Model for automatic subject indexing met with great interest, as did our presentation on retrospective cataloguing of handwritten catalogue cards, a project which employed pattern recognition using the Transkribus software.
Further topics were the urban sustainability transformation, which libraries help to promote in their role as Open Urban Sustainability Hubs, and the transition of scientometric services toward dynamic knowledge maps. A joint contribution with AT2OA2 project partners on predatory publishing at Austrian universities demonstrated how targeted facilitation work helps to fight dubious publishing practices.
Leonhard Zachl of TU Wien Bibliothek’s library IT was awarded the prestigious Bruno Bauer Memorial Prize for Innovation by th Association of Austrian Librarians (VÖB) for his outstanding work programming the Firefox extension „TUW lAma (let Alma be more adroit)“, which considerably improves the efficiency of the Alma library system software.
As a special highlight, TU Wien Bibliothek offered exclusive guided tours focussing on data visualisation, the green library and the sustainable development goals (SDGs). An art exhibition on the SDGs was on view in the library until March 2025.
Annual programme of TU Wien Academic Press
TU Wien Bibliothek’s scientific open access publisher was represented at the Austrian Library Congress from 25 – 28 May 2025 with a joint exhibition booth at the Austria Center together with Verlag der TU Graz and Graz University Library Publishing. There, TU Wien Academic Press presented its annual programme. To date, 48 titles are listed on VLB, and in the first quarter of 2025, intensive work is being carried out on ten new releases and a new book series, “Space&Gender”. Preparations are currently underway for participation in the book fairs Frankfurter Buchmesse in October 2025 and Buch Wien 2025.
Successful relocation of library holdings to the Book Depot Floridsdorf
Following intense preparation work in 2024, media from 15 different locations of the main library, the Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering Library and the Freihaus stack rooms were moved to the new Book Depot Floridsdorf and arranged according to call numbers. The majority of these holdings is available in digital form via the TU Wien campus network; for all other items, users can request scans of individual journal articles or use the reading room at the Depot if required. Print journals where TU Wien Bibliothek is the archiving library in Austria can be stored in the new building under ideal conditions. 20 library staff members contributed to the success of the project with their expertise and commitment. The project will be completed with a celebration by all partner institutions – besides TU Wien, these include the University of Vienna, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Geosphere Austria.