CLB – website
Hosting institution: Institute of Czech Literature, CAS
CLB is a primary research infrastructure for Czech literary studies and associated humanities disciplines. CLB carries on the almost 70-year tradition of compiling specialist bibliographies at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences and continues to develop it. Within this framework a set of bibliographical databases is being compiled and supplemented on an ongoing basis, as well as being systematically utilized at a professional level, consistently mapping out literary life in the Czech lands from the first stirrings of the National Revival to the present, along with associated information resources (biographical databases, digital libraries, literary award database, etc.). CLB resources are used as source material for valued synthetic work (e.g. the Lexicon of Czech Literature and the Dictionary of Post-1945 Czech Literature). CLB research infrastructure offers unlimited online access to extensive database corpora that are updated on an ongoing basis in real time. CLB also focuses on the development of ancillary software aids. CLB staff are also preparing personnel and subject bibliographies, which are not infrequently book-sized. Not least, the CLB is engaged in tuition and education, inter alia in the direct involvement of university students in CLB data processing. CLB also have a clear international dimension, particularly for German-Czech and Slavonic research, as well as national philology and associated humanities disciplines.
Future development
In the next few years the activities of CLB will focus in particular on completion of the system integration of their previously heterogeneous database sources on a uniform software platform and the associated editing of converted data. In addition to processing the current output in the field, CLB will also focus on the retrospective mapping of previously neglected data corpora (inter alia a bibliography of Czech samizdat literature, bibliography of Czech literary internet, etc.). An increased attention will also be paid to the development of services for CLB users (presentation interface, development and innovation of software applications for working with CLB data, etc.) or activities involving tuition and education.
Socio-economic impact
CLB sources are a primary source for studying literary and more broadly cultural life in the Czech lands in all its historical and linguistic varieties and so fundamentally help to get to know national literature as one of the basic components that make up the Czech national identity. Comparatively, this is one of the most extensive and complex projects of its kind both here and abroad, whose online services are used regularly by a large number of users from the Czech Republic and elsewhere.
