Growing an international Cultural Heritage Labs community

‘Cultural Heritage Labs’ in galleries, libraries, archives and museums around the world help researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators and innovators to work on, experiment, incubate and develop their ideas of working with digital content through competitions, awards, projects, exhibitions and other engagement activities. They do this by providing services and infrastructure to enable, facilitate and give access to their data both openly online and onsite for research, inspiration and enjoyment. In September 2018, the British Library Labs team organised a ‘Building Library Labs’' international workshop. The event provided the opportunity for colleagues that are planning or already have digital experimental ‘Labs’ to share knowledge, experiences and lessons learned. The workshop, which attracted over 40 institutions from North America, Europe, Middle East, Asia and Africa, demonstrated a clear need and enthusiasm for establishing an international support network. Within 6 months, a second international workshop was organised at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen in March 2019. In total we have brought together some 120 participants and an even wider community of around 250 people online. Some have been sharing their experiences in setting, using and running innovation labs, but there was a sizeable group of attendees who are planning to set up such labs and need advice and support in how to do this. The aim of this short paper is to present the journey and development of the International Labs community and outline our future activities.