In the course of the digital transformation research practices in the humanities are increasingly shaped by the active use of computers, data, networked archives, digital tools, and digital objects. More and more research projects in the cultural and historical sciences, in art history, literary studies, ancient studies and many more are creating digital editions, relying on text and data mining or use digital image analysis. This implies new task and requirements for university and research libraries. In addition to their tasks as an infrastructure for the supply of literature and information for students, teachers and researchers, academic libraries are increasingly operating as coordinating bodies and academic hubs - as meeting and knowledge spaces. In particular, the new interdisciplinary research field of Digital Humanities (DH) formulates new requirements for libraries and their academic services.

In order to meet the new requirement profiles of the Digital Humanities (DH) in research and teaching, Freie Universität established a competence center for digital humanities: the »Ada Lovelace Center for Digital Humanities(ADA)«. 

The »Ada Lovelace Center for Digital Humanities« (ADA) at Freie Universität gathers, connects and promotes all activities in the Digital Humanities. It is supported by the Departments of History and Cultural Studies, Philosophy and the Humanities, Mathematics and Computer Science as well as the University Library. The center is named after the British mathematician, poet and the world's first programmer "Ada Lovelace" (1815-1852). ADA builds interdisciplinary bridges between the natural sciences and engineering on the one hand and the scientific traditions of the humanities and cultural studies on the other.

To support and foster a community of practice in the Digital Humanities at FU, the center provides a social, communicative, and spatial infrastructure for the cooperative development of digital humanities methods and tools at Freie Universität Berlin. It supports FU researchers in the conception and coordination of topic- and method-related working groups and labs (Ada Labs) and connects relevant expertise from the various cross-cutting fields of the digital humanities. The ADA is located at the University Library.