by Aneta Kopczacka, Museum of History of Photography in Krakow

Since 1997 Museum of History of Photography in Krakow runs website and systematically adds more pictures to online catalogue. Since then MHF was becoming more and more involved in digitization and sharing content issues. In recent years the matter of digitization got more common and more important. Being aware of the problems that accompany digitization process, we organized conference “Heritage in the web – different approaches to digitalization” to start professional discussion and give different people and different institutions opportunity to meet and talk on current problems.

photo by Mirosław Żak

The event took place in Krakow (Poland) in three attractive locations: Museum of History of Photography, Municipality of Krakow and in Jagiellonian University. Scope of the conference was to gather specialist from different fields, all connected with the matter of digitization to exchange knowledge and experience. Very important point was to show the dissonance between theory and everyday reality. Therefore participants were in one hand employees of different museums and other cultural institutions in whole country (public institutions, foundations, societies as well as private companies) and in the other digitalization and aggregation experts, representatives of Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, lawyers and archivists. The conference was an opportunity for regular employees of cultural institutions to ask questions and dispel many doubts about digitization, perspectives of development and current problems. We wanted to give participants chance to discuss these things officially and collectively as well as privately during the breaks.

MHF as an institution well experienced in digitization processes we wanted to give participants practical, useful information about it. That is why, as a consequence of conference we planned our next step which will be digitization workshop in March 2013.

One of the most important matter presented and discussed during the event were IPR  matters – problem of copyright and sharing material in the Internet. Another valid and complex topic we wanted to introduce was the problem of keywords vocabularies.

Significant goal of whole event was promotion of EuropeanaPhotography and giving solid information about the project. We distributed EP leaflets and other materials. Hubert Francuz gave the presentation titled “Strategies of sharing. Case of EuropeanaPhotography project”. Mr. Francuz spoke greatly about benefits of participating in consortia such as EP and shown how Europeana website is working and – what even more important – what end users can find there. Crucial for the presentation was giving  practical information about the project itself and about places where people can find more accurate data. After speech given by Mr. Francuz some representatives of different institutions asked about possibility of creating or joining existing consortia.

photo by Mirosław Żak

To sum up. The conference was a big success. Approximately 200 people participated in session during two days. We distributed evaluation questionnaires among all participants and they gave us very positive feedback. The event was well received and developing the idea of meeting on this fields seems to be very important. We also noticed quite wide interest in participating in digitization workshop.

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