Digital meets Culture

"Digital Cultural Content Re-imagined: New Avenues for the Economy and Society" is the opening event of Europeana Space project.

An important conference about creativity and digital cultural heritage

On 16-17th October, Venice was the venue for culture and knowledge exchange, with focus on digital technologies applied to cultural heritage: the Auditorium Santa Margherita hosted an exciting conference entitled: Digital Cultural Content Re-imagined: New Avenues for the Economy and Society. This conference included important representatives of European cultural institutions together with experts and researchers in the digital cultural heritage domain. The speeches focused on the possibilities of creative re-use for the available cultural data in new applications, and the implicit business potential that lies in this.

The conference is the opening event of EU-funded project Europeana Space, and it is organized by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice – Department of Management, together with Promoter S.r.l. an agency with strong reputation and expertise in the ICT and cultural heritage. www.digitalmeetsculture.net is the official media partner of the conference.

The event started of 16^th October at 2.00 pm with the welcome message of Michele Bugliesi, the Rector of Ca’ Foscari University; followed by speeches of Sarah Whatley, project’s coordinator and professor of Dance at Coventry University, Piero Attanasio of AIE the Italian association of Editors, Harry Verwayen of Europeana Foundation, Antonella Fresa of Promoter S.r.l. and other interesting international speakers. The conference explored the potential of digital cultural heritage, to be used in the development of new creative products and services that will boost the creative industry, generating innovation and economic growth.

During the conference, new applications under experimentation were presented on different themes (Dance, Photography, Interactive TV, Games, Museums, Open and Hybrid Publishing), and it was possible to meet the most brilliant actors that operate in these fields in Europe. The following day 17^th, the conference took place in the morning (9.30 -12.30 am), while in the afternoon it was possible for the group of registered participants to visit the Venice incubator H-Farm.

Conference website: http://veniceconference2014.europeana-space.eu.

More info:

Europeana Space (www.europeana-space.eu), led by Coventry University and including 29 partners from all over Europe, is an EU-funded project that aims to unlock the business potential of digital cultural heritage through the creative reuse of available cultural data. It encompasses 6 themed pilots where experimentation and new business models are developed. The Europeana Space project is developed in cooperation with Europeana, the European portal for Cultural Heritage.

The Department of Management of Ca’ Foscari University carried out a detailed market analysis of the business potential in the 6 key markets addressed by the project. Coordinator of this activity at Ca’ Foscari is Leonardo Buzzavo, professor of Strategy, who declared: “You can certainly derive economic growth from culture: by identifying effective business models. This is an un-missable challenge for Italy”

Promoter S.r.l. (www.promoter.it) is Technical Coordinator of Europeana Space, and the responsible partner for communication and dissemination, thus supporting Ca’ Foscari University in the organization of the conference. Antonella Fresa, the director, says: “This is a golden opportunity for the creative industries, for the cultural institutions, for students and researchers, for anybody interested in the new scenario of digital cultural heritage. This is the occasion to learn what is happening in this sector: join us, follow us on our blog, website and social networks!”

Girona (Spain), 1 - 3 October 2014

Jornades APP, mobile applications for cultural and natural heritage and tourism

The Jornades APP, organized by The Generalitat de Catalunya – Departament de Cultura (GENCAT), i2Cat and Kònic thtr, will be held during the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of October at the headquarters of the CaixaForum in Girona city (Catalonia).

For three days, the Jornades APP will present the opportunities that mobile applications and technology of Augmented Reality offers to cultural and natural heritage and tourism. Experts in these fields will present the state of the art and the potential offered by these technologies for the cultural tourism sector. This tree-day event will host conferences, roundtables and demonstrations of augmented reality applications and also include video mapping projections on Girona’s city emblematic buildings.

The Jornades APP are part of the activities under the International Augmented Med (IAM) project, an European project in the framework of the ENPI-CBCMED programme, cross-border cooperation in the Mediterranean, which aims to establish a self-sustaining cross-sector system (IT-Tourism) that provides innovative services for heritage enhancement.

More information about the events and programme here: http://www.jornadesapp.cat/

Registration (for free) here

Engineering and EGI worked together in a Proof of Concepts to deploy HAPPI on the EGI federated Cloud infrastructure

Cooperation Agreement bewteen DCH-RP and SCIDIP-ES

The Cooperation Agreement that has been signed between SCIDIP-ES and DCH-RP mainly concernes the collaboration and exchange of tools and services for digital preservation of – in this case – cultural assets.

Although the respective Agreement was signed in September 2014, the actual work already began in July 2014. Engineering International Ltd. and EGI.eu prepared for deploying and testing the SCIDIP-ES HAPPI service on the EGI Federated Cloud infrastructure.

The planned outcome of this experiment was two-fold: Firstly, the DCH community was interested in the service itself as it implements a number of required capabilities in the DCH community, such as authenticity and provenance records for a given preserved data set. The community was also interested in how well the HAPPI service could be integrated with other services in the digital preservation community.

Secondly, in the context of the emerging “Preservation as a Service” approach to the digital preservation needs in the CH sector, EGI as an e-Infrastructure provider and Engineering Italy (coming from the SCIDIP-ES project) were interested in how well HAPPI would be suited to be deployed in a virtualized infrastructure, i.e. packaged into readily instantiatable Virtual Machine images.

To that purpose, Engineering and EGI worked together in a Proof of Concepts to deploy HAPPI on the EGI federated Cloud infrastructure.

A call for volunteer gamers was launched to help recreating the British Museum's building and the response was really enthusiastic.

The British Museum recreates itself in the digital universe of the game Minecraft

Considered as one of the best games ever developed, Minecraft is a video game about breaking and placing blocks, where players, both privately and on multiplayer mode, create buildings and explore virtual worlds. The creations in Minecraft are either structures of fantasy and virtual reconstructions of real buildings.

the building blocks of Minecraft can recreate anything

Given the great appeal that the game has, especially among the young people, many real-life organisations have created their maps in the Minecraft universe; now the British Museum intends to join in and digitally reconstruct in Minecraft both its structures and its collections.

A call for volunteer gamers was launched to help recreating the British Museum’s building, and the response was really enthusiastic. The project is currently in its early stage but it seems to be a very appreciated and interesting idea, and follows other institutions such as the Danish Goverment which are already virtually present in Minecraft.

Ed Barton, an analyst of company Ovum, told the BBC that the British Museum’s move to Minecraft would help it be “perceived as something fun”, and would potentially become an effective educational tool among a younger public.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29281051

Photo: source Internet

Preservation as an e-infrastructure service: a Roadmap for digital cultural heritage

PREFORMA presented at DCH-RP Final Conference

PREFORMA project has been presented and disseminated during a workshop that took place on 22 September 2014 at the National Central Library of Rome, organised by DCH-RP Project (Digital Cultural Heritage – Roadmap for Preservation) under the umbrella of the Italian EU Presidency.

The main objective of the workshop has been to provide an overview of the main outcomes achieved by the DCH-RP project, focusing on the Roadmap for Preservation of Digital Cultural Heritage and on the potential role of e-infrastructure in the preservation of DCH.
A round table discussion on the topic “From the Roadmap to its implementation” has brought together various experts and researchers representing e-infrastructures, publishers, cultural and research institutions to discuss the sustainability of the project, giving a perspective on future activities and challenges for the implementation of an e-infrastructure-based preservation system.

For further details about the event please visit this article.

Rome, 22 September 2014

Preservation as an e-infrastructure service: a Roadmap for digital cultural heritage

The Final Conference of DCH-RP Project took place at the National Central Library of Rome, and it was organised under the umbrella of the Italian EU Presidency.
The main objective of the workshop has been to provide an overview of the main outcomes achieved by the DCH-RP project, focusing on the Roadmap for Preservation of Digital Cultural Heritage and on the potential role of e-infrastructure in the preservation of DCH.
A round table discussion on the topic “From the Roadmap to its implementation” has brought together various experts and researchers representing e-infrastructures, publishers, cultural and research institutions to discuss the sustainability of the project, giving a perspective on future activities and challenges for the implementation of an e-infrastructure-based preservation system.

Programme and presentations

10.00-10.30 Welcome and Introduction, Andrea De Pasquale (Director of the National Library), Rossana Rummo (Director General for Libraries, Cultural Institutes, and Copyright)

10.30-11.00 – Keynote speech, William Kilbride, Executive Director (Digital Preservation Coalition), Preservation strategies for digital cultural heritage (download PDF)

11.00-13.00 – First session – The political framework, Chair: Jean Moulin (BELSPO, Belgium)

11.00-11.20 Wim Jansen (European Commission), European Commission activities on e-Infrastructures: current status and vision towards Horizon 2020 (download PDF)

11.20-11.40 Rossella Caffo (ICCU Director, DCH-RP project coordinator, Italy), The DCH-RP Project and the challenges for DCH (download PDF)

12.10-12.30 Federico Ruggeri (Consortium GARR, the Italian Research and Education Network organization), The role of e-Infrastructure for the preservation of cultural heritage (download PDF)

12.30-13.00 Börje Justrell (Director at the National Archives of Sweden) and Antonella Fresa (Promoter Srl and DCH-RP Technical Coordinator), Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for preservation: an Open Science Infrastructure for DCH (download PDF)

13.00-13.20 Agostino Attanasio (Director of the National Central State Archive), Strategies and activities of the National Central State Archive: a good practice in public-public partnership (download PDF)

14.30-17.20 Round table: From the Roadmap to implementation, Chair: Wim Jansen (European Commission)

Participants:

Börje Justrell, (Director at the National Archives of Sweden)
Michel Drescher (EGI.eu)
Tim Devenport (DCH-RP Project)
Norbert Mayer (EUDAT Project)
Mariella Guercio (APARSEN Project)
Franco Niccolucci (ARIADNE Coordinator)
Enzo Valente (e-IRG, Director of Consortium GARR, the Italian Research and Education Network organization)
Giovanni Bergamin (Central National Library of Florence, Magazzini Digitali)
Marie Véronique Leroi (French Ministry of Culture)
Fulvio Marelli (ESA, SCIDIP-ES Project)
Luigi Briguglio (Engineering, SCIDIP-ES Project)
Mirella Serlorenzi (Special Superintendency for the Archaeological Heritage of Rome)

The images come from books published over a 500 year period and digitized by the Internet Archive

Historical illustrations of digitized books available on Flickr

A researcher at Georgetown University in Washington DC, Kalev Leetaru, is adding millions of newly digitized images to the photo-sharing website Flickr, in the framework of a fellowship sponsored by Yahoo!, that is the owner of Flickr.

The project aims to make available up to 14.6 million images on Flickr, all extracted from books, magazines and newspapers published over a 500 year period and digitized by the Internet Archive organization. Currently, the collection uploaded in Flickr comprises about 2.6 million public domain images, extracted and catalogued after the digitization processes.

Image from page 496 of “The boy travellers in Australasia …” (1889)

The digitization activity of libraries, in facts, focuses on text, rather than on images, and makes the book pages available as PDF or text searchable works, while the illustrations are difficult to be search and found. That’s because the OCR program that digitizes the millions of public domain books to converge in the Internet Archive normally discards the illustrations, and this is definitely a pity considering the richness and value of at least some of those ancient images, and in any case considering that most of the images that are in the books, newspapers and catalogues are not available anywhere else in the world.

The code developed by Leetaru recovers those parts of the page which include images: the images are cropped, cleaned up, and uploaded to Flickr along with the text that appears next to them (about 500 words before and 500 after the image), along with detailed description ((title, year of publication, authors, and publisher) and searchable tags that make retrieval very easy.

“Stretching half a millennium, it’s amazing to see the total range of images and how the portrayals of things have changed over time.” said Leetaru to BBC.

Surf the whole collection:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/

http://ebookfriendly.com/internet-archive-free-images-flickr/

http://www.openculture.com/2014/08/new-flickr-archive-makes-available-2-6-million-images-from-books.html

in Florida, it was recently inaugurated a bookless university library

A library without books

Florida Polytechnic University’s new library is not the first of its kind, although the completely digital libraries, that is physical buildings where people can access ebooks only, are still very unusual even in America. It is a new way of thinking a library, that tries to meet with the tendencies of the digital age and the growing amount of digital cultural resources.

the new library at Florida Polytechnic University: a bright, open space with computer terminals, desks, and comfortable spots to read.

Being a Polytechnic University, the idea behind the choice of creating a digital-only univesity library is to encourage and prepare students to read, search and manage digital documents, in order to increase their digital literacy and their abilities in digital research.

These are certainly useful skills that are fundamental in the industry, where the students would be placed in their future jobs.

There are other advantages in having only ebooks. The archive of this library consists of about 135,000 ebooks, and funds are available for acquiring, on demand, new e-texts that are not present yet in the library; in a physical library with shelves and pyles of volumes, to have such a richness and amount of books would not be possible – and next to that, search and retrieval of information would be certainly more difficult than within the digital library. It is also easier that students and readers find new books and information of interest by chance, while surfing the digital archives.

Although a very advanced idea, still it looks strange to completely lose the experience of walking through rooms fully covered with books, as we normally used to do when we were students. Indeed the digital era and the opportunities offered by the digitized cultural heritage have a very strong impact on our society and our habits of accessing information and culture.

Read the full article on The Guardian

Amsterdam, 24 September 2014

Safeguarding our Scientific, Educational and Cultural Heritage

APARSEN – DPHEP – EUDAT – SCIDIP-ES

Joint Data Preservation Workshop

‘Safeguarding our Scientific, Educational and Cultural Heritage’

24 September 2014

Black Room, De Meervaart Conference Centre, Meer en Vaart 300, Amsterdam 1068

The event is free to attend but please register here.

This joint workshop is an opportunity for attendees to provide their views and requirements to four major initiatives, APARSEN, SCIDIP-ES, EUDAT and DPHEP, which are evolving beyond the end of their respective EU-funded projects, and will continue to help organisations to manage and preserve research data.

For more details please visit the workshop web page.

Brussels, 22-23 October 2014

APA Conference – Launch of the Centre of Excellence

The 2014 APA conference launches the APA Centre of Excellence (CoE).

The programme details are available here.

The CoE is a membership organisation, built on the existing Alliance for Permanent Access (APA), supplemented greatly by the APARSEN and SCIDIP-ES FP7 EU projects, which provide expertise about digital preservation and obtaining value from digitally encoded information. Our members have demonstrated this capability with their own data, supplemented with tools, services and techniques which have been proved through extensive research and accelerated lifetime testing, and which has been applied most recently to long term preservation for a number of space agencies.

The CoE provides training, consultancy, tools and services to support organisations which need to ensure that their digital resources remain understandable and usable. It can also help to create the business case to justify the resources needed in order to provide sustainable digital preservation.

The unique selling point is that CoE offering is coherent and consistent and should be applicable to any type of digital object and it is backed by the combined experience of the DP pioneers both in the research field and, more importantly, as worldwide earliest adopters of DP practices. While there are specific data areas such as documents or audio-visual which have community recognised preservation techniques, the CoE believes that most, if not all, repositories will be called on to preserve many different types of information.The services offering comes from members, experts in their fields, as well as from the APA office. Members obtain benefits including, but not limited to, being able to access additional, non-public material, discounts on access to the offerings and to present a unified voice to policy makers and funders.

The conference is organised around examples from members showing how they have tackled and overcome their preservation problems. The examples are further grouped around the integrated view of digital preservation which APARSEN has brought together.