EuropeanaPhotography in Athens

The third plenary meeting of EuropeanaPhotography project took place in Athens, hosted by the National Technical University of Athens. The location was chosen in Athens because the meeting offered a technical training for the content providers of EuropeanaPhotography, who had the possibility to follow a lecture about the MINT tool and also to get training and personalized exercises on their own laptops. The whole event was organized by dr. Nikolaos Simou, who also held the training to the partners in cooperation with his colleagues of NTUA.

The MINT tool is a user-friendly platform developed by NTUA, and includes a multilingual vocabulary about photography, developed by KMKG. The tool is now ready to use for EuropeanaPhotography content providers: once the selected images are digitized, the related metadata will be ingested, mapped and enriched with the tool and the vocabulary, and then delivered to Europeana.

The MINT training was not the only special-event of the plenary meeting: in facts, on day 2 the meeting hosted a presentation about the Rights Labeling Campaign by Europeana's IPR and Policy advisor Mrs. Julia Fallon. She was very kind and cooperative to take part in the whole meeting and to give a precious contribution to the discussion, that will drive interesting results as for IPR issue related to photography and digitized images.

In the plenary meeting, a sum up after the review, which result was “good”, had been presented by Antonella Fresa, and then all the WP Leaders presented plans for the upcoming months. The new partner which joined the project in November 2012, Fondazione Alinari, was welcomed by the others. Dimitrios Tsolis from University of Patrass gave a presentation of the IPR support tools that are under development for EuropeanaPhotography project.

Main activities of year 2 will be digitization (objective is 250.000 digitized image, of which 100.000 available in Europeana), enrichment and ingestion; while work will also proceed on the front of sustainability and IPR. Dissemination will be empowered and enlarged in order to reach a wider audience with which EuropeanaPhotography's results can be shared. Open thematic workshops will be organized by the partners from autumn on, and a photography-dedicated issue of Uncommon Culture will host articles and interviews by the EuropeanaPhotography partners.

The Project Coordinator prof. Fred Truyen also published his impressions of the meeting in his blog about digital culture.

Present to the event were three representatives of the Greek Ministry of Culture, Mrs. Maria Kotlida, Mrs. Panagiota Gerasimou and Mrs. Katerina Moutogianni, who assisted to the training and to the presentations.

The partners enjoyed the warm hospitality at the Divani Palace Acropolis hotel, in the very center of the city, and the organization by NTUA was excellent. Lovely Greek specialties made lunch breaks and dinner extremely pleasant.

Finally, after the end of the meeting, partners had the possibility to visit Athens and the Acropolis surroundings, as unfortunately all the archaeological sites of the city were closed because of a strike. That was a pity; anyhow the picturesque area of la Plaka and the famous Syntagma square were enough to compensate the visitors.

Next appointment for EuropeanaPhotography is September 2013 in Vilnius, for a big event under the EU Presidency of Lithuania, where the plenary meeting will be jointed to a photographic exhibition and some cultural lectures. Organization is now in the hands of Lithuanian Art Museums.