Digital meets Culture

Padua, 7 March 2017

Registration open for the workshop in Padua

After the two successful events organised last year in Stockholm and in Berlin, the PREFORMA project is happy to invite all the members of the digital preservation community to attend the PREFORMA Innovation Workshop which will be held in Padua on 7 March 2017.

Aim of the workshop is to highlight the importance of standardisation and file format validation for the long term preservation of digtal cultural content, present the open source conformance checkers developed in the project and the business models that can be built around them, and involve memory institutions outside the PREFORMA consortium in testing, using and further developing the software.

The event will include:

keynote speeches by international experts in digital preservation and open source business modelling;
a panel to reflect on how to measure the impact of a project and to ensure its sustainability;
live demonstrations of the software developed by the three suppliers (the veraPDF consortium, Easy Innova, MediaArea);
an informal networking event where attendees can share experiences, meet the PREFORMA developers and learn more about the tools.

Check out the full programme of the event and the invited speakers and panellists.

Register now for free at http://www.preforma-project.eu/workshop-in-padua.html and don’t miss this opportunity to meet the PREFORMA developers, share your experiences and learn more about the tools.

This workshop is aimed at anyone interested in digital preservation and cultural heritage: memory institutions or other cultural heritage organisations involved in (or planning) digital preservation initiatives and willing to integrate the PREFORMA software in their infrastructure, the open-source community of researchers and developers interested in contributing code to the PREFORMA tools, the community of enterprises interested in developing services around the PREFORMA tools, the standardization bodies looking for feedback on how to improve and advance the specifications of the standard preservation file formats.

The day before the workshop, on 6 March 2017, the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua will host the fourth edition of the Networking Session for EC projects in the cultural heritage field, a successful initiative launched in the framework of the RICHES project and continued under the auspices of Europeana Space and PREFORMA.

An open-source industry-supported PDF/A validator

veraPDF 1.0 released

The veraPDF consortium announced the release of veraPDF 1.0, an open-source industry-supported PDF/A validator. Led by the Open Preservation Foundation and the PDF Association, veraPDF validates all parts and conformance levels of ISO 19005 (PDF/A). The software is available under a MPLv2+/GLPv3+ license.

Carl Wilson, Technical Lead, Open Preservation Foundation said: “Identifying a file’s format and establishing that it conforms to the format specification is an essential step for memory institutions with responsibilities for long term preservation and access. veraPDF helps users to evaluate their files against the standard. A PDF feature reporter and a customisable policy checker allows organisations to enforce institutional policy beyond the scope of PDF/A.”

Duff Johnson, Executive Director, PDF Association said: “The release of veraPDF 1.0 is a significant milestone for both the PDF industry and the digital preservation community. For the PDF industry, the project to develop veraPDF facilitated the identification and resolution of ambiguities in the PDF/A specification, improving interoperability and utility to end users. For the digital preservation community, veraPDF delivers authoritative information about the nature and long-term reliability of digital holdings while providing more tools to help preservationists advise contributors on their software and workflows.”

veraPDF now enters its contracted acceptance testing phase, which runs until July 2017. Users are encouraged to report any bugs or other concerns to the project’s GitHub issue tracker: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/issues.

Version 1.0 has the following enhancements and fixes as compared to the final beta release:

Application enhancements:

fixed default values for extracted PDF features; and
fixed removal of temporary files.

Conformance checker:

fixed cmap table parsing in TrueType fonts.

Test corpus:

changed metadata file provenance test files from FAIL to PASS (as resolved by the PDF Association’s PDF Validation Technical Working Group); and
fixed xref table in test case 6-3-3-t01-pass-a.

Download veraPDF 1.0:

PDFBox version: http://www.preforma-project.eu/downloads/veraPDF/bin/all-platforms/verapdf-1.0-20170109.zip

Greenfield version: http://www.preforma-project.eu/downloads/veraPDF/bin/all-platforms/verapdf-1.0-GF-20170109.zip

Release notes:

https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/releases/latest

Please help us improve the software by downloading and testing it. If you encounter problems, or wish to suggest improvements, please add them to the project’s GitHub issue tracker https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/issues, or contact us through our mailing list: http://lists.verapdf.org/listinfo/users.

About

The veraPDF consortium is funded by the PREFORMA project. PREFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) is a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme.

Cassino, Italy, 21-22 September 2017

International Workshop HERITAGEBOT 2017 – Call for papers open until 1 April 2017

The aim of the Conference is to bring together researchers, industry professionals and students from the broad ranges of disciplines referring to areas of activities for Cultural Heritage, in an intimate, collegial and stimulating environment. The Conference will be held at the Aula Magna of School Engineering in the University of Cassino and South Latium in Cassino (Italy).

Papers are solicited on topics related with systems developments for Cultural Heritage within aspects of theory, design, practice and applications, including but not limited to:

Business models and business planning: applications to Cultural Heritage
Creative cities & industries
Creative consumption
Documentation, Analysis & Survey of Cultural Heritage
Economics of Cultural Heritage
Economics of creative industries
Cultural Heritage and Business and Organizational Models
Cultural Heritage and Collaborative Digital Systems
Citizen Science for Cultural Heritage: towards a new open model
New technologies for cultural heritage
Psychology of creativity
Service Robotics for Cultural Heritage
Law’s tools for the development and innovation management in cultural heritage
Capital budgeting and capital structure of cultural heritage sector
Cultural heritage and value creation
New devices and procedures for Cultural Heritage
Reports of field applications in Cultural Heritage

More info and registrations: http://heritagebot.unicas.it/heritagebot2017/

Berlin (Germany) 18-19 May 2017

15th KUI Conference “Culture and Computer Science”

The 15th edition of the ”Culture and Computer Science“ conference series focuses on best practice examples, challenges and future trends of mixed reality as a strategy to bring the world of data and information and the world of objects and things into even closer contact. Combining digital and analogue techniques of modelling, collecting, mediating, exhibiting, and teaching is one of the most challenging tasks of today‘s cultural and creative industries. The conference targets cultural policy makers, communication and media scientists, cultural and artistic actors as well as computer scientists and engineers, who conduct research and development in the fields of mixed reality, 3D technology, media integration, modelling, visualisation and interaction.

The presentations will discuss the following key topics:

Mixed Reality
Augmented and Virtual Reality
Acoustic and auditory augmentation
Human-machine interaction with virtual content
Interrelations between culture and computer science
Collections – Exploitation, design, exhibition and conveyance
Intuitive and personalised usage of media systems
Ethics in culture and computer science

These items shall primarily be analysed, demonstrated and critically discussed through concrete examples for museums, collections, art projects, or further cultural and creative fields.

Further Key Aspects of the Conference:

Mixed Reality technologies
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technologies
3D technologies
Digitalisation in the cultural and creative industries
Visualisation and interaction technologies
Interactive multimedia solutions for museums, theatres, concert halls, exhibitions etc.
Digital exhibitions, science centres, museums and galleries
Virtual reconstructions
Location-based and context-sensitive services in a cultural context
Documentation, visualisation and interaction in museums and archives
Digital storytelling
Multimedia guides with Augmented Reality components
Historical, theoretical, or ethical issues concerning the use of virtual and augmented reality

More info: https://inka.htw-berlin.de/kui/17/about

Call for papers open until 16th January: https://inka.htw-berlin.de/kui/17/call

The Pop-Up Museum was used in a demonstration, to combine live dance and cultural heritage images

E-Space MuPop-Interactive Dance Exhibition & Performance

by Rosemary Cisneros, Coventry University.

On the occasion of the C-DARE Un-Symposium event on 8th December 2016 in Coventry (UK), the Europeana Space Dance Pilot was happy to share the new multiscreen audience engaging tool “Qandr”, in combination with the use of the Pop-Up Museum concept, developed in the course of E-Space project.

The Dance Fields Postgraduate Un-Symposium is designed as an informal event to share research and ideas, ‘network’, and engage in dialogue and discussion through a series of one to two hour sessions, and it attracts dance professionals and students.

Before the Un-Symposium and during registration to the event, the interactive dance exhibition allowed the audience to explore cultural heritage images while watching live dancing. The Pop-Up Museum included a live dance performance in front of a screen which was controlled by the audience. Using smart phones and/or any android devices, the audience connected to the screen and controlled what the dancer and other audience members saw.

Featured dancers were: Natasha Adomako, Angelika Mizinska and the Pilot’s very own, Sarah Whatley.

About Pop-Up Museum developed by E-Space: http://www.europeana-space.eu/pop-up-museum/

Pop-Up Museum website: https://www.mupop.net/

C-DARE Un-Symposium event and Mupop-Qandr demonstration.

DPFManager version 3.1 available to download

DPF Manager has been updated to version Version 3.1. This new version includes new features, improvements and bugfixes. One important change on this release is that we have created two new independent projects for the implementation checker and the policy checker with the aim of improving the project modularity. All the projects developed by Easy Innova can be explored in our Github repository, and also in the Maven repository.

New Features

Create and edit configuration files through the CLI
Create new configuration based on an existing one

Improvements

Improved performance for large batches of files
Moved relexation of standards from implementation checker to policy checker
Created separate repositories for Implementation Checker and Policy Checker
Updated TIFF-IT specification
Default configuration viewable
Smaller global reports

Fixes

Solved memmory leaks produced when analyzing large amount of files
Much more robustness against invalid TIFFs
Fixed periodical checker bug in MacOS
When an output folder is specified, check if it already exists and ask to overwrite
Show the correct reports folder in the log messages
Several fixes in METS report
Uninstaller now removes all the files (when asked to)

Many of these points have been suggested by the users. So don’t hesitate to use the issue tracker or any of the other channels available (twitter, forum) to contact us and provide any feedback on things that could be improved.

Download NOW! Available for Mac OS X, Linux & Windows.

View the presentation

on Europeana Music Collections, you can discover best music recordings, sheet music, and other music related collections from Europe's audio-visual archives, libraries, archives and museums.

Uncovering Ethnomusicology on Europeana Music Collections

blog by Europeana Sounds appeared on Europeana on 19 December 2016.

The Music Collections of this month is focused on anthropology and its links with sounds and music studies, in France and in the world.

Ethnomusicologists seek to understand what is music and its purpose. In order to study the cultural and social aspects of musicians, they need to collect field recordings. In this Music Collections, you can explore the work of ethnomusicologists through four of the CNRS’ sound collections.

Two collections are provided by the MMSH sound archive center, which holds pluridisciplinary field recordings collections focused on the Mediterranean area:

A collection of Songs from South of France sung in a variety of languages: Occitan, French, Italian and Italian dialects.
And a selection of Songs from South of Sahara in Arabic, Tamahaq and Tamasheq.

photo: Fonds Marceau Gast – Ahaggar : Les musiciens, photographie de Marceau Gast, 1960 – CC-BY-ND

MMSH sound archives centre also offers to browse violinmakers storytellings who show the technical gestures to build a violin, a cello, a bridge or a bow and how was the violinmakers life at the beginning of the 20th century until today.

photo: Fonds Hélène Claudot-Hawad : Le métier de luthier – Atelier de Pierre Claudot (La Bouilladisse, France) : Emmanchage – 23 | Hélène Claudot-Hawad – CC-BY-ND

Soundscapes are also essential to understand the links between different spaces and how the sound environment is perceived and produced. The CRESSON collection exposes this pluridisciplinary approach and focuses on the sound dimension from the scale of architectural device, housing, district, to the scale of sound identity of cities. Listen to the extract ”Ambiance port de Lesconil” .

The Phonobase collection will also be on Europeana, and will offer you a trip in the past. www.phonobase.org gathers 10 000 sound excerpts and photos taken from early cylinders and records produced from 1888 to 1920 approximately, and distributed in France and Europe. As a reliable witness, these sources provide a new lighting on the Belle Époque and the soundscape of our ancestors.

This month’s Collection will give you access to the audio archives of the CNRS – Musée de l’Homme, which are dedicated to the ethnomusicology: you will find field recordings of music and oral traditions from all around the world, from 1900 to present.

The CNRS will provide recordings collected during the Mission Ogooue Congo from July to December 1946, with special records of Pygmy music. After that mission in Central Africa, Gilbert Rouget, a French ethnomusicologist, came back with an exceptional collection of 600 field recordings on lacquer disc.

photo: Mission Ogooué Congo 1946 : Photo André Didier, 1946 – CC-BY-ND

Find out more on: music.europeana.eu

by Françoise Acquier (CRESSON), Henri Chamoux (LARHRA), Aude Da Cruz Lima (LESC/CREM), Véronique Ginouvès (Phonothèque MMSH), Joséphine Simonnot (LESC/CREM).

View this article on Europeana blog

Take our survey to help us to improve the PREFORMA tools

Memory Institutions in Control: Help Shape Future Standards!

Source: LIBER blog

The PREFORMA project works on one of the main challenges memory institutions are facing nowadays: the long-term preservation of digital data. This issue is also important for LIBER’s community. We’re therefore collaborating with PREFORMA to encourage memory institutions to answer a PREFORMA survey on this topic.

>> TAKE THE SURVEY HERE <<

If your memory institution is working with or is helping to refine open source tools, please share your experiences via this survey. It should take about 20 minutes to complete, and you can skip questions that are not relevant to your situation.

The main objective of the PREFORMA project is to give memory institutions full control of the process of conformity testing of the digital files to be created, migrated and ingested into archives. For this reason, the project is developing three open source tools that control whether a file complies with the standard specifications and with the acceptance criteria of the memory institution. The standards under consideration are: PDF/A for electronic documents, uncompressed TIFF for images and a combination of MKV, FFv1 and LPCM for AV files.

The software development is carried out in a collaborative environment with memory institutions and experts. The project seeks to establish a sustainable community that ensures long-term availability of the software, generates useful feedback for those who control it and continually improves the standard specifications.

Fully functional prototypes of the conformance checkers are available to download in the PREFORMA Open Source Portal.

Your cooperation is greatly appreciated, and will help to shape future memory standards! For further questions, contact Claudio Prandoni of the PREFORMA project. The survey can be found here.

>> TAKE THE SURVEY HERE <<

Please help us improve the software by downloading and testing it.

veraPDF 0.28 released

The latest version of veraPDF is now available to download on the PREFORMA Open Source Portal. This is the final version before version 1.0, which is expected to be released on January 9th 2017 making it an effective release candidate. New features include the schematron based policy checker and a fully functional greenfield implementation. For the upcoming version 1.0 we’ll be:

performing software fixes in response to issues raised on GitHub: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/issues;
reviewing the API and adding JavaDoc for remaining public methods;
improving our documentation; and
making changes to our test and build systems.

The full list of changes listed in the release notes is:

Application Enhancements

schematron based policy checker implementation:
- example policy schemas on GitHub: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-policy-docs/tree/master/Schemas; and
- policy functionality available in CLI and GUI;
greenfield implementation of feature extraction;
greenfield implementation of metadata fixer;
GUI now supports checking multiple files or a directory;
HTML summary report for multiple file results;
single file detailed report containing policy and feature information; and
stability improvements and performance optimization of the greenfield parser.

Conformance checker

fixed glyph width checks in case of exactly 1/1000 point difference;
fixed default color space processing for Indexed color spaces;
fixed Order array support for OCG checks in PDF/A-2; and
fixed Unicode character maps support for PDF/A-1 Level A.

Download veraPDF 0.28

PDFBox version: http://www.preforma-project.eu/downloads/veraPDF/bin/all-platforms/verapdf-0.28-20122016.zip

Greenfield version: http://www.preforma-project.eu/downloads/veraPDF/bin/all-platforms/verapdf-0.28-GF-20122016.zip

Release notes

https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/releases/latest

About veraPDF

Led by the Open Preservation Foundation and the PDF Association, the veraPDF consortium is developing the industry-supported open source, file-format validator for all parts and conformance levels of ISO 19005 (PDF/A). The software is designed to meet the needs of memory institutions responsible for preserving digital content for the long term. http://verapdf.org/

University of Graz, 12-13 April 2017

CO:OPyright: Challenges and Practices of Copyright and Licensing of Digital Cultural Heritage

The conference is hosted by the Centre for Information Modelling – Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and the Institute of the Foundations of Law, Section ‘Law and ICT’ at the University of Graz (Austria).
In the age of digital information technology and the constant availability of information through the Internet, it is not only important to have democratic access to knowledge, but also essential to consider the potential that lies in the critical production and expansion of knowledge. The CO:OP – short for Community as Opportunity: the creative archives’ and users’ network – co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union aims to strengthen and promote the co-operation between institutions preserving our common cultural heritage and the general public.
Of particular interest and concern to cultural heritage institutions are issues of copyright on, provision of and access to digitized material. There is a recognizable political drive in the European Union to facilitate public access to cultural heritage – and data in general – hosted at public institutions. However, the lack of legal harmonization and the often unclear national legislations on the use and provision of resources by public cultural heritage or scientific institutions has been prohibiting a much broader engagement between the general public and its own cultural heritage.

This conference invites:
a. legal experts to present contributions on the legal framework concerning digital cultural heritage resources on a national or international level, the European and international conditions, political developments and innovative approaches to improve the situation on the use and provision of such resources,
b. experts and curators from cultural heritage institutions to share their best – and worst! – practice examples with projects that had to deal with copyright and licensing as exemplary showcases for the CO:OP community at large.

These two different perspectives on the topic will be presented in consecutive sessions of 20-minute papers on April 13 and brought together in a Panel Discussion with stakeholders from cultural heritage institutions, the legal academic community and representatives of funding bodies and political entities at the end of the conference.

Pre-Conference Workshops on April 12 will provide hands-on sessions on pertinent licensing tools, Open GLAM, and the introduction of a Guidelines and Best Practices document regarding the core topics of the conference which will serve as one of the deliverables and milestones of the CO:OP project.

Co:op official website: http://coop-project.eu/