Digital meets Culture

Soon available also on the PREFORMA Open Source Portal

veraPDF 0.14 released with launch of demo website

We are pleased to announce the latest release of veraPDF. Version 0.14 features Transparency and Unicode character map validation in PDF/A-2 levels B and U. Other highlights include:

Conformance checker:

added all transparency-related validation rules in PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-3
added full Level U support in PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-3
code refactoring to synchronize GUI, API and CLI interfaces
PDF/A-1B fix: check both Tiling patterns used as different fill and stroke colour spaces in the same painting operations
added initial versions of PDF/A-2U, PDF/A-2A, PDF/A-3U, PDF/A-3A validation profiles. We now have initial validation for all PDF/A flavours.

Test corpus:

added a further 65 atomic test files for PDF/A-2 specific requirements

Infrastructure:

a demo of the REST interface is available at http://demo.verapdf.org

Download veraPDF 0.14:

http://downloads.verapdf.org/rel/verapdf-installer.zip

Release notes:

https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/releases/tag/v0.14.2

This is the first release of the final design phase which began on 19 April following the PREFORMA Project EC review at the Open Source Workshop.

veraPDF is building the definitive, open source PDF/A validator. The project benefits from a high level of development resource and PDF/A expertise. Please support our efforts by downloading and testing the software. If you encounter problems, or wish to suggest improvements, please add them to the project’s GitHub issue tracker. You can expect a speedy response. Your feedback is very important, it helps to improve the software.

Keep up to date with the latest developments of veraPDF by subscribing to the veraPDF consortium’s newsletter.

About veraPDF

Led by the Open Preservation Foundation and the PDF Association, the veraPDF consortium is developing the definitive 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.

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.

Management Centre, Bangor University, Wales, 9-10 June 2016

Procurement Week 2016: Bootcamp

Procurement Week is a bi-annual, international conference, that aims to explore the many facets of Public Procurement such as Public Tendering, Business Development, Procurement Law and International Trade.

During this conference, presentations will be given by leading procurement practitioners, lawyers, economists, innovators, strategists and thinkers.

Procurement Week continues to grow in popularity, with in excess of 850 attendees last year from over 40 countries.

‘Procurement Week 2016: Bootcamp‘, is an event that explores the Modernisation, Flexibility, and Simplification of the EU Procurement Directives and will be held at Bangor University on the 9th and 10th June. Topics to be discussed at Procurement Week 2016, by leading local, national and international experts, will include:

Day 1, 9th June 2016

Modernisation, Flexibility & Simplification of the EU Procurement Directives
Safe Joint Procurement
Contract Modifications
Alternatives to Litigation
Contractual Ineffectiveness
Procurement & the Courts
Reserving Contracts for NGOs
Collaboration: In house or Horizontal?
Panel Discussion: The view from other Member States

Day 2, 10th June 2016

Slavery & Procurement
Social Procurement
Modernisation, Flexibility & Simplification of the EU Procurement Directives
Health Procurement
BREXIT – Possible Implications for Procurement
E-Procurement – A Good Idea Gone Bad?
University Procurement
Concessions
Sustainable Procurement
Social Services Procurement

Download here the brochure of the Procurement Week 2016 Bootcamp.

For more information on the Procurement Week 2016 Bootcamp visit http://www.procurementweek.org.uk/PW2016.html.

To register to the Procurement Week 2016 Bootcamp visit http://www.procurementweek.org.uk/bootcampregistration.html.

Brussels, 31 May 2016

Scenario workshop on Open eGovernment Services

How Can the Public Sector Become an Agent of Innovation?

The workshop aims to generate collective insight into public sector innovation for Open eGovernment Services (OGS). It is clear that OGS require a deep change in the machinery of government, but also they act as an incentive for change through for example increased transparency and collaboration. The study has analysed several cases in order to understand the key costs and benefits of OGS. The workshop now aims to analyse in depth the rationale and drivers behind these cases, in order to draw lessons and develop future scenarios.

The event is strategically positioned at the beginning of the third and final phase of the study.

The first phase aimed at defining WHAT are Open eGovernment Services, providing a definition and taxonomy
The second phase aimed at analysing WHY OGS are important, in terms of benefits achieved
The third phase aims to understand HOW this innovation happens and how we can accelerate it with appropriate policy measures

Do you want to share your knowledge and network with stakeholders from across Europe?

Download here a first version of the Agenda.

For more info on the event: http://bit.ly/1RVtgjU

Brussels, 23 May 2016

New Horizons for Cultural Heritage

“New Horizons for Cultural Heritage – Recalibrating relationships: bringing cultural heritage and people together in a changing Europe” is the Second Policy Seminar organised by the RICHES project to discuss how the project can provide insights to support evidence-based policymaking in Europe.

The seminar, hosted at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA), comprises political updates by representatives from the European Parliament and the European Commission, the presentation of policy recommendations from the RICHES project and a Round Table discussion involving major stakeholders.

[Show as slideshow]

The programme offered to participants the opportunity to challenge institutional points of view with some practical results of the research conducted by RICHES, with particular regard to the following themes:

The use of craft skills in new contexts.
Community-led developments: food and cultural heritage in the urban age – the role of local food movements.
European identity, belonging and the role for digital cultural heritage: structures for social and territorial cohesion and minority communities.
Economics of culture: fiscal and economic issues in the digital age.
Institutional changes: exploring the status of digital heritage mediated by memory institutions.

Two overarching themes, related to citizenship and cultural heritage, were selected and discussed among the participants in world café type discussion groups:

– in the run-up to the European Year of CH in 2018, what policies should be developed in order to ensure that the celebrations are inclusive?

– how might developments in policy help to bring about an integrated approach to safeguarding CH?

The aim of the discussion was to provide ‘joined-up’ policy recommendations to be used in the definition of the H2020 work programme for 2018-2020.

Also, the seminar started with a pre-event consisting in a networking session of EC Projects, A Digital Posters Exhibition of the involved projects was also published.

The networking sessions was follow up to the first such session organised on the occasion of the first Policy Seminar in October 2015. The scope of this session was to reflect on how to sustain the organisation of these kind of appointments in the future, after the end of the RICHES project. In facts, as the RICHES events are organized with networking sessions and discussions, they represent a good opportunity to reflect on the impact that cultural heritage projects are delivering, identify opportunities to improve the effectiveness of their results, and identify synergies and the potential for collaboration among projects.

For further information, the presentations by the speakers and any further outcome of the Policy Seminar, please visit the event page on the RICHES website.

Gothenburg, 30 May - 2 June 2016

OSS 2016 International Conference on Open Source Systems

The International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS) is a long-standing international forum for researchers, practitioners from business and industry, enthusiasts, and students to present and discuss the latest trends, experiences, and concerns in the field of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS).

The 12th OSS Conference will take place in will take place in the city of Gothenburg, in 30 May – 02 June 2016.

The goal of 12th International Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2016 is to provide an international forum where a diverse community of professionals from academia, industry and public sector, and diverse FLOSS initiatives can come together to share research findings and practical experiences. The conference is also a forum to provide information and education to practitioners, identify directions for further research, and to be an ongoing platform for technology transfer, no matter which form of FLOSS is being pursued.

FLOSS has had a disruptive effect on the software industry and the ways that organizations and individuals create, distribute, acquire and use software and software-based services. The FLOSS movement has created new kinds of opportunities such as the emergence of new business models, knowledge exchange mechanisms, and collective development approaches. On the other hand, the movement has introduced new kinds of challenges, especially as different problem domains embrace openness as a pervasive problem solving strategy. FLOSS can be complex yet widespread and often cross-cultural. Consequently, they require an interdisciplinary understanding of their technical, economic, legal and socio-cultural dynamics.

Many organizations that have been known for developing proprietary software are now actively involved with FLOSS. FLOSS adoption continues to grow among businesses, governments, and other organizations. FLOSS remains important for educators and researchers, as well as an important aspect of e-government and information society initiatives, providing access to high-quality software and the code used to create it.

For more information and to submit proposals for research papers, industry papers, formal tool demonstrations and posters. please visit the Conference website.

View them at http://opensourceworkshop.preforma-project.eu/video-recordings/

Video recordings of the Open Source Workshop now available

The video clips of all the presentations of the PREFORMA Open Source Workshop are now available on the event website.

The workshop, hosted by the National Library of Sweden on April 7, 2016, featured keynote presentations by representatives from the PREFORMA project and the open source community, live demonstrations of the three conformance checkers for electronic documents, images and AV files by the suppliers working in the project (veraPDF, Easy Innova, MediaArea) and an informal networking event where attendees can share experiences, meet the PREFORMA developers and learn about the tools.

View here all the video recordings.

DPF Manager e-News, April 2016

DPF Manager: new release ready to download!

After the redesign phase, a new version of the DPF Manager is available. The version 2.0 includes many new functionalities and improvements and is now ready to download.

The main changes of this version are the following:

The graphical interface has been redesigned, using a better lightweight framework.
The console window has been integrated within a widget in the GUI itself.
Now it is much easier for developers to edit and create new implementation checkers, because they are now written with XML files, instead of hardcoded in the source.
A logging system has been created for easier error reporting.
The DPF Manager now provides an API for external developers to be able to communicate with it, performing checks and receiving the reports.

More detailed information on all the changes in this new version can be found in GitHub.

Please download DPF Manager and test the 2.0 release. Your feedback is essential to keep improving the software.

The MOOC is under development and will be live in October 2016.

E-Space for education: launching a MOCC “Creative with Cultural Heritage”

Europeana Space project, focusing on increasing and enhancing reuse of Europeana and other online collections of digital cultural content by creative industries and education is developing a MOOC, a massive open online course, to be launched in the fall of 2016.

“The aim of the course is to share our experiences, the lessons learned during the project and the tools we have developed during the pilot activities of E-Space; but also what we learned thanks to the hackathons and the workshops that we held with creative professionals throughout Europe. We want to share all of this with students and teachers, professionals from the GLAM sector, event organizers and developers working on cultural heritage, with the aim to convince them of the importance of the creative reuse of digital cultural heritage and to show them that the steps to take and the tools to use to do so are within everyone’s reach.” said Fred Truyen and Clarissa Colangelo from KU Leuven, the task leaders.

The course will be organized in 3 levels. The first is a general level that targets mainly cultural heritage amateurs, students and teachers: the education segment. “Here we want to show our learners how easy it can be to move from a passive use of digitized cultural heritage – that can be simply searching for materials on repositories such as Europeana – to an active and proactive use, where everyone can contribute and share their own insights and new narratives built around this cultural heritage individually and/or with others.”

On the second level, targeted at GLAM professionals, learners will be taught how to access APIs, how to query the database from their own websites and to automate important processes for the stories they want to develop, how to create interactivity into their events, how to build components in their websites and refer to the technologies that we have developed. They also get guidance on how to use the E-Space technical space and its API, how to find interesting samples of code on Europeana Labs and they will have access to more readings on how to reuse Europeana contents and on Europeana creatives.

Lastly, the third level reaches out to developers. They will be able to search the MOOC to find the most technical information, e.g. a link to a certain API or a specific explanation; they will also have the opportunity to participate in forum discussions with people working with Europeana or from the GLAM sector. This way it is possible to incite interesting discussions where knowledge from different sectors can be shared and learners can learn not only from the project, but also from one another.

The MOOC will be live in October 2016.

Read more on E-Space for Education website

Article appeared also on Open GLAM blog.

Barcelona, 11-12 May 2016

CulturalBase: the Major Stakeholder Conference

The Major Stakeholder Conference (MSC) “Co-creating Agendas for Culture in Europe. Memory, Inclusion, Creativity” was held in Barcelona (Spain) on 11-12 May, 2016 in the framework of the CulturalBase project, funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 program.

The Major Stakeholder Conference (MSC) “Co-creating Agendas for Culture in Europe. Memory, Inclusion, Creativity” offered a unique opportunity to network and establish direct interaction between representatives of the academia and professionals in the cultural sector. To this end, specific small-group working sessions were foreseen to provide for in-depth discussions aiming at enabling to:

take stock of what has been produced within the project also through the online debates on the CulturalBase website;
generate a consensus for the profiling of the research agenda(s) & policy recommendations.

Participation by stakeholders was extremely important and highly appreciated in attaining the overall aim of the MSC.

The RICHES project was presented by Prof. Neil Forbes (Project Coordinator, from Coventry University – UK) and Dr. Antonella Fresa (Technical Coordinator, from Promoter srl – Italy) during the Lunch work session – “Learning from other research projects”.

Find more details about the project in the project web site: http://culturalbase.eu

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME: download pdf file

The N.I.C.E. Award 2016 Ceremony will take place on 25th August, concurrently with Forum d’Avignon Ruhr 2016 in Essen.

The N.I.C.E. Award

The N.I.C.E. Award:

The N.I.C.E. Award is an initiative by the “Network for Innovations in Culture and Creativity in Europe” (N.I.C.E.), which was launched in Dortmund in 2013 by the european centre for creative economy (ecce) with the backing of a consortium of 15 partners from ten countries. For more information, please visit: www.nice-europe.eu

This year’s topic:

As the major challenges of our time and society are obviously not getting smaller, we decided to stick to last year’s topic “Solving the World’s Major Challenges – A Call for Innovations”. Due to the great number of submissions of the last year (213 application from 29 countries) we feel that it strikes a nerve. We would like to give more projects an opportunity to provide new solutions to current crucial developments in culture and society. The deadline for submissions was 12^th May, 2016! You’ll find the call here http://nice-europe.eu/award/call-16/.

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Inna Goudz

Project Management Europe

ecce | european centre for creative economy

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