Digital meets Culture

The first BMW featured the 3 finalists that participated in the Europeana TV hackathon held in May in Amsterdam. And the winner is.............

Announcing the winners! Business Modeling Workshop of Europeana Space

by Simon Cronshaw, REMIX

Europeana Space consortium is very pleased to announce that we’re now embarking on the Incubation process of the winner of the first Business Modelling Workshop of the project, held in London on 26th June, following the TV Hackathon which took place in May in Amsterdam.

We had three very interesting ideas emerging from the TV Hackathon, named Bosch, ART(F)INDER, and Mnemosyne, but had to choose one winner that we felt best met the judging criteria objectives:

reuse of cultural heritage;
potential for job creation
and likelihood of success.

The winning proposition still has the internal working title of “Mnemosyne”, but will be launched under a new name over the coming months.

winner teams of the TV hackathon in Amsterdam (8, 9, 10 May 2015)

We were drawn to Mnemosyne because it has several different components, and is a well placed to capitalise upon several consumer and industry trends. Among other things, it offers an innovative user interface for online catalogues; an algorithm for serendipitous browsing across different disciplines; and a hardware installation for physical environments. One of the most attractive aspects of this proposition are the multiple revenue models and markets available to them, which we’ll be unpicking in due course as part of the Incubation process.

It is still very early stages for Knut, Marius and the rest of the Mnemosyne team, but over the next few months we’ll be working closely with them to develop a strategy that gives them the very best chance of succeeding as a commercially viable cultural startup, on the basis of the Europeana Space Incubation Support Package.

We look forward to keeping you updated on their journey, and wish them the very best for this exciting new enterprise!

You can read the Amsterdam hackathon report here and watch the video report here, plus learn more on the Business Modeling Workshop in London here.

Reykjavik, 28-29 September 2015

ICA 2015 Conference

The 3rd Annual Conference of ICA will be held on 29-29 September in the beautiful city of Reykjavik, Iceland.

The conference will address themes that are essential for archives in modern society, the role and function of archives and their importance for individuals, governments and businesses.

Under the theme of “Archives: Evidence, Security and Civil Rights Ensuring trustworthy information” the Annual Conference 2015 will without doubt be the highlight of this year’s professional calendar.

We are operating in an increasingly digitised world, accompanied by unprecedented accumulations of records. This new world offers many opportunities, however also brings with it considerable threats. Archives around the world must take on board a diverse and complex range of attitudes expressed by citizens, businesses and governments concerning the accountability of institutions, right of access to information, privacy/data protection, security of archival holdings and the protection of national security. The Annual Conference 2015 promises to bring together the best international speakers with a stimulating program of events to enable the Archives and Records Management community to engage with these important issues and influence the ongoing development of strategies and solutions.

For further information visit the Conference website.

Malta, 1-3 September 2015

19th International Conference on Electronic Publishing

The international conference on Electronic Publishing (ElPub) approaches its 20th anniversary. Elpub 2015, held in Valletta from 1 to 3 September, is the 19th edition of the conference and it will continue the tradition, bringing together academics, publishers, lecturers, librarians, developers, entrepreneurs, users and all other stakeholders interested in issues regarding electronic publishing in widely differing contexts. These include the human, cultural, economic, social, technological, legal, commercial and other relevant aspects that such an exciting theme encompasses.

ElPub 2015 will particularly focus on the interplay of two dimensions of the electronic publishing: the ever growing volume of digital collections and the improved understanding of the widest user group, the one of the citizens.
ElPub 2015 aims to provide a forum for discussing how scale of collections, openness and trust change the way citizens contribute to modern research.
The conference invites contributions from members of the communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of electronic publishing and scholarly communication.

As part of the conference programme, the Civic Epistemologies project will attend with a presentation of its activities within the session “What’s in it for me? Engaging with citizens and professionals”, scheduled for Tuesday 1st September (11.00-13.00 CET). The presentation will be delivered by the Project Coordinator Mauro Fazio (from the Italian Ministry of Economic Development) and Borje Justrell (from the National Archives of Sweden), intervening as representatives of the whole project consortium.

See the full article presented and published into the proceedings of the Conference here.

See the full Programme of the Conference here.

Venue: St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, Valletta (MALTA).

Elpub 2015 is organised by the University of Malta. The University of Malta is the highest educational institution in Malta.

General Chair: Dr Milena Dobreva, Associate Professor at the University of Malta, Malta
Programme Chair: Birgit Schmidt, University of Göttingen, Germany.

Expernova offers a unique web service to optimise the management of your scientific and technological partnerships

Discover Expernova, your innovation search engine!

Expernova.com is a comprehensive and global solution designed to help find, understand, compare and follow the key players in innovation related to specific scientific domains.
Expernova launched its search engine and flagship product Expernova.com in 2010, after 2 years of Research and Development. Expernova.com is a web service conceived to help innovative companies maximise the success of their R&D projects by analysing their scientific and technological environments. The tool structures and transforms scientific, technical and web data from across the globe into a solution which allows you to obtain scientific profiles for experts and research organisations from a simple key-word search, presenting their areas of expertise and collaborative activity on the chosen topic, as well as the relevant scientific works (publications, projects, conferences, patents, web contents).
Expernova.com is a tool designed for strategies of Open Innovation, offering a solution for the following challenges:

identification of R&D partners and scientific expertise,
visualisation of a specific research ecosystem,
creating consortia or collaborative projects,
identification of leading technologic players
following competitors (technologic and competitive intelligence)
resolving research issues

The solution is used by more than 100 big industrial groups in 15 countries and helps innovation specialists to structure their internal processes, identify new opportunities, extend their collaborative networks and increase their productivity.

Expernova.com gives access to 10 million expert profiles, 30 millions scientific publications, 40 million patents, 150 000 R&D centers, companies and start-ups profiles, across more than 450 scientific domains!

To discover how Expernova.com works right now, we invite you to try the solution for free by clicking here.
Do not hesitate to ask for a free personalised demo! One of Expernova’s sales engineers would be happy to show you the features of Expernova.com and answer all your questions!

For further information visit the Expernova website and follow Expernova on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Bologna Design Week, 30 September – 3 October 2015

A hub to bring together creativity and production

Source: Quotidianoarte.it

From 30 September to 3 October, the first edition of the Bologna Design Week is being held under the auspices of Municipality of Bologna, Emilia Romagna Region and CERSAIE. Thanks to the initiative, for the first time cultural, production and creative excellences of the territory convene in an integrated communication system. The Emilian centre will become a further attraction hub in the Italian design system, through a rich programme providing exhibitions, workshops, talks and business meetings organised in the framework of 8 thematic itineraries.

Bologna Design Week 2015 – 3D printing in fashion

Bologna Design Week is a cultural event aimed at mapping the creativity spread over the territory, through a collaborative approach between institutions, enterprises, designers, universities, research companies, associations and privates. An activity strategical to a territory featuring production excellences in many sectors (from packaging to ceramic, from car to textile industry, from education to food and wellness) and expressing itself not only through product design, but also and mainly in the B2B world, by creating industrial products, technologies, services, design processes and communication plans. The initiative aims to merge and tell multifarious design experiences, by realising an event that is meeting point between the research world and the production world and highlights their creative geographies.
The event provides four main seats (Galleria Cavour, Campogrande Concept, Corte Isolani and Atelier Corradi), a programme thick with workshops, happenings, talks, meetings with companies, institutions, firms and personalities from the design sector and eight thematic itineraries with stands by great brands such as Flos, Molteni & C Dada, Kartell, Fritz Hansen and Vitra.

An Info&Press Point will be in Giampaolo Gazziero’s temporary store of Galleria Cavour, in the green atmospheres of the exposition Galleria Cavour Green, promoted by BolognaFiere and realised by Latifoglia Group. Campogrande Concept will host workshops, talks and expositions. Corte Isolani will be instead reserved to the Design Food section, providing tastes, workshops and exhibits dedicated to the preparation, elaboration, transportation and preservation of food. The subject matter is put on show within the exhibit “Maybe a new way” curated by Accademia di Belle Arti, while Fashion loves Food will offer a reading of the relationship between fashion and food, curated by the Course of Cultures and Fashion Techniques of Bologna’s University. Finally, Atelier Corradi will host a selection of emerging designers. It will be possible to admire, among others, works and products by Antonello Ghezzi, Juno design, Crete Pièce Unique, Maria Luigia 7071 and Cristian De Franchi.

For further info (Italian language) visit www.bolognadesignweek.com

This section provides an overview and references to each open source project that is currently working in the prototyping phase.

PREFORMA Open Source Portal launched!

The first intermediate releases of the PREFORMA conformance checkers are now available for download on the Open Source Portal section of the PREFORMA website.

This section provides an overview and references to each open source project that is currently working in the prototyping phase. It acts as an entry point for all interested suppliers and memory institutions allowing easy navigation to all externally hosted resources.

The three suppliers that are currently working on the conformance checkers are:

the veraPDF Consortium (led by the Open Preservation Foundation and the PDF Association), working on the PDF/A standard for documents;
Easy Innova, working on the TIFF standard for digital still images;
MediaArea, working on a set of open source standards for moving images, namely: the Matroska wrapper, the FFv1 video codec and LPCM for audio streams.

Visit the Open Source Portal and join the PREFORMA open source community to help us shaping our future memory standards!

An article by Professor Truyen about the E-Space Photo Pilot published on Fred Truyen’s Digital Culture blog

Innovate your photographic heritage and your future business!

Prof. Fred Truyen of KU Leuven recently published an interesting article on his Digital Culture blog, under the title Europeana Space Photo pilot: Innovate your photographic heritage…and your future business! The article tells the commitment the E-Space project is devoting through its Photo Pilot to demonstrating a range of possibilities offered by apps, Europeana API’s and a multitude of tools developed by the open source community to come up with innovative models involving historical and present-day photography, with monetising potential and investment appeal.

Investigated possibilities are grouped around three main focus

Museum applications providing access to Europeana and similar resources can yield new types of visitor-experiences;
Storytelling web applications and apps allowing for users to create new stories by mixing historical images from Europeana and other public sources with user-generated content;
Augmented reality applications enabling historical images to be layered with actual experiences and other material, such as maps and social user data.

Silver gelatine glass plates reprinted in HDR with very high resolution give a totally new photo experience, with these beautiful girls laughing at you from decades away.
Gaston Paris | location unknown (France), 1935 Young women at a fun fair. Roger-Viollet collections © Gaston Paris/Roger-Viollet

«The web and the smartphone have changed photography irrevocably» Truyen observes. «The classic business models have suffered from this […] in particular, the IP-based business models underlying the photo industry are under strong pressure, forcing photo archives, photo agencies, museums and publishers to innovate or perish […] But of course the new situation also holds tremendous opportunities. Some of those are currently underexploited». E-Space aims to explore and exploit those opportunities, trying to find «the links between the photographic heritage content, the wide variety of general public, amateurs, pro-ams and professional developers through an intermediate software architecture that provides real role identification and task burden sharing while at the same time improving transparency on rights […] This is the place for innovative, sustainable, professionally maintained infrastructures. In this way Europeana Space hopes to contribute to the overall success and relevance of Europeana».

Read the full article on Fred Truyen’s Digital Culture blog

About the author:
Fred Truyen (°1961) holds a PhD in Philosophy (1991) and is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven, Belgium. Head of the Faculty’s Computer Department since 1989, he is currently chairman of the ICT Council of the Group Humanities and Social Sciences at KU Leuven.
Fred Truyen is a member of the Institute for Cultural Studies, where he leads the CS/Digital Media lab.

Chandra Clarke at TEDxChathamKent: a way for the average person to do real help-answer-the-big-questions science

With citizen science YOU can make the difference

Sources: Chandra Clarke’s talk, Scribendi.com, TED.com

«Citizen science is a way for average people, like you and me, to do real “help answer the big questions” science, even if you never finished high school». So Chandra Clarke, president of editing and proofreading company Scribendi.com, recently speaking at the TEDx Chatham-Kent event on the topic of citizen science. Her talk highlighted the potential of amateur science and the various ways in which the public can engage in academic research.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a programme of local, self-organised events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organised events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organised TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx programme, but individual TEDx events are self-organised (subject to certain rules and regulations).

Clarke, who has an extensive scientific background, began her talk on a sombre note, reflecting on the impact that issues such as disease and climate change have had on the planet.
«It’s so easy to feel overwhelmed by everything that seems wrong with the world today» she remarked. According to Clarke, one way to address these pressing issues is to become involved in citizen science. Citizen science has been around for centuries but has only recently become a hot topic. The rise of the Internet, the emergence of big data and the need for academics to outsource a large part of their work have encouraged amateur scientists to become more invested in research.
New technologies have also changed the nature of scientific discovery so that scientists no longer need to be professionals to make worthwhile contributions to the field. Thanks to citizen science, budding researchers can make discoveries from the comfort of their own living rooms.

In her talk, Clarke remarked that it’s easy to get involved in citizen science and volunteers can choose different types of projects based on their interests. «You can pick your favourite topic or you can deep-dive into something you know nothing about and go exploring» she explained.

Apps, web-based games and crowd-funding campaigns on sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are all popular examples of citizen science. Once volunteers get involved in a project, they may be asked to survey online images of weather phenomena, measure light pollution, track hummingbirds or report on marine debris in their communities. In each case, they’ll be providing crucial real-time data to academic researchers.

Photo Credit: Thomas Lersch via Wikimedia Commons

More ambitious volunteers can get their hands dirty with programmes that require extended time and dedication. For example, amateur scientists who volunteer for the Monarch Watch programme will actually construct temporary habitats where monarchs can eat and rest during their long migrations.

Clarke emphasised that the benefits of citizen science are plentiful, not only for the planet but for the participants themselves. «Citizen science is a way to belong to something bigger than yourself and to inject maybe just a little bit more meaning and purpose into your everyday life» she said.

By understanding different scientific processes, anyone involved in citizen science will be able to make better-informed decisions on important issues such as genetically modified food and climate change. Clarke encouraged everyone who attended her talk to enrich their lives by joining the ranks of amateur scientists around the world.

For further info visit

The E-Space environment for enabling creative re-use of digital cultural content is taking shape

E-Space: Presenting the Content Space and the Open Content Exchange Platform

Europeana Space is proud to announce the initial release of the Content Space, a crucial element of the E-Space environment to enable the reuse of digital cultural content. The Content Space is now online and users can find a variety of resources, including:

information about licensing, rights labelling and associated new technical standards
guidelines on how to identify reusable content
guidance, tools and resources on openly licensed and public domain materials
case studies based on the E-Space pilots
legal advice and tools for the lawful reuse of digital content

In the Content Space, content holders, creative organisations and individuals can access guidelines and tools for clearing copyright and find information about the development of business models for the exploitation of digital cultural heritage content. The Content Space will then directly link to the Technical Space currently under development.

The materials of the Content Space are curated by the IPR experts of Exeter University and, as a part of the Content Space, the subcontracted partner Open Knowledge is building the Open Content Exchange Platform: “a directory of materials and sources related to the value of digital public domain and best practices around open licensing, creative reuse of open content and open strategies for business modelling”, as explained by Lieke Ploeger in a post recently appeared on the Open Knowledge blog.

“The Open Content Exchange Platform will help answer, in an accessible, user-friendly way, questions around the reuse of open cultural content, such as:

How do I label my content correctly?
How can i get content cleared to reuse?
Do licence rules for what I can do differ by country?
Are there differences between the licence for physical work or a digital work?

There are a variety of different resources in the platform, such as guides, case studies, videos, papers, books and presentations: through the search interface, you can easily filter on specific content, or on specific tags. All resources of our OpenGLAM Documentation page have also been incorporated – in the future, a version of the new platform will replace our Documentation webpage to provide a more user-friendly and updated overview.”

Read the whole blogpost about the Open Content Exchange Platform HERE

Visit the Content Space at: http://www.europeana-space.eu/content-space/

MOOC stands for Modular Open On Line Course and it represent the most advanced tool for e-learning.

Europeana Space MOOC

Europeana Space acknowledges the key role of digital cultural heritage to enhance education learning and training since the very beginning of the project. A dedicated task on education and training material is foreseen in the project planning and led by KU Leuven, and the task leader Fred Truyen announced the idea of developing a E-Space MOOC was launched since 2014. The E-Space MOOC will be a real academic course available via KU Leuven’s channel on the renowned platform courses.edx.org.

The mission of the E-Space MOOC, as defined in the dedicated meeting held in Leuven on 16-17 July 2015, is to show how people can become creative with Europeana and digital cultural content, and what Europeana can bring to the learning community, and to educate people with the concept that cultural content is not just to contemplate, but to live with and engage with.

The educational idea behind the E-Space MOOC is also to lower barriers to the access to resources and content, providing tutorials and trial versions of applications and tools. In facts the plan is to organize E-Space MOOC in 3 main levels:

Entry-level module: showing different kinds of content and how to re-use them

Level 2: pro-am level: conveying the information on how to use existing tools on E-Space platform and Europeana Labs: we want to stimulate people to become proactive users of Europeana (and similar) content.

Level 3: Professional level: this could be a repository of information for professionals, e.g. how to use the Pilots outcomes for commercial applications, how to manage rights of images, how to access the E-Space API’s.

The MOOC will also include additional levels about IPR, cumulative lessons learnt on: market analysis, hackathons (especially the experience of the TV hackathon), workshops, problems developers may face (use cases), how to get familiar with technical components etc…, the E-Space incubation process and much more.

It is planned to showcase a demo version of the E-Space MOOC already in the second international conference organized in Tallinn on 10-11 December 2015.