Digital meets Culture

Dublin (Ireland), 18-20 April 2016

For the last seven years MuseumNext conferences have focused on the future of
museums and how the sector is forging ahead, showcasing innovative ideas and
delivering thought-provoking insight. We continue to do so with our next conference taking place in Dublin in April 2016. MuseumNext is a major conference acting as a platform for showcasing best practice today to shine a light on the museum of tomorrow.

MuseumNext Dublin will be our 8th European conference and will feature a day of activity with tours, workshops and exhibitions highlighting the city of Dublin followed by two days of curated conference sessions at the Mansion House in the city centre.

With over 60 speakers taking part in our three day conference we’re looking forward to a packed programme full of inspiration in Dublin this April. We have talks, workshops, tours and social events in various venues around the city, including the National Gallery of Ireland, Science Gallery Dublin, Royal Society of Antiquaries Ireland and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

The full programme is now available here: http://www.museumnext.com/conference/schedule/

Website: http://www.museumnext.com/

eCult Skills project organized an International Conference on Digital challenges for museum experts

E-Space at eCult Skills event (22 September 2015 in Athens)

The event was organized in the context of the eCult Skills project, which investigated the emergence of new job roles as a result of the latest ICT developments and their adoption by the museums, and aims to present project outcomes and discuss possible exploitation routes. It provided to scholars, museum professionals, organizations and networks, and ICT researchers and engineers, a forum to meet and exchange experiences, ideas and plans on the interplay between Culture and Technology and the new professional prospects this can lead to.

E-Space was presented during the workshop “Museums in the digital era“. During the workshop, Alexandra Nikiforidou (PostScriptum) presented “Europeana Space” hackathons and demonstrators as best practices for community engagement and digital content re-use, that enable cultural organisations to create value from their collections.

The conference attracted about 100-120 attendees from the scientific community, higher education and research, culture professionals, Policy Makers, ICT, academy, and of course general public; The vast majority was Greek audience but other countreis represented were UK, Germany, Portugal, Slovenia, France.

Leran more on the event: http://ecultskills-conference.eap.gr/

Berlin, 12-13 November 2015

Digital Heritage and Innovation, Engagement and Identity – Civic Epistemologies Final Conference

The project will deliver an International Conference in Berlin (12-13 November 2015) to illustrate and promote the Roadmap and to present results from the project.

The International Conference will be hosted at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.

ABSTRACT: Digital Heritage is linking cultural heritage and information technologies in novel ways that help safeguarding cultural heritage and that help find new ways for cultural heritage to interact with society.

This conference will present research in this area that focusses in particular on the role of digital heritage in citizen engagement and as a means of defining cultural and social identity.

The conference targets a wide audience, including policy makers, cultural managers and curators, association of citizens, representatives of the educational sector, creative and cultural enterprises.

Two lines will be explored during the Conference:

Digitisation is producing a big change that is impacting cultural institutions, their practices, the way that the heritage is preserved, accessed and made available on the Internet
The participation of citizens in digitisation activities and co-creation experiences, including the artistic dimension, represents a big potential that is demanding to be unlocked.

More information with the Programme of the Conference are available here

More information about the CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project here

Digital Strategies for Heritage (DISH) is the biennial conference on digital heritage and strategies for heritage institutions and is held in Rotterdam on 7-8 Dec. 2015

DISH 2015: the kick off!

DISH program committee has been very busy reading all proposals for papers, workshops, talks etc.. The first day of the conference was kicked off for a rich programme of plenary and parallel sessions on DISH website: be inspired, visit www.dish2015.nl/programme for more information!

Digital Strategies for Heritage (DISH) is the biennial international conference on digital heritage and strategies for heritage institutions. The main theme for DISH2015 is Money and Power. Triggered by changes in society, heritage organisations face many challenges and need to make strategic decisions about their activities and services. The key aims of the conference are inspiration, knowledge, skills, innovation and networking.

Conference (keynote) speakers confirmed:

Marietje Schaake, Member of the European Parliament for the Dutch Democratic Party (D66) with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) political group, will give the opening keynote on day 1 of DISH2015.
Marens Engelhard, National Archivist of the Netherlands and director of the Dutch National Archives, will give the opening keynote on day 2.
Jan Müller, CEO Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision, will be chair during both days of DISH2015.
Jill Cousins, Executive Director of the Europeana Foundation, gives a keynote related to the theme Lose Control, Gain Influence!
Keynote speaker Stuart Hamilton, Director of Policy and Advocacy & Deputy Secretary General at IFLA, will give a presentation related to the Stand up for yourself! theme.
Arnoud Odding, writer of The Disruptive Museum and Director at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe, will give a keynote related to the Lose your modesty! theme.

More information

www.dish2015.nl

Survey conducted by the BenchmarkDP project

Open consultation on software evaluation in digital preservation

BenchmarkDP project is carrying out a consultation on software evaluation in the digital preservation field.

Aim of this consultation is to get insights into the current state of software evaluations in the digital preservation field, in particular which are the current practices of software evaluations, challenges faced, limitations and advantages they bring to the running businesses, and which are in the better community-driven evaluation initiatives.

This consultation is open to everybody who wants to participate. If you are a practitioner working with software tools in a memory institution, or a software developer developing solutions for digital preservation problems, or a researcher in the digital preservation area doing research related to software tools, you are most welcome to join.

Take the survey (it shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes to finish it) at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1cpfUsizBbSC0c8qpXHob91qxpiRBgQhVs8A2HHajJ2w/viewform

BenchmarkDP is a research project funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF). It has started in November 2012 and is running until summer 2016. You can find more information at http://benchmark-dp.org.

Study carried out as part of an IMLS-funded project to establish a Software Preservation Network

Software Preservation for Cultural Heritage

This is an invitation to participate in a study entitled “Software Preservation for Cultural Heritage“.

The research is part of an IMLS-funded project to establish a Software Preservation Network. Aim of the study is to better understand cultural heritage practices/experiences surrounding long-term preservation and access to digital primary resources stored in proprietary file formats. While the cultural heritage community has developed tools and workflows for bitstream preservation, the community lacks empirical data regarding the experiences and efforts of cultural heritage repositories to access material stored in proprietary file formats during appraisal, accessioning, description, and reference activities.

As part of this survey, you will also be invited to opt-in for a follow-up semi-structured interview regarding proprietary software challenges. Anonymized data from the study will be made available to the profession and software rights holders, along with analysis of current trends and possibilities for future research.

Take the survey (roughly 20 minutes) at https://utexas.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_eJr7lm1aCaC4McJ.

Questions? Contact:

Jessica Meyerson, Digital Archivist, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin <j.meyerson@austin.utexas.edu>
Zach Vowell, Digital Archivist, Robert E. Kennedy Library, California Polytechnic State University <zvowell@calpoly.edu>

Brussels, 12 November 2015

Lifestyle and Time Use for a Forward-Looking Europe – GLAMURS workshop

An interesting workshop organized by the European GLAMURS project (Green Lifestyles, Alternative Models and Upscaling Regional Sustainability) will demonstrate the latest findings from GLAMURS, and seek feedback on policy recommendations for the last phase of the project.

GLAMURS aims to explore transitions to more sustainable lifestyles and greener economies in Europe. Involving a team of world-leading psychologists, economists, transition researchers and modellers from Spain, the UK, Norway, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania and Austria, GLAMURS is examining how existing sustainable lifestyle initiatives can be scaled up.

The programme of the workshop is divided in four sessions:

State of the art introduction
What makes people choose and change their lifestyles?
Making time for sustainability
Simulating human scenarios

Download the invitation, agenda and details (PDF, 700 Kb)

Speakers include: Elisabeth Lipiatou / Domenico Rossetti (European Commission, DG RTD – B.6), Ricardo García Mira (University of A Coruna, Spain, Project Coordinator), Adina Dumitru (UDC), Giuseppe Carrus (ROMA3), Lucy O’Shea (UBATH), Michael Finus (UBATH), Ugo Guarnacci (European Commission, DG RTD – I.3), Ellen Matthies (Magdeburg University), Gerardus Klaassen (European Commission, DG CLIMA), Gary Polhill (JHI), Tony Craig (JHI) Jaco Quist (Delft University), Valeriu Dan Dionisie (European Commission, DG JUST), Pawel Swieboda (Deputy Director, European Policy Strategic Center – EPSC).

Date: 12th November 2015

Location: Spanish Centre for Scientific Research (CSIC), 62 Rue du Trône, 1050 Brussels (7th floor, room III)

The entrance is free but for registration please contact moritz.kammerlander@seri.at before 30 October 2015.

For more information about GLAMURS, see http://www.glamurs.eu/.

From William Kilbride of the Digital Preservation Coalition

An invitation to review and reform OAIS

Dear All,

It is my pleasure to invite you to participate in a new initiative that will hold our interest for a couple of years and which we aim to build into a platform for collaboration in the digital preservation community in the future.

The OAIS standard published by both the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) and as ISO14721 has been highly influential in the development of digital preservation. As a reference model it provides a common basis for aligning disparate practice in diverse institutional settings. A range of standards have emerged around and related to OAIS including PREMIS (for preservation metadata), ISO16363 (for certification) and PAIMAS (for exchange between Producers and Archives).

Since OAIS was initially proposed the digital preservation community has grown tremendously in absolute numbers and in diversity. OAIS adoption has expanded far beyond the space data community to include cultural heritage, research data centers, commerce, industry and government.

The digital preservation community has – we have! – a responsibility to keep our standards relevant. The upcoming ISO review of the OAIS standard in 2017 offers a chance for a cooperative, transparent review process. It also creates an opportunity for further community building around OAIS and related initiatives.

Can our community develop an information platform around these common vocabularies, concepts, functions, and standards to develop a common view on the state of digital curation and preservation and provide the basis for a contribution to the OAIS review?

”’We think we can!”’

With your support we have initiated the following:

OAIS Community forum via a wiki: Your feedback and the discussions on this wiki will provide raw material for an editorial committee of the most active participants to formulate recommendations which will result in a formal submission to the 2017 review. So sign in and add your views!
Exploring official mechanisms: Official mechanisms for the review of ISO standards are well established via National Standard Bodies and these will be explored and used to give input for the review.
Active Interaction: Ensuring inclusion for this large, diverse community will mean collaborative virtual meetings are necessary but we all recognize the value of meeting face to face and will seek to enable this.

The outcome from this activity is not simply a wiki nor is it a set of recommendations. By providing a shared open platform for the community that gathers around the OAIS we aim to ensure on-going dialogue about our standards and their implementation in the future.

In this sense the 2017 review is a milestone on the way to an engaged and empowered community rather than a destination.

Join the community and contribute your views on the wiki here:

http://wiki.dpconline.org/index.php?title=OAIS_Community

Read and comment on David Rosenthal’s case for a revision of the OAIS model here:

http://wiki.dpconline.org/index.php?title=The_case_for_a_revision_of_OAIS

William Kilbride

Executive Director, The Digital Preservation Coalition

Posted on TownsWeb Archiving blog by Ryan Kyle

JPEG2000 and Digitisation: Expert round table

With digital preservation, and in particular the preservation of digital assets created by digitisation, very much a hot topic in the archives and libraries communities recently; we are being asked more and more frequently by clients which is the “best” image format to use.

Of course the answer is almost always “It depends on your project’s goals.”

But more specifically, we are finding an increasing number asking about JPEG2000. Some are concerned that they might be unable to access their collections in the future if they don’t digitise to JPEG2000, others have a strong trust in tried and tested TIFF files and have some trepidation at switching to a new format, and yet others aren’t completely sure of the advantages JPEG2000 provides over the original JPEG format…

TownsWeb Archiving interviewed four experts (Dave Thompson – Digital Curator, Wellcome Library, Melissa Terras – Director, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, Paul Sugden – Senior Digitisation Consultant, TownsWeb Archiving, Michael Pritchard – Director-General, The Royal Photographic Society) to shed light on JPEG2000 as a format, it’s potential role in digitisation, and it’s suitability for digital preservation.

Read here the whole interview…

Source: TownsWeb Archiving blog

A new beta version of JHOVE 1.12 is now available to download

OPF releases JHOVE 1.12 beta

JHOVE (JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment) is an extensible software framework for performing format identification, validation, and characterisation of digital objects. The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) took over stewardship of JHOVE in February 2015 to provide it with a permanent and sustainable home.

A new beta version of JHOVE 1.12 is now available to download at http://downloads.opf-labs.org/dev/jhove-xplt-installer-dev-latest.jar

The focus of this release is on stability of the code base, so very little code has changed. The JHOVE README provides an overview of the steps we have taken to put in place automated build, testing and deployment, and mavenisation of the code base. The main functional change is that JHOVE now has a dedicated cross-platform installer.

Installation instructions for Windows, Mac and Linux users are here in the README.

Instructions are available for developers to try including the new Maven version in their own projects. It should continue to work identically to the previous version apart from one or two small output details (e.g. version number, mentions of OPF).

We welcome feedback on the new release. Please tell us whether the installer is an improvement on the previous zip distribution package and what we could do to make installation and configuration of JHOVE easier. The best method for providing feedback is by using the JHOVE issue tracker on GitHub. Here is an example of a recently logged and fixed issue.

The JHOVE web page has been restructured to make it easier to navigate. The logo has been refreshed and work will continue on the look and feel over the coming weeks.

A new mailing list for the discussion of use and development of JHOVE is being set up and will be available shortly.

This JHOVE beta release and plans for future development have been made under the guidance of the JHOVE Product Board. OPF members received a preview of this release to test and provide feedback.

To find out more about becoming an OPF member or software supporter visit: http://openpreservation.org/about/join/.

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