Europeana Photography – Bratislava plenary meeting

BratislavaOne of the most interesting partners of Europeana Photography is Divadelny Ustav, the national Slovak Theater Institute based in Bratislava. The priority of the Theatre Institute is its scientific and researching activity consisting of research of Slovak drama covering the time from establishing the first permanent professional stage in 1920 until today; it also takes part in other research works, co-operates with its partner institutions in various research activities concerning theatre culture in Slovakia and abroad, it takes part in organizing scientific symposiums, seminars, colloquia and other forms of presentation of their research activity. Divadelny Ustav participates in Europeana Photography as content provider, with an extraordinarly valuable collection of vintage photos about theatre performances and Slovak actors.

Divadelny Ustav was the host of the project’s important meeting in November 2014, during the Slovak month of photography. On the 6th November, the group celebrated the official opening of PHOTOCONSORTIUM, the spin-off association which will build on the legacy of Europeana Photography. In the evening of the 6th, there was the official opening of the exhibition “Teatralny Svet – The Theatrical World 1839-1939“, where the project coordinator prof. Fred Truyen had the possibility to speak about the project and its important role in unveiling bits of history through the photographs.

group portrait in Bratislava

On the 7th, in the national heritage location of Studio 12, that is the seat of Divadelny Ustav, a plenary meeting of the project took place, the last one before the big events to be organized in Leuven in late January 2015.

plenary

studio-12

Focus of the plenary was the finalization of the +430.000 metadata of early photographs to be provided to Europeana.eu, the European digital library where the images digitizited by the project will be retrievable and accessible to everybody, and the organization of the final conference of the project, which will be joint to the opening of a new edition of the exhibition All Our Yesterdays, with a very special Belgian flavour that was added to the original format of the exhibition (held in Pisa in April-June 2014 for the first time) thanks to the cooperation with the Leuven City Archive.

Learn more on the Leuven events:

International conference website and registration here

All Our Yesterdays in Leuven-Heverlee, official website: http://www.allouryesterdays.be


AICI at the RICHES International Conference

How can cultural institutions renew and remake themselves? How can they foster the shift from traditional hierarchies of Cultural Heritage (CH) to more fluid, decentred practices?

riches 2014-7758

The ISIA Roma poster

Both the RICHES European Consortium and the Association of Italian Cultural Institutions (AICI) are actively engaged in answering this question, central theme of the International Conference “Cultural Heritage: Recalibrating Relationships” held in Pisa, at the Museum of Graphics of Palazzo Lanfranchi, on 4-5 December 2014.

riches 2014-7761

The Venetian Institute and Ugo and Olga Levi Foundation’s posters

As RICHES official associate partner, AICI brought its valuable contribution to the project event, participating in the conference and related poster session with several representatives from its member institutes. Among them: Carmine Marinucci, AICI Secretary-General, presenting his association and Only Italia Education, innovative project for a modern structure devoted to sharing Italian and European cultural heritage with other cultures in the world; Pasquale Smiraglia, Chair of the National Academic Union, grouping the most important Italian academies as Accademia dei Lincei, Accademia della Crusca and the Venetian Institute for Science, Letters and Arts; Giordano Bruno, Director of ISIA Roma – High Institute for Artistic Industries aimed at the training of highly professional designers as well as the preservation and development of the finest European intellectual and teaching tradition – together with his collaborators Marco Pietrosante, Tommaso Salvatori and Giulia Romiti; the Ugo and Olga Levi Foundation for music studies and the Venetian Institute for Science, Letters and Arts.

The ISIA representatives at the conference

The ISIA representatives at the conference

Since 1992, The AICI members are involved in research activities and the promotion and preservation of cultural heritage. AICI holds the heritage of the enterprises, the social and political movements and all the organisations that characterised the modernisation process of Italy.

The archives of the over hundred AICI-afferent cultural institutions are relevant historical sources, preserving the complex Italian identity and telling the birth of a European political culture.

aici_logoThe Institutes cover all the territorial divisions and act as a plural organisation combining the preservation of book and archival goods with the promotion of relevant cultural activities. They are historical sources and tools for the development of the social, political and technical dimension of the Italian and European culture; in the digitisation of cultural heritage, joined with innovative and original forms of dissemination, AICI identifies a strategic and overriding instrument.

Together with RICHES, AICI works for unlocking the social and economic potential of culture.

 

For more information visit the RICHES conference website and www.aici.it 


PREFORMA presented at the Belgian Federal Scientific Institutions

BELSPO_logo_ENOn 18th of December 2015,  Erik Buelinckx from the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage presented the project at the monthly meeting of the follow-up committee of the Belgian Federal Policy digitisation program.

These meetings are organised in the framework of a big digitalisation project (see below). As this project is working to set up a long term preservation platform for memory institutions, the results of PREFORMA and particularly the conformity checker would fit nicely in as a tool to be added to this platform.

A general presentation of PREFORMA, was delivered to representatives from the Federal scientific Institutions.  The group consists, among others, of the Royal Library of Belgium, the national archives, some big museums, the royal cinematheque, etc.

The reactions were very good and many questions were raised. In particular, the archives were interested, so this will be followed by a more specific meeting with them.

 

About the Digitisation Plan

Belgium retains in its federal scientific institutions (FSI’s) an exceptional scientific, cultural, historical and artistic heritage, whose value was estimated in 2002 at 6.2 billion euros. Their collections make up for an important part of the world heritage in many areas and provide valuable support for scientific research.

At the beginning of this millennium, and despite the efforts of several of the FSI’s separately, this heritage remained mainly inaccessible and little exploited, particularly in digital form. The most vulnerable or most damaged pieces threatened to disappear. It was deemed appropriate to respond to the structural dynamics in Europe to digitise cultural and scientific content, a dynamic that led, in particular, to the building up of a virtual and multilingual European Library (Europeana).

The Council of Ministers has taken on July 19, 2001 notice of these problems and given his agreement for a thorough study aimed to find a structural funding for the digitisation and electronic distribution of the collections.

Therefore, a Digitisation Plan for 10 years was launched in April 2004 with the financing of the first phase (2005-2008) of nine targeted priority projects. The aim of these 9 projects was a better dissemination and utilisation of the collections of the FSI and digitisation efforts in the FSI’s increase by seeking synergies and complementarity, taking into account the specific nature of the various institutions. That first phase of the Digitisation Plan was extended until the end of March 2012.

One problem encountered was to address the large-scale digitisation needs (especially in terms of overall vision, resources and deadlines). From this first experience lessons were drawn for the start of a more ambitious second phase.

The new program (2013-2018) is designed so that the digitisation activities of the various institutions involved and the associated resources will not remain fragmented. The aim is a genuine inter-institutional collaboration to establish on the basis of common investment, an industrial-scale infrastructure and joint management of digitised data and activities allowing synergies to be realised. Of course, always with the specific needs of each institution taken into account.

The creation of three different platforms is provided with the necessary interfaces:

  1. a common platform for storage and long-term preservation (LTP)
  2. a digitisation platform (in-situ and external digitisation)
  3. a valorisation platform.

The common platform for long-term preservation (LTP) needs to bring a solution for the huge archiving problem of the storage, conservation and management of the digitised objects, the FSI’s cannot solve alone.

The FSI’s wish to ensure through the LTP platform that existing digital objects and the new digitised objects will still be accessible in the future, and for a very long time (over 10 years) remain intact, clearly longer than the lifetime of current specific storage systems and technologies.

The sizes and dimensions of preserving digital objects are very diverse (especially PDF, TIFF, WAV, JPEG, JPEG2000, MOV, AVI, MXF, TAR, DPX, ranging from a few Kb to 4 TB). The total data volume is today one PB and can reach more than 12 PB end of 2018.
This platform should ensure at all times the integrity, authenticity and availability of such data. The LTP platform should support as much as possible by the industry accepted open standards, protocols and components. The data and metadata have to be stored in such a way that they can be recovered through open standard protocols. This protects users against an eventual “vendor lock-in” or against any disappearance of a software or a specific vendor. The medium in which the data is stored should be as standard as possible and accessible through open systems. The data and metadata may under no circumstances leave the Belgian territory.

The platform will be installed in the data centers of the federal government. All FSI’s have direct access to high bandwidth on the Belnet network.

The 10 Federal Scientific Institutions are:

An additional Belgian federal institution with a rich cultural heritage was added to this project:


EUDAT News bullettin – November / December 2014

In this issue we introduce the EUDAT License Wizard and ask what researchers think about open data, before having a look back at some of the achievements over the course of the year. On behalf of the EUDAT team, we’d like to wish you the very best for the holiday season and we look forward to working with you in 2015.

 

Get B2Sharing during the season of goodwill with EUDAT’s License Wizard

We’re delighted to announce that a new version of the EUDAT service B2SHARE has just been released. If you’d like to use B2SHARE to deposit data or software but you’re unsure as to which licence you should use, the EUDAT License Wizard is the answer to your problems. This user-friendly tool guides you step by step through the bewildering array of licences, helping you choose the right one for your dataset or software. Try out the demo version which is available online now and let us know what you think.

Open access: What communities really think

Trailed at the September Conference, EUDAT’s study of our communities’ attitudes to open access to data will be published early in the New Year. In the meantime, a summary of the findings will appear shortly in the December/January edition of European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) News.

infografia-01


INNOVA Master’s Degree in Virtual Cultural Heritage

arqueologia-virtual-archaeologyHow do you prepare a professional in Cultural Heritage in the digital age? How the University can solve the gap between Science and Humanities? Is the current University ready to deal with education in Cultural Heritage? Are then Humanities a good professional option?

The INNOVA MASTER’s Degree in Virtual Heritage: The Cultural Heritage in the Digital Era is a degree from INNOVA (Virtual Archaeology International Network) and SEAV (Spanish Society of Virtula Archaeology). Specialists from 36 Institutions, research centers and international companies across 12 countries have developed the degree consisting of 60 ECTs credits. The degree has three mandatory modules to be undertaken by the student throughout 62 teaching weees, with corresponding holiday periods over Christmas, Easter and Summer.
The programme is taught entirely online through the virtual classroom of the International Campus SEAV TRAINING, with personalised access and weekly advice of expert tutors.
The course covers theoretical topics, practical activities and includes objective test to be graded for each chapter.
Student literature, resources and certain software will be provided to the student for the completion of the proposed activities. Three reviews will be conducted during the course that will result in a final grade.
1_LOGO-INNOVAAt its completion, the student will receive the title INNOVA MASTER’s Degree in Virtual Heritage: The Cultural Heritage in the Digital Era

For more information visit www.seavtraining.com/campus


RICHES International Conference concluded successfully!

The first international conference of the RICHES project took place in Pisa on 4-5 December 2014, preceded by the plenary meeting of the consortium. The whole event was organised by Italian partner Promoter Srl in the aristocratic venue of Palazzo Lanfranchi, a patrician palace on the riverbanks of Arno river, that hosts the collection of the Museum of Graphics of the city.

room

The conference opened in the afternoon of 4th December, when the attendees, after the registration and a nice welcome coffee, took seat in the large room of the second floor, fully dedicated to the conference. Welcome speeches of Antonella Fresa from Promoter, Dario Danti Chancellor of Culture in representation of Pisa municipality, Alessandro Tosi scientific director of the Museum of Graphics and Mauro Fazio from the Italian Ministry of Economic Development introduced the day. Then there were speeches by two associate partners of the RICHES project: Francesca Lanz from Politecnico di Milano presenting “MeLa Project: European Museums in an age of migrations” and José María MartÍn Civantos from Universidad de Granada,  presenting “MEMOLA Project: Mediterranean Mountainous Landscapes”. Finally, Neil Forbes from Coventry University spoke about the vision, the research areas and the outcomes of the RICHES project.

The evening concluded with two pleasant cultural activities: a guided tour to the exhibition of Tullio Pericoli, renowned Italian painter and illustrator, on show at the first floor of the Museum of Graphics, and a visit of the crowdsourced photographic exhibition of the All Our Yesterdays series, showing digitised images of vintage photographs collected among the citizens of Pisa during the Europeana Photography main exhibition All Our Yesterdays (1839-1939) Scene di vita in Europa attraverso gli occhi dei primi fotografi (11 April – 2 June 2014).

On the second day, the conference began with Neil Forbes who took again the microphone for the first keynote speech entitled “Assessing value in cultural heritage”. It is widely recognised European cultural heritage is an important component of collective and individual identity and that it contributes to the cohesion of Europe and to the creation of links between citizens. At the same time, a number of challenges and pressures threaten to undermine this immeasurably rich endowment. The over-riding need, it is said, is to promote cultural heritage’s intrinsic value. But what is meant by “value” in this context? The speech by prof. Forbes illustrated a few of the issues involved by drawing on selected examples of contested values around cultural heritage.

Second keynote speech, entitled Digital art and digital cultural heritage in China”, was by Xiaochun Situ, trying either to describe how Chinese artists, Chinese art critics and Chinese media think about “digital” and to investigate the status of digitalisation of cultural heritage in China, with a focus on libraries, museums and galleries. This issue was discussed according to the introduction and implementation of the Chinese government’s directives, showing how the governmental organisations are working and providing some indications about what is on plan.

poster session

Unable to be present on site, the third keynote speaker of the conference, Bill Thompson from BBC , made a virtual greeting to the public via skype; then his speech was shown to the attendees trough a video presentation. Thompson’s intervention, entitled “Broadcast Archives as Cultural Heritage: can the BBC engage as well as it informs, educates and entertains?”, tryied to investigate how the big broadcaster BBC, as a store and source of cultural heritage, can actively engage its public; whether it is possible for BBC to permit unmediated access to the cultural assets it creates without mediation and control and what impact technological innovation will have on the BBC’s future role.

Last but now least, Karol Jan Borowiecki intervened in the conference as fourth keynote, with a lecture about “Personal relationships and the formation of cultural heritage: The case of music composers in history”. Using data on the lives of 522 prominent music composers born in the 18th and 19th centuries, Borowiecki showed how creative clusters formed in Paris, Vienna and London and how locating in a musical city greatly increased each composer’s productivity. Borowiecki’s research signifies the importance of personal relationships in the formation of cultural heritage.

B4FwJ2eIEAAmhqSAfter the lunch and the visit to the poster session of the conference, the second part of the day begun, introduced and moderated by Dick Van Dijk. The afternon was devoted to presenting the co-creation sessions executed as part of the RICHES project in the Netherlands. A co-creation session can be defined as an experimental activity aimed at demonstrating how the public can be creator (and so co-creator, together with the heritage professionals) as well as user of cultural contents. In other words, it is a practical example  of “relationship recalibration”.

This session of the conference included presentations by: Janine Prins (Waag Society), Douwe-Sjoerd Boschman (Waag Society), Ilias Zian (National Museum of World Cultures, Leiden) & Emma Waslander (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), Hodan Warsame, Simone Zeefuik & Tirza Balk (collective Redmond Amsterdam) and Laura van Broekhoven (Stichting Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden).

Central question underlying the Netherlands’ activities is how young people relate to heritage and heritage practices; the method to direct this conversation gets through design thinking and co-creation with young adults, museum staff and designers from Waag Society. The aim of the co-creation activities is to contribute to identify novel strategic directions for museums. The results of such activities can contribute to (re-)think what it means for a museum to relate to contemporary society, fostering recognition of identity and history and contemporary life of young adults with multicultural backgrounds.

The conference ended with final conclusions and remarks and the sense of having created a really interesting event: not only a milemarker for the Riches project, but also a wealth of consideration and input around the theme of reducing the distance between people and culture.

The overall topic of these two-days was indeed: recalibrating the relationship between heritage professionals and heritage users in order to maximise cultural creativity and ensure that the whole European community can benefit from the social and economic potential of Cultural Heritage.

For more information visit the RICHES website and the RICHES International Conference website!


Kick-off of the Swedish Working Group

USA215 archivists met on 15th of December 2015 at the City Archives in the centre of Uppsala for the first preparatory meeting of the PREFORMA National Working Group in Sweden. 6 persons were from archive authorities or memory intuitions and the rest were archivist at governmental agencies.

 

Magnus Geber from Riksarkivet, responsible for the networking Work Package in PREFORMA and National Referee the Swedish Working Group, delivered a general presentation of the project and of its networking activities.

Joining the PREFORMA network would mean to get direct information and means to influence our project, testing parts of the software during the development process and providing feedback and advice.

 

USAThe group showed interested and participated actively, reporting their problem in producing correct PDF/A-files and looking forward to what PREFORMA and its suppliers can provide to help them to solve that problem.

Some of the agencies offered to make available test-files for the demostration and testing phase.

 

After the successful meeting at the City Archives in Sweden, networking activities started also in other Countries, such as in Belgium, Netherlands, Greece, Ireland, Germany, Spain and Estonia.

 

Join the PREFORMA network at www.preforma-project.eu/community.html!


Riga Summit 2015 on the Multilingual Digital Single Market

The Riga Summit will gather government officials, business leaders, technology developers, and language researchers, who will forge a unified vision for the multilingual digital single market.

At the event, stakeholders will work together to develop a combined strategy, identify goals, establish partnerships, and initiate concrete actions to bring about the vision of a digital single market without language barriers.

Besides a high-level plenary, the Riga Summit will consist of multiple workshops, roundtables, and technology showcases. The event will be hosted in Riga, Latvia, as part of the 2015 Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

riga 2015

Day 1 – META-FORUM 2015

META-FORUM 2015 is an international conference on powerful and innovative language technologies for the multilingual information society, the data value chain and the information market place. The two special themes of META-FORUM 2015 are Multilingual Technologies for the Digital Single Market and Language Technologies for the Big Data Challenge. A brief summary of the programme is available at http://www.meta-forum.eu. The online registration for META-FORUM 2015 is open  as usual, participation is free of charge.

Day 2 – Main Conference

  • Presentations from industry and public sector
  • Keynote speeches
  • Plenary session
  • Start-up pitch event
  • Technology exhibitions
  • Roundtable discussions

Day 3 – Main Conference – MultilingualWeb

W3C announced today the 8th MultilingualWeb workshop in a series of events exploring the mechanisms and processes needed to ensure that the World Wide Web lives up to its potential around the world and across barriers of language and culture. The workshop brings together participants interested in the best practices and standards needed to help content creators, localizers, language tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web. It provides further opportunities for networking across communities.

To sign up for news and registration information, please visit the Riga Summit website: www.rigasummit2015.eu.


Creative Enterprise PIE Conference

by Rosamaria Cisneros, Coventry University

creative pie 2014

While participating in this interesting event, CREATIVE ENTERPRISE PIE Conference 2014 held at Belgrade Theatre Conference Venue in Coventry on the 12th November 2014, the objectives were to: (a) disseminate Dance Pilot information and tools. (b) Encourage people to learn more about E-Space and visit project website c) follow the project on twitter and other social media outlets (d) identify local test-users (e) gather feedback on the E-Space Dance Pilot ideas.

Coordinator Sarah Whatley talked in a pop-up discussion dedicated to E-Space and the Dance pilot, about dance annotation and digital technologies; there also was an informal discussion during the PIE Conference which gathered information on Digital Technologies as well as disseminating E-Space. Also Jonathan Shaw from the Open and Hybrid Publishing pilot had a pop-up discussion about open and disruptive media.

Audience  was comprised of creative enterprise business leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, graduate students, academics and other cultural heritage of different nationalities: English, Romanian, American, Irish. Contacts were made with individuals in the creative enterprise sector, cultural heritage sector, free lance artists and university students studying Performing Arts.

Attendees were interested and eager to learn more.  The dialogue generated was constructive and useful for us as a pilot and for them as participants. We gathered information on the digital technologies they are familiar with or currently using. We also shared with them that early next year we will be testing our apps and hope to include them in some capacity.

Website of the event:  Http://www.creativeenterprisecoventry.wordpress.com


“The Digitization Age. Mass Culture is Quality Culture” by Promoter Srl