by Tiziana Lombardo, FST
On 15 and 16 May 2014 took place at Noterik‘s premises in Amsterdam the ESpace WP4 partners’ meeting. The event was organised to plan in bigger detail the upcoming activities of the 6 themed Pilots of the project (Museums, Open & Hybrid Publishing, Games, Dance, Photography, Europeana TV), to deeply discuss their scenarios and to prepare for the project’s Deliverable 4.2 that is exactly dedicated to the Pilots’ planning.
The first day was occupied with an interactive brainstorming session, facilitated by partner and WP4 leader iMinds, that saw 12 consortium members being busy with imagining future scenarios and visionary applications for the 6 pilots.
Thanks to a massive use of post-it and discussion, the “brainstorming” team exercised in developing 6 use cases scenarios, their applications, their feasibility and possible business model.
The brainstorming team has been rewarded with plenty of candies and mashmallows that were the brain gasoline of the whole afternoon session.
The second day saw an in-depth discussion on planning the delivery of the project market analisys and the structure and contents for deliverable 4.2. Hackathons and monetizing workshops, which will be organized later in the project to boost the pilots’ prototypes and results, were also roughly planned. The occasion of the meeting was also the good place to preliminary present and discuss the upcoming Opening Conference of Europeana Space, to be held in Venice in mid-October 2014 hosted by University of Venice.
The project members left the meeting with a full agenda for the upcoming weeks that will make the project run at full steam…. hopefully we still have some candies left!!
From 15 to 17 May 2014, in Belgium, at the Troubleyn Theater (15-16 May) and the Royal Conservatoire (17 May) of Antwerp, it was held the colloquium Thinking bodies – Moving minds, which is a collaboration between the European platform Labo21, the Research Centre for Visual Poetics of the University of Antwerp and CORPoREAL, the research group of the Royal Conservatoire Antwerpen. The project is supported by the European Commission.
Visual Poetics is a research group in theatre, film and related artistic media at the University of Antwerp, divided in 4 areas of research: performative, intermedial, artist’s and textual poetics.
RICHES 
In Bulgaria the whole month of May is a period when literature and culture in general are celebrated in a series of cultural events. This year one of the events in this series is the exhibition “Writers through the photographers’ lens“. It is organized by NALIS in the scope of the EuropeanaPhotography project.
In order to enhance the work and the role of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Directors of the universities of the region, since early 2011 the Information and Communication Technology Directors Network of Latin American universities has built a collaborative space that seeks to contribute to the continuous improvement of its institutions.
APARSEN. APARSEN is a Network of Excellence that brings together an extremely diverse set of practitioner organisations and researchers in order to bring coherence, cohesion and continuity to research into barriers to the long-term accessibility and usability of digital information and data, exploiting our diversity by building a long-lived Virtual Centre of Digital Preservation Excellence. The objective of this project may be simply stated, namely to look across the excellent work in digital preservation which is carried out in Europe and to try to bring it together under a common vision. More information: http://www.alliancepermanentaccess.org/index.php/aparsen/
SCAPE. The SCAPE project develops scalable services for planning and execution of institutional preservation strategies on an open source platform that orchestrates semi-automated workflows for large-scale, heterogeneous collections of complex digital objects. SCAPE enhances the state of the art of digital preservation in three ways: by developing infrastructure and tools for scalable preservation actions; by providing a framework for automated, quality-assured preservation workflows, and by integrating these components with a policy-based preservation planning and watch system. These concrete project results are being validated within three large-scale Testbeds from diverse application areas. More information: http://www.scape-project.eu/
DPC. The Digital Preservation Coalition is an advocate and catalyst for digital preservation, with a vision of making our digital memory accessible tomorrow. Our target audience is varied: people who want to learn more about digital preservation; those already involved in digital preservation; and members of organisations which may be interested in discovering more about our research and advocacy. We can provide introductory information to participants, and advise on many issues relating to digital preservation. More information: http://www.dpconline.org/
TIMBUS. The EU co-funded TIMBUS project addresses the challenge of digital preservation of business processes and services to ensure their long-term continued access. While the project focuses on industrial institutions, our services will feed back to the processes in memory institutions. Our target audience for this workshop is people with a particular interest in exploring the benefits of process preservation for their business. We can introduce them to the TIMBUS approach to process preservation and give advice on where they can find more information about process preservation including planning, risk management and legal aspects. More information: http://timbusproject.net/
ForgetIT. While preservation of digital content is now well established in memory institutions such as national libraries and archives, it is still in its infancy in most other organizations, and even more so for personal content. ForgetIT combines three new concepts to ease the adoption of preservation in the personal and organizational context. More information: http://www.forgetit-project.eu/
DURAARK. DURAARK is developing methods and tools for the Long-Term Preservation (LTP) of architectural knowledge, including approaches to enrich Building Information Models with “as built” information from scans, semantically enrich building models with additional data sets and preserve 3D models for future reuse. More information: http://duraark.eu/
OPF. The Open Planets Foundation (OPF) addresses core digital preservation challenges by engaging with its members and the community to develop practical and sustainable tools and services to ensure long-term access to digital content. More information: http://www.openplanetsfoundation.org/
SCIDIP-ES. The aim of the initiative is to deliver generic infrastructure services for science data preservation and to build on the experience of the ESA Earth Observation Long Term Data Preservation (LTDP) programme to favour the set-up of a European Framework for the long term preservation of Earth Science (ES) data through the definition of common preservation policies, the harmonization of metadata and semantics and the deployment of the generic infrastructure services in ES domain. More information: http://www.scidip-es.eu/
ARCOMEM. The ARCOMEM project is about memory institutions like archives, museums and libraries in the age of the Social Web. Social media are becoming more and more pervasive in all areas of life. ARCOMEM’s aim is to help to transform archives into collective memories that are more tightly integrated with their community of users and to exploit Web 2.0 and the wisdom of crowds to make Web archiving a more selective and meaning-based process. More information: http://www.arcomem.eu/
DCH-RP. DCH-RP project (Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for Preservation) is a Coordination Action supported by the European Commission under the FP7 e-Infrastructure Capacities Programme, to design a Roadmap for the implementation of a federated e-Infrastructure for the long-term preservation of DCH content. The Roadmap will be supplemented by practical tools for decision makers and validated through a range of proofs of concept, where cultural institutions and e-Infrastructure providers work together on concrete experiments. More information: http://www.dch-rp.eu/
EUDAT. EUDAT is laying the foundations for a European Collaborative Data Infrastructure. EUDAT takes a service-oriented approach to federating existing European research data repositories, paving the way for common approaches to data sharing, data archiving, data finding and data re-use for European research. More information: http://www.eudat.eu/
An important initiative coordinated by Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) with theme “Science, Development and Employment” is taking flight.
If you have interesting news and events to point out in the field of digital cultural heritage, we are waiting for your contribution.
