Digital meets Culture

A very successful event for the formal launch of the project

On April the 2nd 2013, the Accademia dei Lincei hosted the EAGLE Kick-off Meeting, a very successful event which brought together more than 20 cultural institutions and archives, universities, research centres and innovative SMEs from all over Europe, including the director of the Europeana Foundation – Jill Cousins – and representatives of Wikimedia Italy.

EAGLE is a Best Practice Network (36-month project) that brings together the most prominent European institutions and archives in the field of Classical Latin and Greek epigraphy, to provide Europeana with a comprehensive collection of unique historical sources which constitute an authentic pillar of European culture.

In particular, it will supply inscriptions coming from 25 EU countries, providing more than 1.5 M of images and related metadata, including translations of selected texts for the benefit of the general public. These represent approximately 80% of the total amount of inscriptions in the Mediterranean area.

[VIDEO: Kick-off meeting presentations]

The EAGLE kickoff meeting, organised with the support of Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and Sapienza University of Rome, represented the formal launch of the project.

Visit the Eagle website for more information on the project.

The Humanities and Social Sciences applications session also hosted a presentation of DCH-RP

Grids and Clouds symposium in Taipei (ISGC 2013)

The International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2013 is held at Academia Sinica in Taipei in March 2013, with co-located events and workshops. The conference is hosted by the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC).

ISGC 2013 brought together from the Asia-Pacific region and around the world, researchers that are developing applications to produce these large-scale data sets and the data analytics tools to extract the knowledge from the generated data, and the e-infrastructure providers that integrate the distributed computing, storage and network resources to support these multidisciplinary research collaborations.

In particular there was a session devoted to Humanities and Social Sciences applications, where, among the others, a presentation about project DCH-RP was illustrated by Roberto Barbera, highlighting the importance of developing best practices and a roadmap for the sustainable long term and short term preservation of digital cultural heritage.

Read the whole chronicle of the speech, titled Big Data Challenges in the Humanities and Social Sciences, in the GridCast blog.

Sum up of year 1, plans for year 2 and few special guests

EuropeanaPhotography in Athens

The third plenary meeting of EuropeanaPhotography project took place in Athens, hosted by the National Technical University of Athens. The location was chosen in Athens because the meeting offered a technical training for the content providers of EuropeanaPhotography, who had the possibility to follow a lecture about the MINT tool and also to get training and personalized exercises on their own laptops. The whole event was organized by dr. Nikolaos Simou, who also held the training to the partners in cooperation with his colleagues of NTUA.

The MINT tool is a user-friendly platform developed by NTUA, and includes a multilingual vocabulary about photography, developed by KMKG. The tool is now ready to use for EuropeanaPhotography content providers: once the selected images are digitized, the related metadata will be ingested, mapped and enriched with the tool and the vocabulary, and then delivered to Europeana.

The MINT training was not the only special-event of the plenary meeting: in facts, on day 2 the meeting hosted a presentation about the Rights Labeling Campaign by Europeana’s IPR and Policy advisor Mrs. Julia Fallon. She was very kind and cooperative to take part in the whole meeting and to give a precious contribution to the discussion, that will drive interesting results as for IPR issue related to photography and digitized images.

In the plenary meeting, a sum up after the review, which result was “good”, had been presented by Antonella Fresa, and then all the WP Leaders presented plans for the upcoming months. The new partner which joined the project in November 2012, Fondazione Alinari, was welcomed by the others. Dimitrios Tsolis from University of Patrass gave a presentation of the IPR support tools that are under development for EuropeanaPhotography project.

Main activities of year 2 will be digitization (objective is 250.000 digitized image, of which 100.000 available in Europeana), enrichment and ingestion; while work will also proceed on the front of sustainability and IPR. Dissemination will be empowered and enlarged in order to reach a wider audience with which EuropeanaPhotography’s results can be shared. Open thematic workshops will be organized by the partners from autumn on, and a photography-dedicated issue of Uncommon Culture will host articles and interviews by the EuropeanaPhotography partners.

The Project Coordinator prof. Fred Truyen also published his impressions of the meeting in his blog about digital culture.

Present to the event were three representatives of the Greek Ministry of Culture, Mrs. Maria Kotlida, Mrs. Panagiota Gerasimou and Mrs. Katerina Moutogianni, who assisted to the training and to the presentations.

The partners enjoyed the warm hospitality at the Divani Palace Acropolis hotel, in the very center of the city, and the organization by NTUA was excellent. Lovely Greek specialties made lunch breaks and dinner extremely pleasant.

Finally, after the end of the meeting, partners had the possibility to visit Athens and the Acropolis surroundings, as unfortunately all the archaeological sites of the city were closed because of a strike. That was a pity; anyhow the picturesque area of la Plaka and the famous Syntagma square were enough to compensate the visitors.

Next appointment for EuropeanaPhotography is September 2013 in Vilnius, for a big event under the EU Presidency of Lithuania, where the plenary meeting will be jointed to a photographic exhibition and some cultural lectures. Organization is now in the hands of Lithuanian Art Museums.

Academia Sinica hosted the annual conference devoted to e-Learning and Digital Archive

2013 Teldap International Conference

Highlighting Retrospect & Prospect as the theme, 2013 TELDAP International Conference was scheduled on March 14-16 at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. In 2008, Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archive Program (TELDAP) was launched to integrate the digital archiving and e-learning projects and carry on the long-term goals. The International Collaboration and Promotion Division of TELDAP held the very first TELDAP International Conference in 2009 to provide a free and open forum for researchers around the globe to exchange innovative ideas and demonstrate exciting results which prompted inspiring discussions on the development of digital archive and e-Learning. Since then, International Collaboration and Promotion Division of TELDAP has been hosting high-quality, well-attended, and up-to-date international conferences annually.

There were five topics of discussion in the 2013 TELDAP International Conference: Technology and Scaling, Disciplinary Impact/ New Model Scholarship, Business Model and Sustainability, International Collaboration, and e-Learning. There has been a steep growth in digital contents over the decade, which demands a new form of preservation scaling. How to manage petabytes data thus becomes an important issue. Along with the development of digitalization, new technologies with innovative data analysis techniques have been invented and applied to the existing disciplinary and inspired innovative applications. To envision the future, the sustainability of digital collection becomes the focus. With limited resources, both cultural and scientific data encounters the challenges in terms of time and space. The future of digital archive project lies in the effective inter-disciplinary, inter-organizational, and international cooperation. Management methods, communication strategies, and troubleshooting are all important aspects in terms of collaboration.

From a series of pioneering national digital projects since 1998 to today’s TELDAP, it is now coming to a significant turning point. The blossom and success of TELDAP came from many people’s contribution. By exploring the crucial issues listed above, the conference continued to gather field experts, brilliant researchers, and devoted contributors from various institutes and diverse domains, leading the way to the golden age of a brand new digital era in Taiwan.

The three-day Conference was composed of 3 Keynote speeches, 15 oral sessions, 2 workshops as well as the Best Poster Award Contest. Topics covered in the 2013 conference include (1) Technology and Scaling, (2) Disciplinary Impact/New Model Scholarship, (3) Business Model and Sustainability, (4) International Collaboration, and (5) e-Learning.

During the “International Collaboration” session, the DCH-RP Project took a presentation on “Digital Cultural Heritage Preservation“. DCH-RP (acronym of Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for Preservation) is a coordination action supported by European Commission FP7 e-Infrastructures Programme, launched to look at best practice for preservation standards in use.

Dr. Antonella Fresa, Technical Coordinator of DCH-RP, took a presentation on behalf of the project.

This is the video presentation. Download PDF version here

A full report of the Teldap 2013 Conference will come soon. Follow us…

For EuropeanaPhotography project time has come for the first review.

Europeana Photography review meeting: eye inside

by Valentina Bachi

On March 5th 2013, the Central University Library in Leuven hosted the first review meeting of EuropeanaPhotography project. Digitalmeetsculture.net editor, Valentina Bachi, was present to the whole event with both the roles of speaker and of correspondent.

the Spoelbergh Room at the University Library in Leuven

Review meetings are always a delicate appointment, as they represent a moment for exchanging views with the European Commission, and also have the aim to verify the status and the progress of an EC-funded project. For EuropeanaPhotography project time has come for the first review. The WP leaders met in Leuven a day before the event, for the general rehearsal of the presentations, after very busy weeks of preparation.

The Project Coordinator prof. Fred Truyen (Institute for Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts) warmly welcomed the presents in the Spoelbergh Room at the University Library, where the 2 days were planned to take place.

a view of the Leuven béguinage

A lovely social dinner followed the rehearsal meeting at the Faculty Club, in the suggestive framework of the béguinage, a collection of small buildings were the Beguines, religious women who sought to serve God without retiring from the world, used to live.

The day after, everybody was ready to meet the EC Project Officer and the reviewers. The new director of the University Library, professor Stefan Gradmann, was present to the review opening, and gave his best wishes for the successful meeting.

dr. Wojtek Sylwestrzak, dr. Makx Dekkers, dr. Krzysztof Nichczynski.

Dr. Krzysztof Nichczynski, the Project Officer and dr. Makx Dekkers and dr. Wojtek Sylwestrzak, the reviewers, showed since the beginning a very vivid interest in the project’s achievements and a sharp preparation about the project planning, thus encouraging a stimulating discussion with the WP leaders.

Professor Truyen, in his role of leader for Content and Themes work-package, had the possibility to illustrate the richness and value of the photographic collections that are going to be provided in Europeana thanks to this project. Furthermore, the eye-catching result of over 150.000 images already digitized was underlined by David Iglesias Frank of CRDI.

Particular attention was given to the presentations of the technical partners, Nikos Simou from NTUA and Nacha Van Steen from KMKG, about the MINT tool and the EuropeanaPhotography Vocabulary – which are indeed the main result of their joint work. The tool is now ready for allowing the content providers to map and enrich the digitized images.

Nice and valuable discussion was carried on about IPR issue and sustainability, which will feed progress during year 2. As for dissemination work package, digitalmeetsculture.net showcase supported the webpresence of EuropeanaPhotography beside the official website, and the many dissemination activities by all the consortium were appreciated.

The final evaluation of the review was extremely positive. Dr. Antonella Fresa, the technical coordinator, commented: “We are very happy to see that all the comments were given in the light of ameliorating the quality of our project, whose results have been in fact assessed as good results”.

EuropeanaPhotography review meeting

Next appointment for the EuropeanaPhotography project is the plenary meeting in Athens on 13-14-15 March 2013, where special guest will be an Europeana representative, Mrs. Julia Fallon, who will speak about the Rights Labeling Campaign.

A national conference held in Torun discussed about digitization and EU Projects where Poland is in.

Poland’s presence in Europeana is growing

A conference was held in Torun to discuss about the Polish stategy for digitization and about the collections that are currently available, or will be soon available, in Europeana.

Article by Justyna Walkowska, source: PSNC Digital Libraries Team‘ blog

Toruń, AD 1641

The Polish Collections in Europeana conference was organized in the medieval city of Toruń on October 18-19, 2012 by the International Centre for Information Management Systems and Services ICIMSS.

The opening speech, The Decision to Digitise, was given by Eleanor Kenny of the Europeana Foundation. The remaining presentations, delivered in Polish, may be divided into the following four categories:

Presentation of Europeana-related projects
National IT infrastructure for cultural heritage resources
The support of Ministry of Culture and National Heritage for digitization projects
Problems and needs of Polish cultural heritage institutions

Two presentations were given by representatives of The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage: The Digitization Strategy of The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (Anna Duńczyk-Szulc) and The Project of a Ministerial Portal Dedicated to Cultural Heritage Resources Digitization (Agata Bratek). The portal is to be launched at the beginning of 2013.

A number of Europeana-related projects were presented, including:

Europeana Photography (Europeana Photography – Documentation of the First Century of Photography, Marta Miskowiec, Museum of History of Photography MHF in Cracow, Piotr Kożurno, ICIMSS)
Athena (Athena and Athena Plus – Projects Encouraging Museums to Cooperate with Europeana, Maria Śliwińska, ICIMSS)
Judaica Europeana (Judaica Europeana – Digitizing Jewish Cultural Heritage in Europe, Edyta Kurek, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw)
APEX (Polish Archives’ Participation in the APEX Project, Anna Matejak, Head Office of State Archives, Warsaw)

Representatives of a number of big Polish institutions presented their current activities, including those related to Europeana:

National Institute of Museology and Collections Protection (National Institute of Museology and Collections Protection, Its Activities and Plans Concerning Museum Objects Digitization, Anna Kuśmidrowicz, Monika Jędralska)
National Audiovisual Institute (National Audiovisual Institute’s Digitization Support: Europeana Awareness Project Case Study, Jarosław Czuba)
The National Library of Poland (The National Library’s Participation in the Ongoing Europeana Projects, Katarzyna Ślaska)

Poznań Supecomputing and Networking Center prepared a presentation entitled The Digital Libraries Deferation: Supporting Institutions of Culture in Making Their Resources Available Online, Metadata Aggregation for Europeana (Marcin Werla, Justyna Walkowska), which is available here (in Polish). In the presentation we describe the role of the Polish Digital Libraries Federation in the Polish digital heritage resources environment and in the context of the Polish IT infrastracture for researchers and science. We also present our cooperation with Europeana, including a number of projects we have been involved or will be involved in near future.

The problems section was opened by a presentation prepared by prof. Folga-Januszewska, Problems Concerning the Delivery of Polish Museums Collections to Europeana. The representatives of smaller institutions were interested in obtaining information on digitization projects funding.

A very important issue was Europeana’s new Data Exchange Agreement. A set of materials and opinions on this subject in the context of the Polish law are available here. The agreement, based on Creative Commons 0, is quite problematic in Polish law. It is not possible to waive copyright in Poland, and licenses can only be granted for enumerated fields of exploitation. The current ministerial directive is to send to Europeana only those metadata records or parts of records which are not copyrighted. This means, for example, excluding the conservation-restoration description of an object’s state. A very good news for all European readers is that the deputy director Katarzyna Ślaska announced that the National Library of Poland has decided to sign the agreement.

Another recurring subject was the need to translate (by a group of GLAM experts) the documentation of the most popular metadata description formats into Polish, so that they are unambiguous and used consistently by institutions.

The conference was open for general public, and there were a few people intested in publishing their private collections online. One of those people was Piotr Grzywacz from Tuchola, running the private Hunting Signals Museum.

Athens, 13-14-15 March 2013

EuropeanaPhotography 3rd plenary meeting

The third plenary meeting of EuropeanaPhotography project will take place in Athens, hosted by the National Technical University of Athens.

The location was chosen in Athens because the meeting will also offer a technical training for the content providers of EuropeanaPhotography, who will learn how to properly use the software tool for the ingestion of metadata to Europeana.

In facts in the previous months, while the content providers started the selection of content and initial digitization phase, the technical partners (NTUA and KMKG) were working closely together to develop the tools for enrichment and ingestion: the EuropeanaPhotography multilingual vocabulary, by KMKG and the MINT mapping tool, by NTUA.

As a result, a very user-friendly platform is ready to use for EuropeanaPhotography content providers: once the selected images are digitized, the related metadata will be ingested, mapped and enriched with the tool and the vocabulary, and then delivered to Europeana.

The MINT training is not the only special-event of the plenary meeting: it is also planned to host a presentation about the Rights Labeling Campaign by the Europeana Team.

The Renaissance building of the Biblioteca Marciana hosted the international project meeting reserved to the DCH-RP partners

DCH-RP Second Plenary Meeting in Venice

photo by Maciej Brzeźniak

In the wonderful scenario of Venice, the Renaissance building of the Biblioteca Marciana hosted the Second Plenary Meeting of the DCH-RP project.

DCH-RP (Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for Preservation) is a coordination action supported by EC FP7 e-Infrastructures Programme, launched last October to look at best practice for preservation standards in use.

The project aim to harmonize data storage and preservation policies in the digital cultural heritage sector; to progress a dialogue and integration among institutions, e-Infrastructures, research and private organisations; to identify models for the governance, maintenance and sustainability of the integrated infrastructure for digital preservation of cultural content.

It involves 13 partners from 8 different European countries and will move to external partners from Europe and other countries.

DCH-RP is part of a wider process, which started 10 years ago among cultural institutions with the projects DC-NET and INDICATE, two pioneer projects in the DCH e-Infrastructures area which identified the implementation of a preservation infrastructure for DCH as the first priority in this sector.

photo by Maciej Brzeźniak

The two-days discussion, held in a positive spirit of collaboration, covered both the impacts already achieved by previous projects and those foreseen in the future to be obtained by DCH-RP.
The first step in the discussion is to measure the impact delivered by DC-NET and INDICATE .

To this regard, each CH partner has presented the situation in its respective country with a special focus on:

1. Amount of the investments committed by national authorities on the DCH e-infrastructure within national programmes and projects;
2. The influence obtained by the partner in the national programming, directly, or through other institutions;
3. The role of the partner in the national projects, directly, or through other institutions.

The discussion, supported by partner’s presentations, was very useful to provide a clear situation on the European DCH’s sector.

The references were focused on the real increase of investment for a DCH e-infrastructure, the concrete use of the existing e-infrastructures to activate innovative services that did not exist before, the implementations of new components of e- infrastructures.

The meeting continued with the discussion on the project’s activities, where each partner presented its achievements and plans for the next months. (find below all the presentations of the partners)
The next project meeting will take place in September 2013 in Stockholm, hosted by the Swedish Royal Archives.

More information on DCH-RP project Official Site

Padova hosted a very full immersion program with WG meetings, training workshops and social events

Linked Heritage Fifth Plenary meeting in Italy

Photo by Piotr Kozurno

On 6, 7 and 8 March, Padua hosted a plenary meeting between the partners of Linked Heritage, the project founded by the European Union in order to increase the quantity and quality of the content provided to Europeana – the great European digital library – from the public and private sectors.

The three days event has been hosted at the Emeroteca Cà Borin, the newspaper library that collects about 600 printed journals on open shelves.

The Plenary was opened with the national workshop “Il patrimonio culturale digitale verso Europeana e CulturaItalia: aspetti tecnici e metodologia”, addressed to librarians, museum curators, archivists, and experts in the field of culture. The meeting, in addition to focusing on the key issues of the project, was an opportunity to describe the experience of CulturaItalia as a national aggregator.

There were also two trainings: one concerning MINT, a new open-source web application to facilitate the dataflow to Europeana, and the other concerning a set of learning objects made in order to facilitate the understanding and the dissemination of the key concepts of the Digital Library.

The second-day meeting was divided into two sessions: in the morning there were two different technical meetings devoted to the individual working groups; the afternoon session was dedicated to the first part of the plenary meeting including the “State of the art of the project” (presentation by the project coordinator Dr. Rossella Caffo) and the status of the Work Packages. At the end of the presentations, the partners had the opportunity to visit some very interesting hystorical places of Padova (as the “Teatro Anatomico” and the “Cattedra di Galileo”) before completing the day with a relaxing Social Dinner.

The last day meeting was opened with the presentation of Dr. Antonella Fresa (Technical Coordinator) on the Status of the activities and the planning of the last months of the project (the project will close at the end of September). WP leaders completed the exposition on the Status of their Work Packages and the Plenary meeting was closed in the afternoon with the last Working Group. All the preminent topics have been addressed: interoperability, workflow, open data, multilingualism, e-learning, dissemination with depth and useful discussions and in a a spirit of true and profitable collaboration.

A complete report of the meeting coming soon…

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