Digital meets Culture

Brussels, 5 March 2014

On March 5th, 2014 PREFORMA project will organise a workshop in Brussels targeted to memory institutions to agree on the joint user model for tendering the PREFORMA conformance checker.

In other words: to agree on the expected behavior and functionality of the tools to be developed in the coming years by the software suppliers that will be selected out of the procurement that will be launched by the project.

These requirements will be further developed in the susequent design and prototype phases. But the set of requirements to be defined now will be used for selecting the software suppliers.

DATE AND VENUE

March 5th, 2014

FARO, cultural interface centre for cultural heritage, Priemstraat 51, 1000 Brussels (Belgium).

DRAFT AGENDA

9.00-9.15 Introduction (objective of the workshop)

9.15-09.45 joint user model (15′ overall presentation of the use cases and requirements + 15′ general questions)

09.45-10.00 coffee break

10.00-11.30 checking audiovisual files (30′ presentation + 60′ discussion)

11.30-12.30 lunch (sandwiches)

12.30-14.00 checking text files (30′ presentation + 60′ discussion)

14.00-14.15 coffee break

14.15-15.45 checking image files (30′ presentation + 60′ discussion)

15.45-16.00 coffee break

16.00-17.30 conclusions (list amendments and settle agreement)

For more information on PREFORMA activities and to join PREFORMA community please visit the official website www.preforma-project.eu.

Barcelona, 3-7 February 2014

Mobile Apps and Augmented Reality Workshop

RICHES’ partner I2CAT (Internet and Digital Innovation in Catalonia, research organisation promoting research and innovation in advanced internet technology) organised a workshop in Barcelona, on “Mobile Apps and Augmented Reality”. The workshop was held at the School of Industrial Engineering of Barcelona in the framework of I AM project (International Augmented Med).

I AM is an international cooperation project involving fourteen partner organisations in seven countries around the Mediterranean Sea. It is funded by the 2007-2013 ENPI CBC Mediterranean Sea Basin Programme. The 14 partners work to develop joint activities to provide innovative services to the tourism sector in each of their countries, with the aim of assisting economic development in the Mediterranean region. The innovative services consist in the application to a number of heritage sites of a variety of multimedia and interactive techniques in the field of Augmented Reality.

Mobile applications and Augmented Reality technologies offer new opportunities for heritage and tourism. A new market is under development and specific skills are required to offer innovative products adapted to the market needs.

As mobile devices become more powerful in terms of interactivity, data gathering and Internet access, Augmented Reality apps are increasing. They have the opportunity to augment, enhance and transform user’s experience.

Barcelona 3-7 February’s workshop explored the design, development and user studies associated to mobile Augmented Reality. In particular, discussion topics were focused on:

Design of mobile Augmented Reality Apps
Augmented Reality for Heritage and Tourism
Augmented Reality for Marketing
Augmented Reality Games, Entertainment and Education
Exploration currently standards, available tools and devices

The workshop was conceived as a 5-days training, covering the global development chain, from understanding the business approach when working with mobile apps to the programing training.

Within this workshop the participants were provided with the knowledge and skills required to develop Augmented Reality experiences. It was discussed theoretical design approaches and practical frameworks, which will help developers to make Augmented Reality interfaces in mobile contexts.

Target audience: developers, SME’s, entrepreneurs and students willing to develop apps for heritage and tourism.

For more information:

http://www.eventbrite.es/e/entradas-mobile-apps-augmented-reality-workshop-bcn-3-7-february-2014-10096323375

RICHES on Twitter: #richesEU

Interested parties are invited to submit their proposals by 26th February 2014.

EUDAT Call for Collaboration Projects

EUDAT is offering free resources and expertise to pilot collaboration projects as part of its Collaborative Data Infrastructure where users, community centres and large data centres collaboratively tackle data challenges. Research communities, research projects and individual researchers are invited to make use of its data services that are available at a European scale.

EUDAT services target a broad range of disciplines and projects, in particular those looking for simple solutions to store and/or perform computations with research data, or for a robust data infrastructure to manage, access use, re-use and preserve their data. Interested parties are invited to submit their proposals by 26th February 2014.
For complete details and on-line submission visit http://www.eudat.eu/news/eudat-calls-collaboration-projects.

Twitter (suggestion): take advantage @Eudat_eu data services – free resources & expertise to pilot EU collaboration projects full details http://goo.gl/LMldWg.

Barcelona (Spain), 30 - 31 January 2014

Europeana Photography updates and plenary meeting 2014

Natura morta a la Galeria Unal. Càmera fotogràfica sobre un trípode al costat d’una tauleta amb pintures i pinzells i altres productes. Photo courtesy of CRDI.

Immediately following the EuropeanaPhotography software seminar organized by partners GenCat and CRDI, a plenary meeting of the project was held in Barcelona on 30-31 January, again at the premises of Palau Moja.

The plenary meeting was held just before the upcoming project’s review (scheduled in March) and after the very important milestone of over 176.000 new items in Europeana, delivered by the project’s partners. These are ancient photographs of historical and artistic value, digitized with the most advanced technologies.

Such exceptionally valuable new pieces of cultural heritage provided by EuropeanaPhotography to the European digital library show how early photography was a privileged witness of the History and societal changes in Europe during a very crucial period: 1839 – 1939.

The images by EuropeanaPhotography can now be retrieved in Europeana here and are provided with descriptions and metadata in 12 languages, thanks to the EuropeanaPhotography multilingual Vocabulary.

Moreover, 3 more languages were recently added to the Vocabulary – Chinese, Ukrainian and Russian: therefore, the next batch of EuropeanaPhotography images will be delivered to Europeana with translation in these further 3 languages!

The second day of the plenary featured a mini workshop about IPR, with the presence and presentations by Europeana representatives. This workshop follows the one previously held in Paris and produced important results in the landscape of IPR related to digital (photographic) content.

Finally, the Barcelona plenary meeting included the official announce of the upcoming EuropeanaPhotography exhibition, opening in Pisa (Italy) in April 2014.

Brussels, 4 April 2014

PREFORMA Call for Tender, Information Day

On April 4th, 2014 PREFORMA project will organise an Information Day in Brussels to present the call for tender that will be launched as part of the Pre-Commercial Procurement.

Participation is open to everybody who is interested to participate to the call and to become a PREFORMA supplier but will be subject to registration. Registration is limited to a maximum of 50 participants and it will be open until Friday 28th March 2014, 6 pm CET.

The PREFORMA Information Day will be available also via webcast to allow people who cannot attend physically to follow the event remotely and the video of the event will be published online.

DATE AND VENUE

April 4th, 2014

Koninklijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium (KIK-IRPA), Jubelpark 1 Parc du cinquantenaire, B-1000 Brussels (Belgium).

How to get there: http://www.kikirpa.be/EN/42/372/Contact.htm

AGENDA

09,00 Welcome coffee

09,20 Welcome messages (Christina Ceulemans, Erik Buelinckx, KIK-IRPA)

09,30 Introduction to PREFORMA (B. Justrell, RA)

10,00 Presentation of the tender (B. Lemmens, PACKED)

10,30 Website, guidelines and help desk (A. Fresa, PROMOTER)

11,00 Coffee break

11,30 The design phase (P. Pharow, Fraunhofer)

11,50 The testing environment (N. Ferro, UNIPD)

12,10 The open source projects (B. Lundell, HS)

12,30 Questions and answers

13,00 Lunch break

14,00 Networking session and bilateral meetings. Participants are invited to share their ideas; representatives of PREFORMA will be available for bilateral meetings.

15,30 End of the meeting

REGISTRATION

Deadline: Friday 28th March 2014, 6 pm CET

Event registration for PREFORMA Call for Tender, Information Day powered by Eventbrite

WEBCAST AND VIDEO

Click here to connect to the streaming of the event.

The event will be registered and the video will be published online.

More details on the Call for Tender can be found at http://www.preforma-project.eu/tender.html.

For more information on PREFORMA activities and to join PREFORMA community please visit the official website www.preforma-project.eu.

Thessaloniki, 29 April 2014

Digital innovation for regional growth

How can digital innovation help your region grow?

Digital innovation has the potential to radically improve people’s lives and help stimulate growth throughout Europe. Join us on 29 April 2014 for a high level event in Thessaloniki, Greece to find out about the support available from the EU to help boost digital innovation in your region.

The one-day event will consist of presentations and interactive workshops to discuss with the European Commission, the S3 Platform, European regions and local stakeholders, on Innovation Procurement and Innovation Vouchers and their application in boosting regional digital growth.

Innovation procurement holds an enormous — so far largely underexploited — potential to improve the quality and efficiency of public services and create market opportunities for innovative firms. Meanwhile, schemes for ICT Innovation Vouchers implemented by EU regions can improve the competitiveness of microenterprises and SMEs by stimulating the demand for a large range of innovative ICT-related services and development of new products, services and processes.

Participants interested in providing an input to the interactive discussions by sharing views on initiatives in their region in the afternoon parallel sessions please contact Mr. Vasileios Tsanidis Policy Officer, Innovation Unit, DG CNECT European Commission by 10 April 2014.

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The Greek Film Center, partner of PREFORMA, will deliver a presentation of the project and of the call for tender to the audience, which is expected to be composed of more than 200 representatives from public administrations, regulatory bodies, policy makers, research centers, universities and SMEs.

The title of the presentation is “PREFORMA PCP project: Tackling the challenge of long term digital preservation through PCP“.

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Agenda: Here is the draft agenda

Time: 29th of April

Venue: Science Centre and Technology Museum “NOESIS”, 6th Km. Thessaloniki – Thermi Road, 57001, Thermi, Thessaloniki, Greece

Registration: register for the event here.

Questions please contact: Styliani-Zoe Makrantonaki; tel. +302313319867; email exitec@pkm.gov.gr

Helsinki, 21 May 2014

PREFORMA @ EGI Community Forum 2014

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

This session will present to the whole digital preservation community – open source community, developers, standardization bodies and memory institutions – the new opportunities offered by the pre-commercial-procurement launched by PREFORMA. The aim of the call for tender, which will be published by the end of May, is the development and deployment an open source software licensed reference implementation for file format standards aimed for any memory institution (or other organisation with a preservation task) wishing to check conformance with a specific standard. This reference implementation will consist of a set of modular tools, which will be validated against specific implementations of specifications of standards relevant to the PREFORMA project and used by the European memory institutions for preserving their different kind of data objects. In order to demonstrate effectiveness (and refine) these tools, they will be developed in an iterative process with multiple releases and with a number of experiments with ‘real’ data sets (files) from memory institutions during each iteration. Media types covered by the tender are: documents, images, audio-visual records.

The session will be interactive to allow the participants to ask questions and provide feedback.

DATE AND VENUE

Wednesday 21st of May, 2014 – from 11:00 until 12:30 am.

Helsinki University, Main Building.

PROGRAMME

Presentation of PREFORMA call for tender

Introduction to the PCP Procedure (Borje Justrell, Riksarkivet)
How to participate to the tender (Antonella Fresa, Promoter Srl)
The implementation phases: design, prototyping and testing (Peter Pharow, Fraunhofer)
Open source projects (Bjorn Lundell, University of Skovde)
Challenge brief (Bert Lemmens, Packed

Panel discussion (Moderators: Borje Justrell and Antonella Fresa; Panel members: Peter Pharow, Bjorn Lundell, Borje Justrell, Bert Lemmens)

Open issues & new challenges when moving from traditional to digital curatorship
Discussion

Open issues:

Availability of test files beyond the PREFORMA consortium
Industry dependencies (pro/cons)
Thresholds for adopting conformance checking software by memory institutions
Sustainable communities beyond PREFORMA -> business opportunities during and after the PREFORMA project
Risks for loosing data

New challenges when moving from traditional to digital curatorship:

Are identified standards the right ones? (open standards vs de facto standards)
Standards to be identified in a next phases
Applying PCP instrument to other digital preservation issues or other research domains
Migration challenges for memory institution on the long term (how to migrate vast collections of data to new preservation formats)
How to provoke standardisation -> how to create a continuous stream of standardisation feedback to standardisation organisations

REGISTRATION

Alle attendees need to register to the EGI Community Forum main conference, at least for the day of the workshop. Registration is available at http://cf2014.egi.eu/registration/.

Furthermore we kindly ask to espress your interest to attend the networking session also using the form below.

THE PREFORMA PROJECT

The main objective of PERFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) – a Pre Commercial Procurement project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme – is to give memory institutions full control of the process of the conformity tests of files to be ingested into archives, through the development of a set of tools which enable this process to happen within an iteration that is under full control of the institutions.

For further information visit the PREFORMA Website and the PREFORMA Blog.

TARGET COMMUNITIES AND STAKEHOLDERS

Memory institutions and cultural heritage organisations coordinating or representing them, that are involved in (or planning) digital culture initiatives.
Developers contributing code for the PREFORMA tools as well as developers implementing the reference implementations in production software.
Research organisations providing technical and expertise advice to cultural stakeholders.
Standardisation bodies maintaining the technical specifications of the preservation formats covered in PREFORMA.
Funding agencies, such as Ministries of Culture and national/regional administrations, that own and manage digitisation programmes and may endorse the use of the PREFORMA tools in the digitisation process.
Best practice networks endorsing the use of open standards in creating and managing digital content.
Other projects in the digital culture, e-Infrastructures and policy arenas.

On 13-14 January 2014, RICHES enters the network for “Assessing effective tools to enhance cultural participation”

RICHES presented in Bilbao to the PUCK Project’s network

On 13-14 January 2014, in Bilbao, at the University of the Basque Country, a workshop was held by the “PUCK (Participation University City Kulture) Project – Assessing effective tools to enhance cultural participation”. PUCK has been awarded a European Grant in the CULTURE 2007-2013 programme from the European Union, to promote cooperation among organizations involved in the analysis of cultural policies. Academics and managers of public and private cultural institutions are cooperating in in this project to investigate the drivers and barriers to cultural engagement in contemporary European societies. They aims to:

develop knowledge and useful management tools to better understand and to enhance cultural participation;
improve the mechanism of transmission of knowledge between the university, the cultural sector and private and public managers.

The 13-14 January’s workshop brought together researchers and practitioners who met to discuss the impact of digitization on cultural participation and on research on cultural participation. The meeting was an opportunity to showcase some interesting European projects on the area of impact assessment of cultural projects, digitization and cultural heritage and the use of technology on cultural institutions.

Karol Jan Borowiecki, Assistant Professor at the Department of Business and Economics at University of Southern Denmark, took part in the workshop as PUCK member. In the project showcase, he delivered a presentation of RICHES, which is partner of. RICHES (Renewal Innovation and Change: Heritage and European Society) is a new EU-funded project, kicked-off on 9-10 December 2013, aimed at investigating the change digital technologies are bringing to the European society and at demonstrating the great opportunity digital technologies are offering to the EU citizens to use their heritage as a drive for social and economic development.

The showcase was a good platform to introduce RICHES to a relatively large group of people interested and working in culture and to compare it with projects of other EU-funded networks. It was also a good occasion of networking and for exchanging best practices.

The other projects presented in the showcase were:

CENDARI (Collaborative EuropeaN Digital/Archival Research Infrastructure), presented by Jennifer Edmond from the Trinity College Dublin;

ALIADA (Automatic publication under Linked Data Paradigm of library data), presented by Marta Gonzalez of Tecnalia;

SMARTCULTURE, presented by Aiala Fernandez of EIKEN;

MAPSI (Managing Art Projects with Societal Impact), presented by Beatriz Plaza of the University of the Basque Country.

For more information:

Visit PUCK web-site

Download Bilbao workshop’s programme

RICHES on Twitter: #richesEU

Barcelona, 13 May 2014

Next RICHES workshop: “Building the project’s foundation”

RICHES (Renewal, innovation & Change: Heritage and European Society) is a research project about change: about the change digital technologies are bringing to our society, offering to the EU citizens a great opportunity to use their heritage as a drive for social and economic development. It groups together ten partners from six EU countries and Turkey, working to understand how development and growth can be stimulated by digital technologies.

i2CAT RICHES’ partner from Barcelona will organize the first of three thematic workshops aimed at showcasing the outputs of the project research.

Barcelona’s view

Within RICHES work-plan, i2CAT work-package represents the foundation of the research, an agreement between the partners of basic definitions and frameworks which will delineate the RICHES fields of survey. During the first 3 months of the project period, these definitions will be outlined jointly thanks to the partners’ contributions. The final result of this first phase will be presented and discussed at Barcelona’s workshop, where the project’s foundations will be established.

This workshop will be focused to give an introducing to all interested stakeholders – culture professionals and educators, professionals and companies in the IT and ICT sectors, decision-making bodies – to the new interdisciplinary field of digital cultural heritage. Project’s partners, international guests and attendees – key figures in developing the field – are invited to participate and contribute to the taxonomy and definitions of the contextual framework of research of RICHES Project.

Barcelona’s workshop will enable all participants to:

– elaborate and agree on a Taxonomy of Terms and Definitions which will support the project’s research;

– share knowledge and enrich debate through the RICHES network and its groups;

– develop a framework of understanding of copyright and IPR laws as they relate to CH practice in the digital.

This very first workshop in Barcelona on digital cultural heritage is a unique opportunity to bringing together researchers, educators, scientists, industry professionals and policy makers to debate, discuss and present digital technology applied to the protection, documentation and understanding of European shared Cultural Heritage. The workshop will be composed of discussion sessions about specific set of terms, grouped by specific field of expertise/practice.

The workshop will be addressed to:

cultural ministries of member states within and beyond the project partnership
regional, national and state authorities
CH organizations
AHSS (Arts, Humanities and Social-Sciences) experts, researchers and students; public administrations
SMEs working within the digital cultural economy
industrial associations and organizations dealing with creative industries
citizens.

RICHES on Twitter: #richesEU

GEANT releases a report exploring options for joining eduGAIN

Enabling Users: Options for Joining eduGAIN

Within the research communities the need of federated access to services is seen as an essential success factor, especially in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) sector, where users may vary widely in their technical proficiency and just need a quick and easy access to web-based electronic research tools. The experiences of research communities with grid computing showed that X.509 certificate-based infrastructures were a major hindrance for wide community acceptance of research tools. Thus federated Identity Management is seen as the only acceptable authentication and authorisation technology within the SSH community.

The FP7/ESFRI programs of the EC have led to the construction of long-term Europe-wide research infrastructures, which need to inter-federate to allow for virtual organisations ith members from different countries. The interfederation service eduGAIN is an answer to such a need.

Academic research projects often operate their services in different countries, with many of these services requiring authentication and authorisation and could therefore benefit from integration into eduGAIN. Enabling eduGAIN interfederation support for these services requires some know-how and efforts by the service operator. Given that the number of services operated by SSH projects is probably higher than for other research projects and given that the number of services is likely to increase even more, the question is how can research projects efficiently add their services to eduGAIN?

The following three options for adding services to eduGAIN were identified:

Option A: Add services via an existing federation.
Option B: Create an own federation.
Option C: Join via a Hub or Proxy.

Each of the above options has its advantages and disadvantages and not all of them are suitable for each research group. This document investigates the above options to help decide which of them is best suited to a particular research community or case.

The report also mentions the promotion of Science Gateways as Service Providers of eduGAIN, which is strongly supported by the DCH-RP and CHAIN-REDS projects.

The full report can be downloaded here.

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