Specialists from all over Europe shared and discussed their expertise about photographic collections.

The CO-MA conference, interesting event in Brussels

by Nacha Van Steen

The 31st of October 2013, Brussels’ IRPA (Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage) hosted a 1-day conference on issues in the management of photographic collections: CO-MA.

This day brought together specialists from all over Europe to share and discuss their expertise on issues regarding collection management, care and conservation of collections, and digitization and access to photographic collections.

The collection management portion of the day, which featured Johan Swinnen from VUB and Hilke Arijs from IRPA as keynote speakers, looked more closely into the conservation of images, the value assessment and categorisation related to the decision making process of conservation, and the consequences of historical archival methods on collections and accessibility. The speakers presented the obstacles with which they had been confronted in the past during the conservation of their colelctions, and the best practices they developed from these experiences.

Session 2, with keynote speaker Herman Maes, focused on the care and conservation of images and collections as a whole, confronted with ecological and economical perspectives. It went deeper in on the issue of conservation of photographical images during exhibitions, and presented research into the conservation of cellulose acetate negatives. This session addressed very practical issues with which collection managers are confronted today, and will have to address in the future as well.

The final session, with keynote Juozas Markauskas, focused on the digitization and creative reuse of photographic content, and looked to the future of digital accessibility and preservation of collections. This session was followed with a poster session highlighting some practical research and results in the marking of photography, storage of digital data, and digitization and dissemination techniques.

A small exhibition of IRPA’s photographic collection accompanied the conference.

Website of the conference: http://org.kikirpa.be/coma2013/

KIK IRPA website’s news

Download the booklet of the abstracts: http://org.kikirpa.be/coma2013/Abstractbooklet_web.pdf

About the author:

Dr. Nacha Van Steen holds a Masters degree in Art Science from Ghent University, Belgium. She is project manager for KMKG in several EU projects. Attending this event, she took the occasion for disseminating EuropeanaPhotography project.

Padua, 11-12 December 2013

AIUCD annual conference on digital humanities

The AIUCD (Associazione Italiana per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale) annual conference, devoted to any aspect of the digital humanities, was held in Padua on 11-12 December 2013. It particularly focused on interdisciplinary work and new developments in the field and related to some specific themes:

Interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity
Legal and economyc issues
Tools and collaborative methodologies
Measurement and impact of collaborative methodologies
Sharing and collaboration methods and approaches
Cultural institutions and collaborative facilities
Infrastructures and digital libraries as collaborative environments
Data, resources, and technologies sharing.

The programme of the conference is available here in the official website.

All the submitted abstracts for which the primary author was a Master or PhD student were eligible for the AIUCD 2013 Best Student Abstract Award.

The prize consisted in a cash prize of € 200,00 and in the possibility of the full paper publication on the AIUCD 2013 post-proceedings volume.

AIUCD is sponsored by the Department of Information Engineering of University of Padua and by CULTURA, EU Project for the development of next generation adaptive systems aimed at increasing and enhancing the use of digital humanities collections.

For more information:

http://aiucd2013.dei.unipd.it/home

Padua, 30-31 January 2014

IRCDL 2014: X Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries

IRCDL is a yearly conference for Italian researchers on Digital Libraries related topics. One of the focus of IRCDL 2014 is on emphasizing the multidisciplinary nature of the research on digital libraries which not only goes from computer science to humanities but also crosses among areas in the same field, ranging for example from archival to librarian sciences or from information management systems to new knowledge environments. This is a continued challenge for the DL field and there is the need to continue to contribute to improve the cooperation between the many communities that share common objectives.

Another focus of IRCDL 2014 is on the profound change that is happening on the world of scientific communication, where the object of scientific communication is no longer a linear text, although digital, but an object-centric network that consists of text, data, images, videos, blogs, etc. This change is likely to transform the nature and the role of the Digital Library and its relationship with the thematic data center. It is vitally important that this change is presented and discussed at IRCDL 2014. The aim of IRCDL 2014 is once more to provide the opportunity to explore new ideas, techniques and tools and to exchange experiences also from on-going projects.

Topics of IRCDL 2014 include but are not limited to:

Formal and methodological foundations of digital libraries
DL Architectures and infrastructures
System interoperability and data integration
Ontologies and linked data for digital libraries
Metadata creation, management, and curation
User interfaces and visualisation
Information Access, Usability, and Personalization
Long-term preservation
Collaborative and adaptive environments
Social networking and networked information
Quality and evaluation of digital libraries
Digital libraries for education and learning
Digital libraries for the evaluation of research quality and scholarly impact (bibliometric indicators, citation analysis etc.)
Exploitation of digital cultural heritage collections
Semantic publishing and digital libraries
Linking data to publications
New models for scholarly publishing

Research papers, describing original ideas on those topics and on other fundamental aspects of digital libraries and technology, are solicited. Moreover, short papers on early research results, demos and projects are also welcome. Research papers presenting original works should not exceed 12 pages, whereas short papers on early research results should not exceed 6 pages and papers presenting demos or projects should not exceed 4 pages.

Papers should be submitted electronically as a PDF file at:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ircdl2014

Submissions must be formatted according to Authors Instructions for Springer-Verlag LNCS Proceedings. Accepted papers in PDF format will be published in on-line proceedings (max 12 pages) at the time of the conference and presented at the conference. After the conference, some selected authors will be invited to submit a revised version of their paper for a possible inclusion in the post-proceedings volume. The revised version of each paper must take into account the suggestions and the comments received during the discussion at the conference; the revised versions are going to be reviewed by at least two reviewers.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Deadlines

Submission Deadline: December 13, 2013

Acceptance Notification: January 10, 2014

Registration deadline: January 17, 2014

Final version submission: January 20, 2014

Conference

Conference: January 30-31, 2014

Post-Proceedings

Revised Version Submission: March 28, 2014

Post-proceedings Publication: by July, 2014

The IRCDL conferences have been launched and initially sponsored by DELOS, an EU FP6 Network of Excellence on digital libraries, together with the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua. Over the years IRCDL has become a self-sustainable event that is supported by the Italian Digital Libraries Community. The 2014 edition is sponsored by the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua and by CULTURA, EU Project for the development of next generation adaptive systems aimed at increasing and enhancing the use of digital humanities collections. IRCDL Steering Committee is composed of:

Maristella Agosti, University of Padua
Tiziana Catarci, University of Rome “La Sapienza”
Alberto Del Bimbo, University of Florence
Floriana Esposito, University of Bari
Carlo Tasso, University of Udine
Costantino Thanos, ISTI CNR, Pisa

Networking session at the ICT2013 Conference in Vilnius

A Virtual Research Community for the Preservation of Digital Cultural Heritage @ ICT 2013, Vilnius

Norbert Meyer (Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center) took a presentation of the EUDAT project

A network of projects and initiatives working worldwide in the domain of DCH, digital arts, digital performances, digital humanities, digital preservation and e-infrastructures was born during the EGI Community Forum in Manchester

The networking session “A Virtual Research Community for the Preservation of Digital Cultural Heritage” held at the ICT2013 Conference in Vilnius, intended to continue the discussion which was carried out in the last months through a series of joint events to identify common goals, strategies and synergies between the projects.

The aim is to progress in setting up a common plan for establishing a Virtual Research Community for the preservation of DCH, to be acknowledged at European level by the world of e-infrastructure and to target the opportunities offered by Horizon2020

Here below you can find all the presentations made during the event and some background information.

Programme and presentations

16:50 – 17:00 Welcome and introduction (Antonella Fresa, Promoter Srl, download PDF)

17:00 – 17:05 EUDAT: last achievements and next steps (Norbert Meyer, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, download PDF)

17:05 – 17:10 SCAPE and SUCCEED: last achievements and next steps (Hildelies Balk, National Library of the Nedherlands, download PDF SCAPE/OPF, download PDF SUCCEED/IMPACT CoC)

17:10 – 17:15 APARSEN and SCIDIP-ES: last achievements and next steps (David Giaretta, Alliance for Permanent Access)

17:15 – 17:20 CHAIN-REDS: last achievements and next steps (Federico Ruggeri, INFN / GARR, download PDF)

17:20 – 17:35 Discussion. Towards a Virtual Research Community for the Preservation of Digital Cultural Heritage: topics and ways of cooperation (use cases, MoUs, etc.), target users, features and services to be provided, interoperability issues

Objectives

To bring together projects and initiatives working world-wide in the domain of DCH, digital arts, digital performances, digital humanities and digital preservation to find synergies and discuss opportunities for cooperation, in particular around the theme of using e-infrastructures for the preservation of DCH.
The Session will be realized with the contribution and participation of representatives from several EU projects, among which:

DCH-RP: Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for Preservation
SCIDIPES: SCIence Data Infrastructure for Preservation – Earth Science
APARSEN: Alliance Permanent Access to the Record of Science in Europe network
EUDAT: Towards a European Collaborative Data Infrastructure
CHAIN REDS: Coordination and Harmonization of Advanced e-Infrastructures for Research and Education Data Sharing
DARIAH: Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities
DASISH: Data Service Infrastructure for the Social Science and Humanities
CLARIN: Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure
SCAPE: SCAlable Preservation Environments
SUCCEED: Support Action Centre of Competence in Digitisation
PREFORMA: a new joint Pre-Commercial Procurement project – which is now under negotiation – whose main objective is the development of an open source software licensed reference implementation for different format standards as a tool to be used by memory institutions to check conformance with standard specifications

Targeted user communities and stakeholders

Cultural Heritage institutions (libraries, museums, archives, other National institutions)
Institutions that design policies at National and International levels (Ministerial policy makers, National authorities)
Ministries and state agencies responsible for e-Infrastructures (Ministries of Science, and/or Education, ICT agencies)
Cultural Heritage International Agency and Organizations (e.g., NEMO, EMF, ICOM, EBLIDA, CENL)
Policy-making bodies (e.g. Map out, ESFRI)
Public and private academic and research institutions which own digital content and carry out research activities
Private sector (Publishers; Bip, RRO organizations)
e-Infrastructures providers (NRENs, Grid & Clouds platform providers)
R&D projects and e-Infrastructure initiatives in digital preservation
Other National and International Projects and Initiatives related to the use of e-Infrastructures for the preservation of DCH

Expected outcomes

To continue the discussion and consolidate the network born during the EGI Community Forum in Manchester. It encompasses projects that are building data and research infrastructures applicable or dedicated to the CH and the humanities.
To identify common goals, strategies and synergies between the projects and set up a common plan identifying opportunities and threats in the light of establishing a Virtual Research Community to be acknowledged at European level by the world of e-infrastructure. The plan will chart an approach for targeting the opportunities offered by Horizon2020. This is as part of a more general vision towards an Open Science Infrastructure for DCH in 2020 that will be formed as a federation of existing infrastructures: national infrastructures (NRENs, NGIs), joint European initiatives (e.g. EGI), European data infrastructures (e.g. APARSEN, EUDAT, SCIDIP-ES), research infrastructures (e.g. DARIAH, CLARIN, DASISH), by also involving the commercial sector.

Contact details

Name: Claudio Prandoni

Affiliation: Promoter Srl

Email: prandoni@promoter.it

the collaboration with SC BALI on behalf of Ukrainian libraries will enrich EuropeanaPhotography and Europeana digital holdings

Europeana Photography new partner from Kiev

EuropeanaPhotography consortium is happy and proud to announce that the group is growing! It was just signed an agreement for the provision of amazing new content with a new content provider from Ukraine.

So welcome to company SC BALI and to Ms. Olga Barkova and her colleagues.

SC BALI is a company based in Kiev that already has experience with EU projects; the general activity is the international business and one of the directions is ICT in the cultural, science and education sectors, including the distribution and developing of software.

Ms. Olga Barkova in her studio

SC BALI has been an official contributor of the Linked Heritage Project and already has got experience in delivering content to Europeana. For EuropeanaPhotography, it will be a collector for photographic collections belonging to Ukrainian libraries and archives, helping them with metadata preparation and content providing.

The technicians of SC BALI are already at work testing the EuropeanaPhotography MINT tool to provide a first batch of photographs. Thanks to this collaboration, Ukrainian and Russian languages will also be added to the EuropeanaPhotography Vocabulary!

And, at the end of November, SC BALI is organizing a very interesting workshop in Kiev, also focused on EuropeanaPhotography.

Kiev (Ukraine), 25-26 November 2013

Preservation and use of digital collections of photographic documents

First International Scientific and Practical Seminar

DIGITIZED HERITAGE: PRESERVATION, ACCESS, REPRESENTATION

Preservation and use of digital collections of photographic documents

November 25-26, 2013

State Polytechnic Museum (NTUU “KPI”) held a scientific and practical seminar, the first in a series of informational and training events on the subject of digitizing of historical, cultural and scientific heritage stored in archives, museums, libraries and private collections.

The objective was to familiarize professionals with advanced international practices, digitizing technologies, development and integration of digital collections, access and use methods. The event was composed of lectures, presentations, trainings, workshops, and professional meetings to foster discussions and find appropriate technological solutions.

Moderators and speakers were highly experienced local and foreign experts on digitizing and related areas of information and communication technologies: heads of archives, museums, libraries, publishers, owners of private collections, scientists, and a notable audience of about 140 participants.

Speakers:

Nataliia Pysarevska, Director of State Polytechnic Museum (NTUU “KPI”), Museology expert (Kiev, Ukraine)

Andrea de Polo, BFA, holds a Museum Studies Certificate from George Eastman House Museum. Project manager for R&D projects at Fratelli Alinari Photo Archive. Independent consultant to museums and the cultural heritage sector specializing in digital strategy for institutions of all sizes. Expert in strategic planning, business sourcing and procurement, budgeting and forecasting, DRMS, electronic publishing, online digital resources and publications, open access policies and issues. (Florence, Italy)

Hilary Roberts, Head Curator of photography at Imperial War Museum Photograph Archive, archivist, specialist in the history of war photography, expert consultant to curators, archivists and librarians on matters pertaining to photography around the world. (London, United Kingdom)

Olga Barkova, PhD, Deputy director on IT development at BALI Specialized Center, Deputy head of Technical Committee TK-144 “Information and Documentation”, expert in digital libraries and collections, digitizing technologies (Kiev, Ukraine)

[Show as slideshow]

Seminar program:

Presentations:

State Polytechnic Museum: the collection of photographs (Natalia Pisarevskaya),
The Fratelli Alinari Photo Archive and Museum: history, funds, activities (Andrea De Polo, presentation available here),
The Photograph Archive of the Imperial War Museum (UK): storage, digitizing, the use of film and photographs, digital designs to the anniversaries of the events (Hilary Roberts)
Ukrainian in Europeana: the initiative and the experience of connecting the Ukrainian digitized documentary heritage to EUROPEANA, the integrated European catalog (Barkova Olga)

Lecture:

Digitizing of photographic documents: best practice of safety and access (Andrea De Polo)
Software technologies for the integration of digitized photocontent into digital collections and electronic encyclopedic resources (Olga Barkova)

Master class:

Digitizing of photographic documents: the organization of the process, licensing and protection of digital content (Andrea De Polo)
Preparing of the content for Europeana: requirements to the digital copies of the photographic documents, metadata (format LIDO) (Olga Barkova, Andrea de Polo)

Professional meeting – Cooperation with EuropeanaPhotography

The Perspectives of Ukrainian organizations participation in the EU programs
Commercial use of the photographic documents: the experience and proposals of Societа Fratelli Alinari IDEA S.p.A.
The possibility of cooperation with European partners, projects and various forms of public access to public, licensed and private digitized photocontent.

Working languages: Ukrainian, Russian, English.

Location: Kyiv, 37 Peremohy ave. 37, Building 6

State Polytechnic museum NTUU “KPI”

Administrative Council Hall (1 floor)

Map: http://museum.kpi.ua/location/

Schedule

November 25
9:30	Registration
10:00-17:00	Presentations, lectures session, master class
11:00, 15:30	Coffee break
13:00-14:00	Lunch break

November 26
10:00-15:30	Professional meeting
11:30	Coffee break
	Excursion at the museum

Details for participation in the official announce (PDF, 270 Kb)

Training workshop about epigraphy, project's progress and planning the future activities

EAGLE plenary meeting in Pisa

On the 24th and 25th October 2013, in Pisa, it was held the second plenary meeting of EAGLE project, that was joined with a training workshop for the partners.

Actually, the training workshop was held on day 1, and after the welcome by Vittore Casarosa of CNR-ISTI, the hosting partner, it started with a very interesting introduction to epigraphy for non-epigraphers by the project coordinator Silvia Orlandi, Sapienza University of Rome.

The presentation was very useful to those non-specialist partners that learned the main concepts of epigraphy; during the presentation it was also mentioned an interesting paper by prof. Panciera: “What Is An Inscription? Problems Of Definition And Identity Of An Historical Source.”.

The rest of the workshop was focused on resources, metadata and harvesting protocols, the EAGLE metadata model & schema (presentation by Eydel Rivero Ruíz, University of Alcalà), and a wide training about the mapping process to allow ingestion of the metadata to Europeana, by Andrea Mannocci, CNR-ISTI.

Also requirements for the mobile application, to be presented on day 2, were tackled.

On Friday 25th, Philippe Martineau of EUREVA opened the session presenting the EAGLE Mobile Application, designed for enabling tourists to understand inscriptions they find on location by scanning them with a smartphone.

Then, the plenary meeting started with discussions by all the WP leaders about project progress and objectives for the next period. Particularly useful for the partners were the summary of the training workshop and planning of the ingestion phase, by Valentina Vassallo, The Cyprus Institute, the discussion on networking methodologies and next steps in the Working Groups by Pietro Liuzzo, University of Heidelberg, Christian Uhlir and Andreas Sanders, Paris-Lodron University of Salzburg and the discussion about the requirements for the implementation of the end-user dedicated services, among which the storytelling application, by Francesco Mambrini, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut.

Raffaella Santucci, Sapienza University of Rome, the Dissemination Leader, presented the challenges and future strategie for the dissemination and outreach of the project in collaboration with all the partners.

During the session, a wide presentation of the EAGLE website and the EAGLE showcase hosted by digitalmeetsculture was also delivered by our technical director, and technical coordinator of the project, Claudio Prandoni.

Next appointment for the EAGLE project will be on the 19-20 February 2014, in Ljubljana, with the first EAGLE workshop “Current Practices and New Directions in Digital Epigraphy“. Still to be confirmed as for dates and venues, the first EAGLE International Conference will also take place in early autumn 2014.

Marseille, 28 October - 1 November 2013

Digital heritage international congress 2013

Over 13 Conferences, Symposia, Workshops and Exhibitions under one roof

In the 2013 European Capital of Culture, Marseille, this fall will have place the world’s largest gathering ever focused on Digital Heritage. A federated event of the leading scientific meetings in information technology for heritage, the Congress will for the first time bring: VSMM, Eurographics GCH, UNESCO’s Memory of the World, Arquaeologica2.0, Archeovirtual, Digital Art Week and special events from CAA, CIPA, Space2Place, ICOMOS IPCH, and multiple others together in one venue with a prestigious joint proceedings.

A ground-breaking public display of cutting edge digital heritage projects will grace the conference venue at the new museum complex on the Marseille waterfront. Organized by CNRS-MAP, in collaboration with other local research organisms (Aix-Marseille University, Arts et Métiers ParisTech, CICRP, INRIA), the venue will be Marseille’s architecturally stunning new waterfront museums, MuCEM and La Villa Mediterranée.

The Congress covers heritage in all its forms, focusing around 5 heritage themes:

Built Heritage (sites to cities, towns and cultural landscapes, ie World Heritage)
Culture & Traditions (folklife to languages, song, dance, craft… ie Intangible Heritage),
Museums & Collections (movable objects and their museums, ie Movable Heritage)
Libraries & Archives (books to maps, manuscripts, …, ie Documentary Heritage)
Art & Creativity (digital / new media art to creative digital and online culture)

The Congress’ International Scientific Committee is seeking for:

Technical & Application Papers
Posters & Short Works
Panel, Workshop & Tutorial Proposals
Videos for a public screening
Functional Exhibits for a public exhibition of digital heritage works

Download the Call for Participation (PDF, 994 Kb)

For further information please visit the official website: http://www.digitalheritage2013.org/

dissemination at Digital Heritage 2013 big event

Europeana Photography in Marseille

Sofie Taes of KU Leuven gave a presentation of EuropeanaPhotography during the panel session of EU projects at Digital Heritage 2013.

The workshop took place on the 29th October and included representatives of several EU projects, who delivered interesting speeches.

It was an occasion to discuss and present the project to colleagues, experts and professionals in the cultural heritage, to foster reciprocal awareness and cooperation.

Download the presentation (PDF, 3.82 Mb)

The e-Culture Science Gateway developed within DCH-RP project is now empowered with a new tool

Parallel Semantic Search Across Multiple Repositories

Thanks to the collaboration between DCH-RP and CHAIN-REDS projects, a Parallel Semantic Search Engine has been integrated in the e-Culture Science Gateway.

This is a standard-based web 2.0 demonstrative platform that enables search in parallel in different online repositories of linked data. The users now can search across the tens of millions of resources contained in the CHAIN-REDS Knowledge Base as well as in the Europeana, Cultura Italia and Isidore repositories.

Data accessible through the eCSG are stored on the European Grid Infrastructure and are accessible through the pan-European GEANT network and the National Research & Education Networks. The service is available both in a web-based version and with a mobile app.

The eCSG was developed to show the Proofs of Concepts (PoCs) identified by the DCH-RP project and how they fit with the requirements defined in the Roadmap.

Please access here the Semantic Search service: http://ecsg.dch-rp.eu/semantic-search

IMPORTANT DATES:

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Conference

Post-Proceedings

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