EAGLE joins Pelagios for linking together the ancient places through the documents that refer to them

EAGLE (the Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy) joins Pelagios.

EAGLE is a Best-Practice Network (BPN), co-funded through the ICT-Policy Support Programme of the European Commission and aimed at creating a new online archive for epigraphy in Europe. As part of Europeana’s multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitised items (from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections) EAGLE will link and connect, using Linked Open Data (LOD) best practice, thousands of inscriptions, photos of inscriptions and related contextual items in a single readily-searchable platform. The project will make available the vast majority of surviving inscriptions from the Greco-Roman world, complete with the essential information about them and, for all the most important, one or more translations.

PELAGIOS stands for “Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems”. It is a collective of projects connected by a shared vision – most eloquently described in Tom Elliott’s article ‘Digital Geography and Classics’ – of a world in which the geography of the past is every bit as interconnected, interactive and interesting as the present. Its aim is to help introduce Linked Open Data (LOD) goodness into online resources that refer to places in the historic past.

Pelagios also means “of the sea”(and sea was the superhighway of the pre-industrial world): an appropriate metaphor for a digital resource that will connect references to ancient places.

By joining Pelagios, EAGLE will be able to connect with other major online projects about the Ancient World and make its data accessible to other aggregator and LOD projects to increase the quality, usability and accessibility of data provided by the BPN. Moreover, working with the Pelagios team, EAGLE looks forward to taking linked ancient world data one step further in terms of networking and interoperability and to helping facilitate research in all disciplines of the field, digital or otherwise.

For more information:

http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-eagle-flies-with-pelagios.html

http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-nesting-of-eagle-within-pelagios.html

an intuitive tool to support a very ambitious 3D modelling program

The Smithsonian x3D Explorer launched!

The Smithsonian Museums, in cooperation with Autodesk, recently launched a new program and big effort to create 3D renderings of its vast collections of more than 137 million objects. The Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office, featuring the most advanced 3D scanning and rendering technologies, has developed 3D models from its holdings, a miscellaneous selection including whale fossils, Abraham Lincoln’s head, the Wright Brothers’ flyer, Amelia Earhart’s flight suit, David Livingstone’s gun and many others.

“With only 1% of collections on display in Smithsonian museum galleries, digitization affords the opportunity to bring the remaining 99% of the collection into the virtual light.” said Günter Waibel, Director of the Digitization Program Office. “All of these digital assets become the infrastructure which will allow not just the Smithsonian, but the world at large to tell new stories about the familiar, as well as the unfamiliar, treasures in these collections.”

The Collection includes digital objects derived from different applications of 3D capture and printing, now available online for interaction with the public, thanks to a portal and a tool specifically designed.

The Smithsonian x3D Explorer allows users to interact with the digital objects in a web browser, to access, view and manipulate these objects, and eventually to print them with a in-house 3D printer, as the raw 3D data from the objects will be made available for downloading for personal and non-commercial use.

The Collection is available here: http://3d.si.edu/browser

The explorer contains a variety of tools for examining these objects: users can to rotate the objects, take accurate measurements between points and adjust color and lighting. The explorer also has a storytelling feature, which allows Smithsonian curators and educators to create guided tours of the models.

The potential in terms of research, accessibility and education is of course very much evident, and this is “another brick in the wall” as for the open data and open access movement. Teachers and other educators can use the data to create 3D models of these objects for use in their classrooms, and to interact with Smithsonian museum objects in new ways.

In particular on the side of education, these 3D objects offer an excellent opportunity to excite and engage students in a valuable, interdisciplinary education experience. To help introducing 3D and its possibilities in schools, Smithsonian educators are creating other new resources, currently being tested in schools across the US, and a blog to exchange experience will be online soon.

The conference was the occasion to launch and showcase the first set of EUDAT services.

EUDAT 2013 conference in Rome

EUDAT project provides an integrated solution for finding, sharing, storing, replicating, staging & computing primary and secondary research data, deployed thanks to different services.

digitalmeetsculture was media partner of this important event, the EUDAT 2nd conference held on 28-30 Oct 2013 in Rome, that saw the participation of international speakers discussing the new challenges for research in the big data era. Medicine and Natural sciences, including astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth sciences and physics, and, more recently, the Social Science and Humanities and in particular the Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) sector are facing an increasing need for new services and data management solutions.

For this reason, the conference was the ideal setting to showcase the services developed withing the EUDAT project, and outline the roll out phase as well as to offer hands-on training. Discussions on the new set of EUDAT services were also a feature of the conference with semantic annotation, dynamic data & workflows addressed, a natural follow on to the Working Group discussions that were held in Barcelona in Sept. 2013.

EUDAT first set of data services currently includes:

B2FIND : a simple and user-friendly way to find and access research data collections stored in EUDAT data centers

B2SAFE : a robust, safe and highly available replication service allowing community and departmental repositories to replicate their research data

B2STAGE : a reliable, efficient, easy-to-use service to ship large amounts of research data between EUDAT storage resources and workspace areas of high-performance computing systems.

B2SHARE : a user-friendly, reliable & trustworthy way for researchers & communities to store and share their research data.

EUDAT’s approach to building services is based on three fundamental elements:

Capturing community requirements
Appraisal of technologies and service candidates
Operation of the collaborative infrastructure

These services imply and demand data access and re-use policies as well as sustainability plans and cost & funding models, not to forget public-private-partnerships and interoperability all addressed during the conference.

Cultural Heritage and Social Sciences & Humanities featured strongly in this year’s conference with two dedicated workshops: Social Science and Humanities (SSH) tackle the Big Data challenge and Digital Preservation of Cultural Data.
The former saw the presentation of several case studies, demonstrating what can be achieved with big data in these fields: from new archaeological methods to understanding historical census data, and from handling audio-visual data to understanding works of art.

The latter brought together projects and initiatives working world-wide in the domain of the digital preservation of digital cultural heritage, digital arts, digital performances and digital humanities, to identify common goals and strategic approaches, find synergies, and discuss opportunities for cooperation, starting from concrete use cases. Several services were presented during the workshop: EUDAT services to safely store and preserve data, SCIDIP-ES tools for managing provenance and authenticity, SCAPE scalability platform, APARSEN registry of services.

They will all be tested in the second run of the Proof of Concepts that will be conducted by DCH-RP, the project who organised the workshop, generating a very concrete impact of the encounter. Finally, new emerging issues have been investigated, such as the possibility for the memory institutions to check the conformance of their digital archives implemented in the most common file formats. This is a key topic in the digital preservation workflow and it will be the subject matter of the new PREFORMA Pre-Commercial Procurement project.

the coordinator was invited at the Photo Archive Days, on 4th and 5th November 2013

Europeana Photography disseminated in Finland

The project coordinator prof. Fred Truyen and his assistant Sofie Taes were invited for a lecture about EuropeanaPhotography at the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki, during the Photo Archives Days.

The meeting room at National Museum of Finland. Photo Virve Laustela / SVM

The event was a very good occasion for disseminating EuropeanaPhotography project, and also Europeana, the European digital library, to national and international colleagues and curators, all of them involved and interested in the photo heritage.

Finland is not represented (… yet!) in the EuropeanaPhotography consortium but the event was useful to start a dialogue and relationships with representatives from the Finnish archives and museums.

Also, a nice visit to the Finnish Museum of Photography allowed the participants to enjoy a beautiful collection of postcard art.

Read a wider report of the mission in the blog Digital Culture by Fred Truyen

The Senior Curator at National Council of Antiquites Ismo Malinen, the director of Finnish Museum of Photography Elina Heikka, Anna Boman from Swedish National Heritage Board and Frederik Truyen. Photo: Virve Laustela / SVM

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)

IMPORTANT DATES:

Deadlines

Conference

Post-Proceedings

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