Digital meets Culture

Dublin, 18 June 2013

Linked Heritage plenary meeting in Dublin

The Linked Heritage project (a 30 months Best Practice Network project founded by the EC) now draws to the end of its life and in Dublin the partners will have the possibility to discuss the latest commitments in view of the expiration (September 2013). The consortium includes representatives of all the key stakeholder groups from 20 EU countries, together with Israel and Russia. These include ministries and responsible government agencies, content providers and aggregators, leading research centres, publishers and SMEs.

On the June 17th there was the International EU Presidency Conference at Dublin Castle on “Access, Use, Re-use – Unlocking the potential of online cultural content”.

This international conference focused on developing new access to online cultural content to support education, cultural tourism, creative industries and to provide creative new ways for people to participate in their cultural heritage. Speakers were drawn from leading international companies in the digital field and from leading experts in the EU research and cultural heritage area. All 27 member states were represented through their Ministries of Culture or national authorities for libraries, museums and archives with additional attendance from key European institutions and associations and all of the main cultural institutions in Ireland, north and south. The conference was funded by the EU Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme Linked Heritage project.

On the June 18th it is planned the Linked Heritage Plenary meeting, which will be the last meeting before the end of the project.

Linked Heritage meeting in Dublin:

Date: 17th – 18th June 2013

Venue: Local Government House & National Museum, Dublin

Agenda

Tuesday 18^th June

09:30-17:30: Linked Heritage Plenary Meeting at Local Government House, Ushers Quay, Dublin

Evening: Walking tour of Dublin

The Agenda of the Linked Heritage Plenary is downloadable here.

Registration, accomodations and more information available here

an interesting workshop was hosted at the Paul Scherrer Institute

5th Federated identity management for research communities (FIM4R) Meeting

Federated identity management (FIM) in general and federated identity management for research communities (FIM4R) is an arrangement that can be made among multiple organisations that lets subscribers use the same identification data to obtain access to the secured resources of all organisations in the group. Specifically in the various research communities there is an increased interest in a common approach to FIM as there is obviously a large potential for synergies.

This workshop in the fivth in a series that started in summer 2011 to investigate Federated Identity Management for Research (FIM4R) collaborations.

The workshop was hosted at the Paul Scherrer Institute (see the picture), located in Villigen, a municipality in the canton of Aargau (Switzerland). The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), is the largest research centre for natural and engineering sciences within Switzerland.

The first workshop was held at CERN in June 2011 (https://indico.cern.ch/event/129364), the second at RAL in November 2011 (https://indico.cern.ch/event/157486) and the third at ISGC in February 2012 (https://indico.cern.ch/event/177418). The last workshop of this series has been held in Nymegen (http://www.clarin.eu/events/3501). Through these workshops, several research communities have converged on a common vision for FIM, enumerated a set of requirements and proposed a number of recommendations for ensuring a roadmap for the uptake of FIM is achieved. These points have been documented in a paper (https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1442597) for which comments are welcome (https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1442597/comments).

One objective of this workshop was finalizing the work on a common FIM4R paper and to discuss related papers. Another major topic was to go from theory to practice and to present and discuss several FIM prototypes currently in development. Third, as the term ‘federated’ already indicates, it will not be possible to find a ‘one size fits all’-solution to all requirements. In addition, there are, especially in the commercial sector, already various existing identity management tools, which would be interesting to connect. Therefore, solutions are thought of, which provide links between different systems. These developments are just in the beginning.

For further information please go to the meeting website:

http://indico.psi.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2230

DCH-RP project was invited to attend the event in representance of the humanistic domains and to support and promote of Identity Federations.

Download the report “Federated Identity Management for Research Collaborations”

Download the “The DCH-RP project: Digital Cultural Heritage – Roadmap for Preservation requirements and implementations of federated access to digital cultural heritage contents (by Maria Laura Mantovani, GARR)”

Download the 5th FIM4R: Summary 20-21 March 2013

DCH-RP Workshop the creation of a Virtual Research Community dedicated to the cultural heritage and the humanities

EGI Community Forum 2013 in Manchester

Between 8th and 12th of April 2013, EGI.eu and UK NGI, a partnership between GridPP and the National e-Infrastructure Service (NES), hosted the Community Forum 2013.

The event, which was hold in Manchester in conjunction with the 3rd EMI Technical Conference, was very successful and provided a great opportunity to reflect upon the growing diversification in usage of the European Grid Infrastructure from across all research disciplines as well as the widening international collaboration that is taking place.

DCH-RP project has been invited to attend the meeting, organizing a workshop, on “Digital Cultural Heritage: state of the art and future developments”. The workshop brought together projects and initiatives working world-wide in the domain of the digital cultural heritage, digital arts, digital performances and digital humanities in order to find synergies and to discuss opportunities for cooperation, in particular around the theme of the use of the e-infrastructures for DCH, thus avoiding to duplicate efforts to reach the same goals.

Antonella Fresa from Promoter Srl introduced the workshop presenting the meeting and DCH-RP (PDF, 960 Kb).

Shirley Crompton from STFC presented the SCIDIP-ES initiative (PDF, 2,5 Mb). Nicolas Larousse from TGE-ADONIS introduced the DARIAH project (PDF, 900 Kb). Roberto Barbera from INFN gave on overview of CHAIN-REDS (PDF, 2,5 Mb). Martin Philipp Hellmich from CERN introduced the EUDAT project (PDF, 3 Mb). Faridah Mohd Noor from University of Malaya spoke about Mah Meri Masks Project, an example of Virtual Storytelling and Digital Archiving in the Cloud (PDF, 1,2 Mb). And finally Jan Just Keijser from Nikhef made a presentation on Data management for digital archivists (PDF, 1,1 Mb)

This occasion was a first step where projects that are working on the creation of a research infrastructure dedicated to the cultural heritage and the humanities could get together and agree on the need to set up a common plan in the light of establishing a Virtual Research Community to be acknowledged at European level by the world of e-infrastructure, to approach the next opportunities offered by Horizon2020.

Naturally, a common plan is an ambitious goal, it will be composed by several parts where each project and possibly new ones will have different roles and priorities, it will need time to be discussed, to analyse opportunities and threats, but it seems that also, thanks to the efforts spent in the last years, the community of the researchers on cultural heritage and humanities needs to be shaped more precisely, identifying common goals, strategies and synergies between the different initiatives.

For more information on DCH-RP wisit the project website.

A very successful event for the formal launch of the project

EAGLE project kick-off meeting

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.

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