is the Programme Manager of Europeana, based in The Hague. He's a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the Irish World Academy in Limerick, and wrote A Practical Guide to Managing Web Projects.
I'm the Programme Manager at Europeana, bringing together ideas from design, business and technology to make this large-scale European Commission project effective.
BACKGROUND
I studied classical music composition in college. And while writing string quartets didn't lead to a job, I did find that I could think about a piece of software the same way I used to approach a piece of music. Rhythm and structure and layers of abstraction -- it's all the same thing, really.
I spent quite a while as a consulting technical architect and manager in software firms. Feeling the pull of my more artistic past, I melded my interests in music and management with a position at Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, working hard to promote and preserve Irish cultural traditions.
While moving between the for-profit and non-profit realms, I learned and practised a lot of project and personnel management, business development, community organising and the use of information technologies to develop organisations.
I've kept up the learning while doing my professional work, culminating most recently in an MA degree in Ethnomusicology from the University of Limerick. I liked it so much that I'm currently working on a PhD.
MOST RECENT WORK EXPERIENCE
Programme Manager, Europeana Foundation
I lead the Programme Management Group at Europeana, a project aggregating digital heritage through partnerships with more than two thousand European galleries, museums, libraries and archives. In addition to leading the project management function for the 25+ ongoing projects of the Europeana Foundation, I am responsible for the knowledge management within the Europeana ecosystem of projects, identifying and communicating best practice in the digitisation, sharing and re-use of cultural and scientific heritage in a wide variety of contexts. I give frequent presentations and workshops at working group meetings, conferences and project events around Europe. I report to the Director for Business Development.
I was responsible for all aspects of user experience design at this boutique web design studio, consulting on issues of user research, information architecture, usability, technical feasibility, strategy, metrics, analytics and accessibility. My position involved frequent preparation and running of workshops with clients and potential clients, development of user research protocols, authoring of research reports, development of prototypes and wireframes, scripting and analysis of external user testing and communication and management of other technical team members. As part of my consulting to cultural heritage organisations in Ireland, I prepared the Contemporary Music Centre and the Northern Ireland Causeway Museum Service archives to send data to Europeana, including defining the required input/output data formats. I reported to the Managing Director.
As a projects officer at Comhaltas, I had wide-ranging responsibilities for the administration and presentation of Comhaltas cultural programmes. Projects that I initiated and managed include the Foinn Seisiún series of CDs and the new website at http://comhaltas.ie. On an ongoing basis, I edited the ComhaltasLive weekly video programme, managed the recording studio at Cultúrlann na hÉireann, produced graphic design work for publications, compiled and typeset music notation for upcoming music books, designed and operate sound reinforcement and lighting for theatre shows, and specified and maintained IT equipment for the Cultúrlann and all Regional Resource Centres. I was also involved in the administration of cultural festivals (such as the Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann) and in the design and outfitting of a new traditional arts theatre in Dublin. I developed a new digital archive system, the Comhaltas Traditional Music Archive (comhaltasarchive.ie) to house the collection of recorded audiotapes, printed materials and images collected by the institution. I prepared the Comhaltas Archive data for export and aggregation within Europeana. I reported to the Director-General, an Irish Senator and Government Spokesman on Rural and Gaeiltacht Affairs.
Project Manager for european clients of Happy Cog. Managed kick-off and requirements definition activities, information architecture taxonomy, scoping, budget management and client communications. Reported to President for Philadelphia Office.
I worked as senior staff in the Architecture Competency of BearingPoint Ireland (subsidiary of a $3 Billion global consulting company), with a rank of Manager. In this capacity I acted as a technical team lead, oversaw systems architecture, worked on project bid teams and managed staff and projects of up to €12M. In addition to software programming, I was responsible for the designs of partial and entire public sector projects involving benefits administration and social housing management for the Irish government. As a manager, I put a premium on mentoring other staff around me, as well as general project and budget management. I reported to the Managing Director for Ireland, with direct responsibility for teams of up to 15 people.
I provided services in music composition, recording, sound reinforcement and audio editing for a variety of clients in music, theatre and modern dance. I have also worked as an accompanist during the preparation and rehearsal of performances. Using an all-digital recording studio, I worked very closely with choreographers and technical directors to create the ideal aural environments required for each piece, subsequently following each project through to presentation. I produced a great deal of work for Comhaltas, including the annual American Tour CDs.
I was in a CTO role at this eBusiness company, which published Irish civil records, ordinance survey maps and historical images on the web using a proprietary eCommerce platform and associated large database. As the senior supervisor reporting to the CEO, I directed every aspect of the technology strategy and implementation. I managed the technical staff, specified and participated in programming projects, administered aspects of the internal corporate infrastructure and web delivery infrastructure and provided data analyses upon request to support sales and marketing campaigns.
I was responsible for research and development at this technology start-up, which provides software and associated infrastructure to support the marketing, legal and medical markets. Because of the small size of the company, there is no technical area in which I was not directly involved. I designed and wrote soft- ware, configured network routing and monitoring, managed the servers, answered technical support re- quests and so forth. Though primarily a Java developer, I also maintained their physical server and network infrastructure and managed much of their network security. I reported to the CEO.
This Dublin firm (now defunct), provided technology consulting services to Irish and international clients. I worked as part of the management team, reporting to the CEO, and also as a technical team member on some projects. I was responsible for drawing up competitive analyses, meeting with prospective clients, allocating time and resources for projects and creating design documentation, in addition to supervising and participating in software code development. The methodology used was a variant of the Rational Unified Process, using UML heavily in the design phases.
My general responsibility was to coordinate and spearhead J2EE application development projects for the New York clients of eFORCE, primarily financial services, monitoring and steering all technical aspects of each project through the full product lifecycle. I worked closely with the rest of the project management team to define client requirements, evaluate technology choices and create a design for the end system. I reported to the Managing Director, and managed teams of up to 30 people.
As a technical lead, I was responsible for leading the definition, extension and development of data mod- els and class libraries for use in client projects, while remaining an active participant in the project management process. I reported to the Managing Director for New York. Within the context of a client engagement, I was responsible for evaluating and refining tasks and milestones for development teams of up to 10 developers, as well as authoring large portions of the design documentation.
I was responsible for coordinating internal development projects at this top-10 accounting firm. Though my official duties consisted of developing in-house applications and customising desktop applications, shake-ups within the internal IT department resulted in my taking on system and database administration and project management roles in addition to my regular tasks. I reported to the CTO. I implemented office automation, desktop integration and document management solutions, in addition to developing internal LOB applications such as Time/Expense tracking and scheduling software.
At Mentortech I programmed Windows applications for clients in accounting, real estate and consulting industries. I was generally solely responsible for the design and implementation of these small-scale sys- tems, working closely with the internal IT departments at each client. I also recommended network and server topologies to clients. I specialised in office automation and process improvement, exploring novel and useful metaphors to extend the user's experience of the computational environment. As part of appli- cation design, I developed data models to support various line-of-business applications, migrating data from legacy systems where necessary.
I was an intern for a locally produced news magazine program. On air day, my duties included preparing scripts, preparing TelePrompter and Chyron feeds, and providing production assistance with VTRs and other equipment. During the preparation days for the program, I was responsible for logging tapes of news broadcasts to identify B-roll, monitoring wire services to find story ideas and organising information for the presenters.
By Lars Wieneke, Researcher at Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l'Europe.
In 2005, Time magazine declared 'You', the individual content creator on the internet, as its 'Person of the Year'. While Time didn't invent user-generated content, the accolade brought public attention to the effort of individual volunteers that have invested millions of hours of work on building large-scale repositories for video (YouTube), images (Flickr) and knowledge (Wikipedia). Since then, user-generated content (UGC) has become part of our everyday lives. Some of us now naturally create and share our stories and experiences with each other through UGC.
Very often this creation takes place outside of the institutional framework but some memory institutions have found ways and means to make user contributions a meaningful part of their mission. The Europeana Network Task Force on Understanding the Role of User-Generated Content in Europeana, which has nine members, wants to gather these experiences to encourage a discussion at the Network level about the role and relevance of user-generated content, the obvious and hidden challenges of its application and potential future ecosystems that could be shared between all members of the Network.
User-Generated Content Task Force meeting, Hilversum, The Netherlands
As a first part of this mission, we invite you to fill in a short survey so that we can find out more about the status quo of user-generated content. Who uses it and how? Who doesn't use it and why not? What can we learn from each other and what kind of services could the Europeana Network offer to turn user-generated content into a true asset for its stakeholders?
The survey launched at the beginning of May and so far more than 20 institutions have responded, showing a great diversity of uses. In the next phase of our Task Force, we will conduct individual interviews with members who want to share their best practices. Then in autumn this year, look out for the results! We will share them on the Europeana Network LinkedIn page, this blog and during the Europeana Network Annual General Meeting.
The survey is open until 28 May and takes less than 8 minutes to complete. Even if you have no experience with user-generated content, your voice is important to us, as we also want to find out more about the obstacles and concerns regarding UGC.
We are now halfway through the Wiki Loves Public Art photo contest, which runs throughout May 2013. Volunteers in Austria, Finland, Israel, Spain and Sweden have taken over 5,000 pictures of a total of 1,385 public artworks! All of these photos are uploaded under a free licence, so that they can be used, for example, in online projects such as Wikipedia.
The goal of the Wiki Loves Public Art (WLPA) contest is to get as many pictures of public art as possible available under a free licence on Wikipedia’s online database, Wikimedia Commons. The 5,000 photos uploaded so far can then be seen and used by anyone, anywhere. At the same time, the world’s sixth largest website, Wikipedia, will see a boost in its art coverage as photos in the contest can be added to illustrate articles in the online encyclopedia. The contest is organised by Wikimedia Sverige, Europeana and volunteers in the Wikimedia chapters and affiliated groups in each of the participating countries.
'Paparazzi statue in Bratislava', photograph by DMY, CC-BY.
'We are doing this to increase our common collection of photos of artworks and to make them easily accessible to everyone through Wikipedia. This is also a fun way to start contributing for volunteers', says the international WLPA coordinator, John Andersson.
The contest has been challenging to organise because most countries lack a national database of their artworks. In addition, the countries participating in the contest have a diverse set of copyright laws, which means that the public artworks that can be photographed and uploaded online for the contest differ between countries. For example, in Finland the contest focuses on outdoor sculptures made by artists who have been dead for 70 years or more. In Spain and Austria, on the other hand, any public artwork can be photographed.
'This has also made a difference to the amount of artworks photographed in different local contests. From Barcelona we have over 4,000 pictures, whereas from countries with stricter copyright laws we understandably have fewer contributions', states John Andersson.
To make it easier for people to find the artworks suited for the contest, volunteers in national Wikimedia chapters have put together lists on Wikipedia.
The photos uploaded for the contest will first be judged nationally, and the ten best pictures from each country will be sent to the international jury. The prizes for the three internationally best pictures – which will be announced in July – are travel gift certificates for 500 euros, 300 euros and 200 euros and on top of that Europeana has sponsored high quality prints of the winning pictures that will be sent to the winners.
To enter, go to wikilovespublicart.com.
For more information, contact John Andersson, Wikimedia Sverige, by phone: +46 (0)733965189 or email: john.andersson@wikimedia.se
Today's blog introduces you to a great European Commission-funded project called Preserving Linked Data, or 'PRELIDA' for short. The project launched in January this year and is now looking forward to its first major working group meeting in June. A great opportunity, we thought, to tell you what it's all about.
The project aims to build bridges across the digital preservation and linked data communities, with the view of
The sheer amount of data offered and consumed on the internet, and the volume of data being digitally stored and exchanged, is growing exponentially. This generates the potential for many new types of products and services, and a whole new industry implementing services on top of large data streams. The impact of this emerging economic sector - the data economy - may soon outrank the current importance of the software industry.
Carlo Meghini, project coordinator and long-standing partner on Europeana projects, says, 'An important part of the data economy is the linked data movement, which is about using the web to connect related data that was previously not linked, or using the web to lower the barriers to linking data. With the increasing adoption of the linked data paradigm by governments and organisations, the requirements in terms of quality, usability and maturity increase. In order to continue to develop and increase uptake of linked data as a platform for publishing open data, we need to address the issues surrounding preserving linked data. For example, they are different to other data sets in that they are in RDF, they use URIs as identifiers, and they rely on shared vocabularies. Whilst these are all good features of linked data, they are likely to create preservation problems that other types of data do not have.'
Carlo Meghini, project coordinator. Image taken from a video lecture by Carlo on data preservation.
The PRELIDA team is convinced that the preservation problem of linked data can only be solved satisfactorily if the digital preservation and linked data communities come together with their complementary skills and technologies. So an important task of PRELIDA is to raise awareness of existing preservation solutions and to facilitate their uptake.
The project will produce a report on the current state of linked data and its preservation needs, and will develop a roadmap focusing on the most promising research paths, and the resulting problems to be addressed. This research will drive the scientific and technological development of the field, as well as future research programmes that the European Commission may wish to fund.
The challenges of preserving linked data are expected to be related to intrinsic features of linked data, including their structuring, interlinking, dynamicity and distribution. PRELIDA will implement its aims through a coherent collection of activities, including a working group, open consultations, holding three dedicated workshops, two summer schools, and a broad dissemination action, addressing the scientific community, technology providers, key user groups, and policy-makers.
The main partners for the project are CNR-ISTI (Italian National Research Council of the Institute of Science and Information Technology), APA (the Alliance for Permanent Access), the University of Huddersfield in the UK and the University of Innsbruck in Austria. As a leader in linked data thinking, Europeana is involved with PRELIDA in a sub-contracting capacity.
Members of PRELIDA are looking forward to the first workshop of their working group. The group is made up of around 20 world experts and has been formed to help PRELIDA achieve its goals. It will meet three times during the course of the project. The first meeting takes place in Tirrenia, Italy on 25-27 June. Then in September, the project will be represented at the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) Summer School in Kalamaki, Crete, running seminars on the topic of preserving linked data. We look forward to reporting on the discussions and developments that come out of these events.
For more information on PRELIDA, go to their website or follow them on Twitter @Prelida_Project
By Ingrida Vosyliūtė, Coordinator of Hack4LT and Project Manager at Vilnius University Faculty of Communication.
Vilnius University Faculty of Communication and Vilnius University Library recently hosted the first cultural heritage and digital humanities hackathon in Lithuania - Hack4LT. The event was inspired by Lithuania's co-operation with both Europeana with its significant multilingual online collection of digitised cultural heritage, and DARIAH: Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities, a major European digital humanities network.
The 2-day event took place in a recently opened National Open Access Scholarly Communication and Information Centre – the most modern library in the Baltic countries. It started symbolically on 4 April, also known as the day of St. Isidore of Seville, who is a declared patron of the internet, computers and computer users.
Hacking is fun! Photo - Darius Verseckas.
Hack4LT aimed to foster collaboration between scholars of digital humanities and software developers. The event encouraged technology-driven experimentation with existing Europeana datasets. Open access to this resource stimulates a broad public interest in European culture and challenges cultural institutions to seek new ways of engaging people and developing innovative tools. Because of the richness of Europeana's collections and the nature of preserved digital content, it is a valuable data source for digital humanities researchers and can enhance digitally-enabled research.
The hackathon brought together 20 young software developers, who were encouraged to try out their ideas for creative re-use of Europeana content in order to build applications showcasing the social and scholastic value of open cultural data. Two 500 EUR prizes were available for the best prototypes meeting the needs of digital humanities and the general public.
Dr E. Champion from DARIAH with the 'Manuscript' team, Digital Humanities category winners. Photo - Darius Verseckas.
The hackers formed small teams and worked on ideas they had discussed beforehand. Hacking ran till late in the evening with a few enthusiasts staying awake all night.
The 2 days of hacking resulted in 3 prototypes. After presentations of the results on the second day, the prototypes were judged by the jury of 7 experts.
The best prototype in the digital humanities category was ‘Crowdhwr’, developed by team ‘Manuscript’ (A. Gimbutas, J. Sadzevičius & M. Zimnickas). They created a crowdsourcing manuscript transcription system, tested using examples from Europeana. The prototype allows users to mark words in a digitised manuscript and prepare it for analysis. The winners were happy with the results and are planning to continue developing this prototype. Their goal is to create a tool allowing users to convert image to text in order to perform automatic search of a manuscript’s content.
The best prototype in the general public category was ‘Gamepad 2.0’, developed by team ‘CodeUnited’ (S. Mikalonis, K. Rutkauskas, M. Sorokin & M. Ūba). The team created a fun, educational quiz game, which uses Europeana data to generate questions, concerning various aspects of Lithuanian history, art and culture. The quiz encourages players to compete with each other by giving answers in a limited amount of time.
'CodeUnited' team, the winners in the General Public category. Photo - Darius Verseckas.
A consolation prize was also given to the third prototype developed by I. Bačius, M. Baranauskas, J. Jaronis & I. Pliavgo. They created a Europeana plugin, which can be set up in databases and web portals that use the Django framework. While using an existing search of digital objects, the plugin links the search with Europeana's data and shows similar results found on the Europeana portal.
Hack4LT participants with the rector of Vilnius University, prof. habil. dr. J. Banys (centre). Photo - Darius Verseckas.
The rector of Vilnius University, prof. habil. dr. J. Banys, congratulated the participants of Hack4LT saying: ‘You are a revolutionary part of our society, having so many great and fresh ideas. I am glad that these ideas matter. Moreover I hope there will be more of them in the future.’
Follow Hack4LT on Twitter and Facebook
Last week, EuropeanaTech released two major new documents. Today's blog looks at the work and the people behind one of them, interviewing Maarten Brinkerink and Marlies Olensky.
First of all though - a quick look at the two new documents.
The first, titled, 'Core Inventory of FLOSS in the Cultural Heritage Domain, second iteration' analyses the Free/Libre and Open-Source Software landscape and provides a baseline for the development of innovative applications in the Europeana Network.
The second, called 'Functional specifications for social semantic functions' is the first step in a process of building two prototypes that will articulate user-generated metadata with semantic functions in Europeana v2.0's R&D work package. It provides functional specifications and a description of prototypes. To find out what that's all about, we've spoken to two of the minds behind it.
Maarten Brinkerink and Marlies Olensky
What is your day-to-day role/where do you work?
Maarten: I'm a project manager for Research & Development at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, mainly working on projects that aim to provide meaningful access to digitised audiovisual heritage.
Marlies: I'm a researcher at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) where I work on the Europeana v2.0 project. I've previously been involved in another Europeana project: Europeana Connect where I worked on the semantic data layer (2009-2011). I'm also doing my PhD, which is not related to cultural heritage but is about data quality in bibliometric studies.
What is your involvement with Europeana?
Maarten: For the Europeana v2.0 project, Sound and Vision works on several tasks within the 'innovation' work package, including one on the developers' network and FLOSS inventory and one on the development of innovative apps. The aim of the work package is to foster a research and development community around Europeana, to stimulate innovation that benefits the projects, Europeana Network and the broader cultural heritage domain.
Marlies: Like Sound and Vision, Humboldt University is a partner in the innovation work package, responsible for the Semantic Web & Linked Data and multilinguality tasks. The aim of the Semantic Web & Linked Data task is to make Europeana more 'semantics aware' and to integrate it into the emerging paradigm of Linked (Open) Data.
Tell us about the 'Functional specifications for social semantic functions' work. What problem are you trying to solve?
Marlies: The aim of the task was to demonstrate and try out some options for social semantic web functions that could be useful for Europeana. The semantic web is basically the idea of turning the web into a web of data that can be processed by machines, so it adds machine-readable metadata to human-readable web documents. The social part here means that we would like to employ the users to make this vision happen. In other words, we looked for ideas for what or how the user can contribute to existing content by tagging, correcting, or organising objects or their metadata. So, we tried to come up with innovative functionality that can be tested out using the prototype tools we developed.
Maarten: The functional specifications for social semantic functions and prototype code builds on earlier research done within the work packages on identifying open source tools for the cultural heritage domain (led by Sound and Vision) and the social semantic web (lead by Humboldt). It describes how two selected open source tools (the Waisda? Video Labelling Game and Crowdcrafting) can be further developed to support metadata enrichment via crowdsourcing. Waisda? is a crowdsourcing video annotation platform that has been released as an open source framework by Sound and Vision. Crowdcrafting/PyBossa is a platform for creating and running crowdsourcing applications that utilise online assistance in performing tasks that require human cognition, knowledge or intelligence such as image classification, transcription, geocoding and more.
Screenshot from Crowdcrafting/PyBossa
What was your involvement in this work?
Marlies: In the beginning, I researched what social semantic web solutions are already out there. Then we had several brainstorming sessions to discuss possible functionalities for the two selected tools. We had a very good and close cooperation between Maarten and his colleagues at Sound & Vision and myself which in the end led to a very satisfying document on functional specifications. Sound & Vision was then responsible for developing the prototypes.
Maarten: Sound and Vision supported Humboldt University in writing the functional specification and further developed the tools in the form of prototypes that showcase the functionality that is described in the deliverable.
What challenges did you encounter?
Maarten: When setting up these open source tools for datasets on Europeana, we noticed that only a few data providers are linking out to their digital objects in their metadata. We set out to make tools that could actually present rich content - instead of only metadata - to the users during the crowdsourcing tasks. Another challenge was to find suitable controlled vocabularies to support users in describing the material. Ideally, these vocabularies should fit with the content, be available in SKOS, be licensed for free re-use and be multilingual.
Marlies: For me, the main challenge was the one Maarten already mentioned: As we (along with data providers) employ controlled vocabularies to describe the information objects in a standardised way so as to make them retrievable. It was important to find suitable ones that match the terms that users would want to use to describe objects. Another challenge was narrowing down the functionality options we wanted to try out first and identifying those that seemed most feasible.
What have you achieved?
Marlies: Well, I think we've created an important showcase by demonstrating what kind of social semantic web functions could be leveraged to improve or augment Europeana content.
Maarten: By creating prototypes based on the functional specifications written by Humboldt, Sound and Vision was able to further develop two crowdsourcing tools, enhancing the opportunities to re-use them in the Europeana context. As a result of this work, it is now relatively easy for Europeana data providers and/or projects to set up their own instance of either or both tools. A European data importer was built for both tools, using the Europeana API, so others will be able to set up their own crowdsourcing tasks.
What are the next steps?
Maarten: Next we will further develop the prototypes to encompass all functionality that is described in the report and make the code available to the Europeana Tech community, allowing for Europeana projects and data providers to set up their own instances of the tools to enrich their metadata via crowdsourcing. The European Film Gateway has already shown interest in re-using the Waisda? Video Labelling Game technology.
Marlies: Indeed, and Humboldt will support Sound & Vision in this second development phase where needed.
Screenshot from Waisda?
What response are you looking for from readers?
Maarten: We look forward to feedback on the specifications, suggestions on further developing the prototypes and pointers to controlled vocabularies that could be used for a next iteration.
How can people contact you with their feedback?
Maarten: They can send me a message through Twitter: @mbrinkerink or drop me a line at mbrinkerink [at] beeldengeluid [dot] nl.
Marlies: You can get in touch with me at marlies [dot] olensky [at] ibi [dot] hu-berlin [dot] de.
Finally, a little something beyond Europeana. What do you do when you're not working?
Maarten: When I'm not working I write and record music. I used to perform quite a bit as well, but I'm currently in between bands. I'm also a volunteer for Wikimedia Netherlands, helping them to join forces with cultural organisations.
Marlies: At the moment, I don't have much free time, as most of my time is dedicated to my PhD research. But I do need some balance which I find in travelling, practising yoga and spending time with my family and friends.
What is your favourite item from Europeana?
Maarten: 'Het melkmeisje' by Vermeer. I chose this item not only because is it is a visually compelling and quite iconic piece of art. But for me it is also a best-practice example of how cultural heritage is accessible through Europeana. The Rijksmuseum has really raised the bar for providing open access to art collections on an international level. Their metadata is available through an open API under a CC0 licence, allowing for aggregation by, among others, Europeana. They explicitly mark the works in their collection that are in the public domain as such, using the Public Domain Mark and, last but not least, they provide links to beautiful high resolution digital representations of the artworks.
The Milkmaid, Vermeer. Rijksmuseum, public domain
Marlies: My favourite item in Europeana is a radio recording that is a curiosity about my home country, Austria and my current country of residence, Germany. It's a recording from 1978 when Austria beat Germany at the soccer world cup in Cordoba, Argentina, (for the first and only time in a world cup). And believe me, everyone in Austria is still proud of that victory and nobody in Germany even remembers that match any more! Listen to the recording.
In the latest in our series of blogs following the progress of aggregation schemes for Europeana, we hear how our team visited Slovenia, talked masterpieces, and found enlightenment! David Smith writes...
On 21 March, the Europeana Business Development and Ingestion teams ran a workshop in conjunction with the National Library of Slovenia in the city of Ljubljana.
The National Library has been aggregating material to Europeana for many years via its Dlib.si portal. In the past year, the National eContent Aggregator was initiated as a cross-domain national aggregator.
Before the workshop, we were lucky enough to be shown around the impressive National Library building, designed by Slovenia’s most famous architect, Jože Plečnik. Through the building's imposing brass front doors, the potential reader is led up a dark, marble-pillared staircase towards the light-flooded, wooden-panelled reading room. To access collections here, you literally have to walk up towards enlightenment.
Main Entrance Staircase of the National and University Library by Jože Plečnik, 2009. Slovenian National E-content Aggregator, CC-BY-NC.
The workshop itself was held at another site on the outskirts of the city. Around 20 participants engaged in a day of discussions about Europeana and aggregation in Slovenia. After an introduction, Annette Friberg from Europeana gave a presentation on Europeana's current and future plans. This included development of Europe’s network of aggregators and some current interesting projects. Zoran Krstulović then introduced the National eContent Aggregator project including technical details regarding how the system is working. Zoran’s presentation was in Slovenian and created quite a buzz of discussion with the attendees.
Following this, I presented Europeana’s key areas of development: audiovisual material, masterpieces and the API. A common trend across all the places I have done my presentation is the reception of the audience when presented with a potential list of their country's masterpieces. The requirement for the availability of digitised masterpieces was a recommendation of the EC’s New Renaissance paper and something we have been working on for the past year. Mobilising national aggregators and other organisations to make these available is a priority area of Europeana but not without its pitfalls. The Slovenian audience was receptive to the idea, which was reassuring to us.
Francesca Morselli from the Europeana Ingestion team then presented and ran a workshop on metadata quality and rights statements. Rights statements are a key focus for Europeana in 2013 and the workshop gave us an opportunity to work through issues associated with providing accurate rights statements for content coming into the Europeana portal.
After lunch, the final workshop looked at simplifying the process of making material available via Europeana. During this workshop, we discussed the possible benefits of the work being done on the Europeana Inside project. The audience clearly saw the benefits of that project and how it could relate to their own work.
As with all workshops, the end of the day was marked with very quick goodbyes and next steps before the rush back to the airport. Throughout our time in Slovenia, we were assisted by the National Library of Slovenia, to whom we are very grateful for their hospitality and organisational support.
More blogs about aggregation:
Finland's National Digital Library Formula for Success
Working Towards a Bulgarian National Aggregator
We have published another case study from our series of real-life examples on the use of open data that were presented at Europeana’s Open Data Case Studies workshop in Paris earlier this year. This week we are looking at how the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision are measuring the impact of opening up their datasets via Open Images, an open media platform that provides online access to audiovisual archive material to stimulate creative re-use.
Maarten Brinkerink, Project Manager for R&D at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, presenting at Europeana’s Open Data Case Studies Workshop in Paris.
To learn a little bit more about Open Images, we caught up with Maarten Brinkerink, Project Manager for R&D at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.
What is the ‘big idea’ behind this project?
MB: Together with Kennisland, we set up Open Images in 2009 with the aim of facilitating re-use of the collections we hold, along with content from individuals and collections from other institutions. Access to the material on Open Images is provided under the Creative Commons licensing model or a Public Domain Mark. This enables the freedom to approach copyright in a more flexible manner and make work available in a way that encourages re-use.
How did the project create value for users of Open Images and the institutions involved?
MB: Open Images is accessible to anybody who wants to upload their own material and assign an open licence to it to encourage re-use. We’re not just about institutes and producers, but all ‘netizens’ who create material and want to enable the re-use of it via Open Images. Wealso provide an API, which enables developers to easily re-use material and create mash-ups. After launching Open Images, material was almost immediately re-used within several projects.
What benefits have resulted from Open Images?
MB: Aside from traffic and usage figures on Open Images increasing, we have also seen the external re-use of material increase as well. The Sound and Vision videos from Open Images are, for instance, also available on Wikimedia Commons and in Europeana. This is facilitated by the open infrastructure of the Open Images platform, which effectively distributes open content by combining open source software components, open media formats, open standards and an open API.
What’s next?
MB: In response to the growing need within the cultural heritage field to receive statistics on the impact of the opening up of cultural data sets, Sound and Vision will perform impact analysis research together with Kennisland for Open Culture Data. In order to do so, the data providers from the Open Culture Network, along with international initiatives, are requested to provide data on the impact and re-use of their data sets. The results of this impact analysis will be made public in the course of 2013.
You can learn more about Open Images and its results from the embedded case study below, or alternatively you can download it.
If you are interested in learning more about Open Images or have questions related to measuring the impact of cultural datasets you can contact Maarten Brinkerinkon Twitter (@mbrinkerink) or directly through email mbrinkerink@beeldengeluid.nl.
We have already published three other case studies from the Statens Museum for Kunst - the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK), the Polish Digital Libraries and Europeana – so check them out if you haven’t already done so. We will soon be publishing our final case study in this series next week. The final case study from the BBC, along with the others, will then form a larger white paper on open data, due to be published later this spring.
Today's blog comes from Bogna Wróż, Adam Dudczak and Marcin Werla, Digital Libraries Team Members at Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center.
ACCESS IT Plus is a two-year (2011-2013) project funded by means of the Culture 2007-13 programme. This project is a continuation of the successful ACCESS IT project (2009-2011), which supported institutions from Serbia, Turkey and Greece. ACCESS IT Plus extends the original scope of this initiative to reach institutions from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia. The cultural heritage of these countries is a significant element of European culture and should be widely accessible online, including through international portals such as Europeana.eu.
The ACCESS IT project delivered a unique package of practical training and skills development, supported by clear guidance, to enable smaller, local cultural organisations to effectively deliver and disseminate arts and cultural offerings to the citizens of Europe. One of the main activities was the creation of two e-learning courses, in order to support self-development of knowledge and skills about cultural heritage collections digitisation, online access and aggregation, with respect to the Europeana requirements.
One of the ACCESS IT workshops held in Central Public Library of Veria (Greece).
The first course, 'Digital Repositories for Small Memory Institutions' includes the subjects: how to digitise cultural heritage objects, how to prepare them for online presentation and how to describe them with metadata and organise them in collections. Besides the necessary theoretical background, the course also provides practical instructions which will enable small institutions to create high quality digital content and make it available online to services like Europeana.
The second course, 'Cooperation with Europeana', is aimed at those who want to provide their metadata to Europeana. It covers the underlying vision of Europeana and explains its technical infrastructure. It also provides a detailed explanation of the procedures which have to be followed in order to make digital cultural heritage resources available through Europeana.
The first version of both courses was released in October 2010. Now, as part of ACCESS IT Plus, PSNC together with other project partners, have started work on a major update of these materials to increase accessibility of the courses and enrich them with more examples of digitisation projects. Several changes were also suggested by course users from Serbia, Turkey, Poland and Greece. The most recent version of the courses was released in July 2012.
The distribution and deployment model for the courses was as follows: a base version in English was made available at http://dl.psnc.pl/moodle, under a Creative Commons licence. Each of the participating countries was asked to make a copy of the base courses in order to translate and adapt them. As a result, each country partner is running its own version of the course based on the generic one. At the moment, the following adaptations are available:
In order to make the above model possible and to support parallel development of all course adaptations, each time a new version of the base course is released, PSNC publishes a list of changes made since the last release.
DigitLab in action during one of the conferences in Poland.
In addition to the courses, the project has developed one more important tool. In order to simplify the digitisation process and support education based on practice, a set of open source applications has been identified and combined together into a dedicated operating system: DigitLab. This is a digitisation ‘Swiss army knife’ which can be launched from a USB stick and does not require installation on the user’s computer. Examples of DigitLab usage include: creation of searchable PDF files with free OCR tools, preparation of high quality digital versions of old maps and preparation of audiovisual collections for both archiving and online delivery.
Apart from tools dedicated to post-processing of digital content, users can also play with three example digital libraries created using different software packages (dSpace, GreenStone and dLibra). This Ubuntu-based operating system can be downloaded for free, as an ISO image. The project wiki contains detailed instructions which should help users to create a bootable USB stick and use it for various digitisation scenarios.
The courses described in this article provide a huge body of knowledge about digitisation, digital libraries and Europeana. They include detailed, step-by-step manuals showing how to work with digital versions of cultural heritage objects. Thanks to the availability of DigitLab, anyone who is interested can use the knowledge and manuals presented in the courses in practice. If you are interested in using or making your own adaptations of materials and tools that we have prepared, feel free to contact us.
The courses will be further developed as a part of the LoCloud Best Practice Network, which includes partners from 28 European countries and aims to support digitisation and accessibility via Europeana of the cultural heritage held by small and medium sized memory institutions, through provision of cloud-based solutions and training.
Guest blog from Carolien Fokke of the Collections Trust.
It is hard to believe that the Europeana Inside project kicked off just a year ago, in April 2012. The work that the 26-partner consortium has done in such a short amount of time is incredible, and we would love to share the story of our journey so far with you.
Europeana Inside meeting in The Hague, The Netherlands. Image by SPK (Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz).
For those of you who are less familiar with the project, Europeana Inside is a Best Practice Network connecting content providers with technical partners throughout Europe. We aim to achieve a lasting transformation in the quantity, scope and usability of the content available to Europeana from European cultural institutions. We mean to reach this goal by developing the Europeana Connection Kit (or ECK) – a set of open-source software tools that will enable cultural heritage institutions throughout Europe to share their collections online via Europeana.
In this past year, much has already been achieved. The project was off to a good start with the creation of our website and social media channels, as well as a bunch of printed dissemination material. Then it was on to gathering the user requirements from the content providers, developing use case scenarios, and investigating the current technical standards. At the end of 2012, a technical specification was written which combined all the information gathered over the previous months.
The ECK box! Image by SPK (Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz).
The user requirements and specifications have since served as the basis that the technical partners use to do what they do best: develop software. The first iteration of the ECK is due at the end of this month, which means that we can start testing the prototype software very soon. This is an enormous milestone for the project, and we are all looking forward to the cooperative testing and evaluation process.
Over the past year, we’ve also extended the Europeana Inside family with a number of Associate Partners ranging from content providers to aggregators and Content Management System vendors who are sharing their expertise and knowledge with us. We are always looking for more Associate Partners so if you’re interested in becoming involved with the project, please contact us via the website.
One of the highlights of the past year was certainly the first Europeana Inside Review in Luxembourg on 15 February. The management board was excited about the opportunity to show the European Commission how much work had been done by all partners with so much enthusiasm. It was wonderful to hear from the reviewers that the project was well on its way to becoming very successful, and that the work that had been done was excellent.
In short, it’s been one amazing year, and we’re all sure that next year is going to be even better!
If you are keen to receive updates about the project, what’s been happening, and what’s going to be happening, you can always visit our website, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, join our LinkedIn group, or sign up for our newsletter.
Europeana Inside meeting in Leuven, Belgium. Image by SPK (Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz).
Blog by Milena Popova, Europeana Senior Marketing Specialist.
On 18 April, the Foundation for the History of Technology in Eindhoven - ‘the city of bulbs and brains’ - hosted a discussion about ways of diffusing historical knowledge via new media with a focus on two case studies - the Golden Age Game and the virtual exhibit, Inventing Europe.
The first case study presents scientific knowledge in a gaming format. Gamers acting as merchants during the Dutch Golden Age can get acquainted with the ins and outs of the financial markets of the time. The Inventing Europe exhibit showcases an excellent online platform that connects research results with cultural heritage collections, visualising context and allowing visitors to make (sometimes unexpected) correlations. It is a pioneering collaboration between historians and cultural heritage institutions across Europe and explores the modern history of Europe through six curated exhibitions and 36 tours. These virtual journeys are based on the objects and images of partner heritage institutions and are enriched with relevant materials from Europeana collections through the Europeana API.
At the end of the event, in the presence of more than 150 researchers, students, partners and journalists, Drs Mary-Ann Schreurs, Eindhoven alderman of innovation, design, culture and public space, announced the launch of the newer version of Inventing Europe.
Drs Mary-Ann Schreurs, Eindhoven alderman, launches the new Inventing Europe site.
This portal version has built upon its technology and content to become the Inventing Europe: European Digital Museum for Science and Technology. The website now has an improved design and code, and a better functioning content management system. It also uses the new Europeana API (2.0) which ensures access to over 26 million objects from Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage and feeds the visitors’ research with extra objects in a more efficient way.
The website now includes an extended educational environment which is a result of the project’s seven-month collaboration with 11 teachers in eight universities in seven European countries. The site gives teachers access to ready-made tools for lecturing and samples of shorter and longer assignments on modern European history. There are also outlines for two complete courses built around the themes and exhibitions of Inventing Europe.
The new Inventing Europe website is launched.
With this contextually rich, very visual and interactive portal, the newly launched Inventing Europe: European Digital Museum of Technology and Science is certainly on the way to becoming a dynamic and engaging educational online space for researchers, students and cultural professionals. Explore it at www.inventingeurope.eu!
Tweet Follow @EuropeanaEUToday, Geer Oskam, Europeana Senior Marketing Specialist, tell us about a couple of interesting Wikimedia events that Europeana was involved with last month.
First of all, there was the Europeana Fashion Edit-a-thon in Stockholm in collaboration with the Nordic Museum and Stockholm University. At the event, no less then 47 participants showed up to edit the fashion pages of Wikipedia, 23 of them female. Wikipedia is very male dominated (only 9% of all editors are female), which apparently makes the topic of fashion very poorly represented.
One of the images from the Nordic Museum used in the edit-a-thon: 'Hattmode. Modeplansch från 1874', public domain.
In preparation for the event, the Nordic Museum and the MoMu Fashion Museum in Antwerp (partners of Europeana and Europeana Fashion) uploaded hundreds of fashion images to Wikimedia Commons. These, and other images, uploaded during the 10-hour edit-a-thon were incorporated into numerous Wikipedia pages. 57 images were used 72 times in articles. Ten new articles were created and articles were edited in eight different languages. View photos of the event.
This isn't the first edi-a-thon we've been involved with. Read about our Europeana 1914-1918 edit-a-thon in this blogpost. That event was a big success with the number of views of the collection images used hitting the 900,000 mark within 3 months. The lesson we learned from this is to try and get interesting content linked to well-read articles (for example, a postcard written by Hitler was linked to various articles about the man).
The interesting thing about the latest fashion edit-a-thon is that although the number of views might not be as high as those from the World War One themed event, from a Wikimedia perspective it was very successful in terms of participants (women) and the subject (the underrepresented pages on fashion). With both edit-a-thons, we have helped to increase the coverage of cultural heritage on the largest free encyclopaedia in the world.
In April, Europeana attended the GLAM-Wiki 2013 Conference in London to present our collaborations with Wikimedia. We gave a presentation about the fashion edit-a-thon mentioned above, and talked about future events including the Wiki Loves Public Art contest (of which more later!).
On the second day of the conference, Europeana hosted a workshop for Wikimedians and GLAM (gallery, library, archive, museums) staff on the GLAM Wiki Toolset. This set of tools is being developed in the Europeana Office to make it as easy as possible for GLAMs to upload their content to Wikimedia Commons, meaning that their collection items can be featured in Wikipedia pages.
All in all, it was a succesfull conference at which we shared our experiences and showed how Europeana is valuable for Wikimedia and the GLAM sector, building bridges and creating possibilities to work together.
You can find more highlights from the event in this blog by Joris Pekel from the Open Knowledge Foundation, Netherlands.
'Paparazzi statue in Bratislava', photograph by DMY, CC-BY.
If you live in Sweden, Spain, Finland, Israel or Austria you can participate in improving online access to artworks as the Wiki Loves Public Art (WLPA) photo contest kicks off in May. The goal of the contest is to get as many pictures of public art as possible available under a free licence on Wikipedia’s online image database, Wikimedia Commons. The photos can then be seen and used by anyone, anywhere.
The Wiki Loves Public Art contest is organised by Wikimedia Sverige, Europeana and volunteers in the Wikimedia chapters and affiliated groups in each of the participating countries. There are great prizes to be won: travel gift certificates for 500 euros, 300 euros and 200 euros. On top of that, Europeana has sponsored high quality prints of the winning pictures that will be sent to the winners.
To make it as easy as possible for people to find artworks suitable for the contest, volunteers in national Wikimedia chapters have put together lists on Wikipedia with information about art that you can find while you're out and about. While in some countries, the focus has been on working with national art museums so that people can go there and take photos of items from the museums' collections. Find out everything about the contest on the contest website or at Wikimedia Commons. Please help us spread the word about the contest and of course: participate yourself!
It’s time to share another insightful case study on the use of open data, this time from our friends at the Digital Library of Wielkopolska (DLW) and Digital Libraries Federation (DLF) in Poland. Along with case studies already published by Europeana and the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK), this case study was presented at the Open Data Case Studies Workshop that took place at the end of January in Paris. These case studies along with others will form a larger white paper on open data, due to be published later this spring – so keep your eyes peeled here for more examples that demonstrate the value of open data.
In 2009, PSNC, the operator of Polish Digital Libraries Federation, began working with Europeana and exploiting the potential of promoting Polish cultural heritage content across Europe with the aim of creating wider access and facilitating re-use of their content. Europeana’s API has provided a good platform for this, both enriching existing services and providing a wider breadth of content to users of the DLW and DLF services. Through a number of widgets, DLW and DLF have utilised Europeana’s API to bring in content from Europeana that is related to search queries on their existing websites. This provides end-users with more choice as results are returned from hundreds of other trusted heritage institutions across Europe via the Europeana API.
To learn more about the project we caught up Marcin Werla, author of the case study and Digital Libraries Team Leader at Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center.
What is the ‘big idea’ behind this project?
MW: We’ve been working closely with Europeana since 2009 and we recognised the strategic potential to provide access to Polish heritage content to a wider pan-European audience. In 2010, shortly after the announcement of the Europeana API, we joined a pilot programme with the intention of creating an automated way of accessing aggregated data which could significantly increase the visibility of European cultural heritage among the users of Polish Digital Libraries.
How did the project create value for end-users, DLW and DLF?
MW: Thanks to the integration of Europeana’s API, we’re able offer our users the ability to search not only our collections, but the collections of hundreds of other heritage institutions across Europe. Through the widgets that we developed on top of Europeana’s API, we were able to integrate something that is seamless and adds value to the experience for users of Polish Digital Libraries; it was always our intention to include the integration within the current workflow of our users.
What benefits have resulted from these API implementations?
MW: After looking at the usage statistics we were impressed to see the number of our users clicking through to Europeana search results. For example, 5.17% of visitors who saw search results on DLF decided to click through to Europeana via the widget we developed. This clearly shows that enrichment based on the Europeana API not only directed users to an additional source of information, but also that they enjoyed this additional source.
What’s next?
MW: We will continue to utilise Europeana’s API within our current integrations and always explore new ways for Europeana’s data to be used via our different services. We would also like to see other institutions take a closer look at the Europeana API and consider implementing additional features for their systems based on this API – for us we have seen that it has really added value for our users on top of our existing services.
You can learn more about what the Polish Digital Libraries did and what the results were from the embedded case study below, or alternatively you can download it.
The Europeana API enables the development of applications, websites and mash-ups using the extensive heritage collections available via Europeana – it’s free and open to anybody. You can learn more about the API and discover what other institutions and individuals have done with Europeana’s 26 million records by visiting: http://pro.europeana.eu/api
The Digital Public Library of America goes live with two million objects at 12:00 EST (18:00 CET) on Thursday 18 April.
Celebratory launch events have been put on hold due to the terrible events at the Boston marathon, which took place right in front of the Boston Public Library, the launch venue. The DPLA's Executive Director Dan Cohen said, 'From all of us at the Digital Public Library of America, our hearts go out to those affected by the terrible events in Boston. I have been in touch with Amy Ryan, the President of the BPL, and I extended our sympathies to the BPL staff and their loved ones.' He went on to say that, 'The new DPLA site will still go live at noon ET on Thursday as planned, and we look forward to sharing the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums. I see the building of a new library as one of the greatest examples of what humans can do together to extend the light against the darkness. In due time, we will let that light shine through.'
The first content for the DPLA will come from state and regional digital archives, special collections of major university libraries and federal holdings. The DPLA says that it will 'incorporate all media types and formats including the written record - books, pamphlets, periodicals, manuscripts, and digital texts - and expanding into visual and audiovisual materials in concert with existing repositories. In order to lay a solid foundation for its collections, the DPLA will begin with works in the public domain that have already been digitised and are accessible through other initiatives. Further material will be added incrementally to this basic foundation, starting with orphan works and materials that are in copyright but out-of-print.'
The DPLA and Europeana announced their collaboration in December 2011. Speaking at the time, Robert Darnton, a DPLA Steering Committee member and University Librarian at Harvard, said, 'The association between the DPLA and Europeana means that users everywhere will eventually have access to the combined riches of the two systems at a single click. The aggregated databases will include many millions of books, pamphlets, newspapers, manuscripts, images, recordings, videos, and other materials in many formats.'
Since then, the DPLA has worked closely with Europeana, adopting the Europeana Data Model, sharing metadata expertise, inspiration and lessons learned, and working to make the two digital datasets interoperable.
From 'Leaving Europe' exhibition: Peder (Peter) Martinson Øyen', Credit: FylkesFOTOarkivet i Møre og Romsdal, Norway, free access
In December 2012, as a result of collaboration with curators, content partners, project staff and others, the DPLA and Europeana launched a joint virtual exhibition - 'Leaving Europe: A new life in America'. Jointly curated by the two digital libraries, the exhibition uses photographs, manuscripts, broadsheets, paintings, letters, audio, government documents and other unique materials to chart people's journeys across the European continent and their settlement in the United States. The digital items displayed are from U.S. and European libraries, museums and archives and the accompanying narrative has been commissioned specially for the exhibition from U.S. and European experts.
Explore the DPLA
Explore 'Leaving Europe: A New Life in America' exhibition
The Europeana Awareness project has published an online survey to be sent to around 20,000 archives across Europe. The survey, which is available in four languages, will assess the potential role of local archival collections of all kinds in the future development of Europeana. Its responses will give us a better picture of the digital holdings and planned digitisation work in local, regional, smaller and other specialised archives. This is important because archives are currently underrepresented in both the Europeana dataset and in the Europeana Network. The survey's findings will go some way to helping us look at how to address this problem.
The survey will be open until the end of May and the findings will be analysed in June, after which time they will be shared with the Network.
If you work for a local, regional or specialist archive, please help us to ensure that the wealth of valuable digital content held by Europe’s archives of all kinds is fully accessible through Europeana in the years to come by taking the survey and joining the Europeana Network.
A pilot survey carried out in 2012 began the process of scoping out digitisation in local archives. This chart shows the answers to the question, 'By how much is the amount of digital content likely to increase by 2017?'
Local and regional archives are broadly defined to include heritage objects, documents and knowledge held, for example, by local history societies, associations for genealogical studies, church councils etc. as well as municipal and regional archives. This currently underexploited sector forms a bridge between the more formal cultural institutions whose content is currently ingested by Europeana on the one hand and user-generated content on the other. A vast reservoir of potential content exists in such collections. For the public, they provide a vital link to their own local cultural history, and beyond that to both the cultural history of others and more widely known heritage. Proper digitisation and access would greatly enhance the durability and value of these local, regional and specialist archives.
The survey takes less than 15 mins to complete!
Take the survey in English
Take the survey in French
Take the survey in German
Take the survey in Spanish
Once you have completed the survey, a link will take you directly to the Europeana Network registration form. Please consider becoming a Network member if you are not one already. The Europeana Network is an open forum for content providers and experts across Europe that represents and reflects the diversity of Europeana and gives its more than 600 members an opportunity to voice their views. The Europeana Network is united by a common cultural mission to 'work together to improve access to Europe’s cultural heritage in balanced and sustainable ways'. As a Europeana Network member, you can influence strategic decisions, collaborate with experts, improve your knowledge and find new opportunities (using Europeana channels for publication, project funding, etc.).
Guest blog from Breda Karun, Zavod Jara, an institute for library development in Slovenia.
This is not a story of the First World War, it is a story of how Slovenian librarians, inspired by Europeana 1914-1918 Family History Roadshows, are developing new services using the principles of 'crowdsourcing', 'everyday history' and 'user-generated content'.
We started with three Europeana 1914-1918 Family History Roadshows as part of our Europeana Awareness PR campaign in spring 2012.
Hosting libraries invited volunteers from other regional and smaller libraries to help. The response was very good and we had plenty of staff on hand on the days of the roadshows. Experts on the First World War from museums and archives were also keen to be a part of it and were happy to get in contact with contributors for possible future cooperation.
Volunteers shared their positive experiences when they returned to their libraries, so more libraries decided to organise roadshows in 2013 at their own expense. Two more roadshows ran in spring 2013 and another two are coming up in the autumn.
Young and old: left, a young girl looks up at the Ljubljana roadshow poster, and right, a 100-year-old man with his contribution.
Over the five roadshows run so far, we have welcomed 130 contributors who brought with them a total of 220 stories and 900 objects.
The response from the media has been incredible. We documented 108 mentions in the media around the three collection days in 2012, and more than 50 covering our two events in 2013, including interviews on the most prominent radio and TV stations, newspapers, social media and websites.
Television interview in progress at the Ljubljana event
We noticed that the events brought satisfaction to both staff and contributors. Older people were grateful to have the opportunity to tell their stories to very enthusiastic listeners. Slovenians are traditionally introverted people, sharing their private stories mostly within their family or social group. For this reason, we didn't expect many contributors and were positively surprised about 30-40 people coming to each event. Being able to share the stories through Europeana, Europe's digital library, was an additional stimulation for staff and contributors.
We were so pleased with our results that we presented our experience of Family History Roadshows at the public libraries conference in Macedonia (February 2013) and at the international conference of archivists (April 2013).
A couple of the interesting objects brought to the Slovenian roadshows
The successful events sparked interest among librarians and stimulated them to come up with the idea of inviting local people to share memories related to their communities, outside the realm of WWI. One of the planned topics is industrial history - inviting people to share stories about the important industries that were ruined in the 1990s. Whole generations of people worked in factories that have since been closed or destroyed, and many people still keep photos and documents from the time when industry was flourishing.
Our enthusiasm for this type of content collection has also speeded up the development of a user-generated content module on our own regional portal (KAMRA). At present, all the information from KAMRA is uploaded to Europeana on a monthly basis. We are looking forward to discussing with Europeana how our new user-generated content could be incorporated later this year.
Karin Nilsson, head of the department of digital resources at LSH (The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl Museum, Sweden), tells us about the bold work they've done recently to open up their archives for free re-use.
On 6 March, the entire image archive from the Swedish national agency, LSH (made up of three museums: The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl Museum), was made available on the internet. All 40,000 images are published under open licences, about a third of them in high resolution. The release of the archive has attracted a lot of attention in Swedish social media.
In June 2012, we started the 'Open Image Archive' project. The objective was to make the museums’ image archives freely available to the public. The project consisted of three parts:
'Porträtt, karikatyr', from Skoklosters slott, public domain
In early 2012, we launched the web interface for our collection database. This first stage enabled users to search for objects and people related to these objects. Each object record held one related image. The database contains about 90,000 object records and 40,000 related names of people and organisations. The data is licensed with the Creative Commons Zero Public Domain Dedication (CC0).
Up until the launch of Open Image Archive, the three museums had distributed images manually, through an FTP server solution. Just like most museums, we used to charge the users for both reproduction and usage rights. In January 2012, LSH decided that the images should be made public and available free of charge, since they have already been paid for through taxes and belong to the public. Now the work could really begin.
'Frukt- och grönsakshandel, Målning, Grönsaker', from Hallwylska museet, public domain
The objective of the Open Image Archive project was to ensure free access to our image collections and make it possible to use and re-use the images, in accordance with the expected expansion of the Directive on the re-use of public sector information. In order to maximise usability, the images need to be structured in a machine-readable format and be provided with all necessary metadata.
If a user is to make the most of this new openness, it has to be easy to find and re-use images. They need to be available for both non-commercial and commercial purposes. To achieve this, we had to:
'Hjälmkrossare, Webbprojektet, Stämningsbild', from Livrustkammaren, CC-BY-SA
We are also one of three Swedish contributors to the Athena Plus project, meaning that we will soon be delivering linked open data to Europeana.
All digitised or digitally born images are made available free of charge for the user. Analogue images can be digitised on demand, at a marginal cost.
The result of this project is better quality data and increased possibilities for the use and re-use of our material, for example for children preparing school work, for innovators building applications or for researchers who can study objects closely, through high resolution images.
We hope that this will contribute to building a platform for an increased use of our cultural heritage and that people around the world will benefit from this step.
Here’s the must-know information for some of the forthcoming Europeana partner key events. Interested? Follow the links to find out more or to register.
GLAM-Wiki 2013 Conference, 12-14 April, British Library, London
Representatives from the GLAM domains come together with Wikimedians for an international celebration of open access and culture. GLAM-Wiki 2013 is a global conference, organised by the UK Wikimedia chapter in association with Wikimedia Sweden and Europeana, and hosted by the British Library. It examines the possibilities, relationships and potential for galleries, libraries, archives and museums working with Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia. Europeana will present the ‘GLAMwiki toolset’ which makes it as easy as possible for any cultural institution to put their digitised cultural objects into the Wikimedia Commons. On Saturday, Europeana will host a workshop for GLAMs and Wikimedians on how to use this tool, then on Sunday, at the ‘unconference’, we will host a hackathon using the Europeana API.
More information
Europeana 1914-1918 Family History Roadshows
Bring your First World War objects and stories to roadshows on the following dates:
21 April – Hasselt, Antwerp, and Louvain, Belgium
15 May – Rome, Italy
18 May - Valli del Pasubio, Italy
More information
Screening the Future 2013: Crossing Boundaries for AV Preservation, 7-8 May, Tate Modern, London, UK.
This event is an annual showcase delivered by PrestoCentre and focuses on the latest technological trends in audiovisual preservation. The conference aims to navigate participants through current case studies and latest thinking on standards and planning for the digital preservation of AV assets.
More information
ELAG (European Libraries Automation Group) 2013, 28-31 May, Ghent, Belgium
ELAG is Europe’s premier conference on the application and development of information technology in libraries and documentation centres. This year’s tag line will be ‘Inside Out Library’: while ELAG 2013 will still be focused on specific, library related IT issues, we want to expand the aim and target audience by addressing innovative topics such as Open Access
More information
Web as Literature, 10 June 2013, British Library, London
A one-day event of talks and workshops exploring Linked Open Data and its revolutionary potential for the humanities brought to you by the DM2E project and Judaica Europeana. The event will bring together leading digital humanists and cultural heritage professionals and will feature a keynote from Ted Nelson the inventor of hypertext. Attendance is free, but places are limited.
More information
Promoting innovation in Europe - The European Library partnership of research and national libraries, 16-17 September, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
The location, Amsterdam Public Library, is a modern architectural gem that has 7 collections floors, a theatre, broadcasting facilities and panoramic views of the city. It was designed to connect the library's collections with active participation and experience, and this will be a theme of our conference. The event will feature some of the projects The European Library is involved with (e.g. Europeana Newspapers, CENDARI, Europeana Cloud) as well as keynote talks, discussion of Horizon 2020 & funding opportunities for libraries, and hands-on workshops.
More information
Our image for April:'Venus (right), Taurus, Libra and three lunar masions of Taurus (left) from Persian Manuscript 373', Wellcome Library, CC-BY-NC.
Check out our events calendar for other diary dates and our presentations page for slides from recent events.
Want your event to be in our next round-up? Email the details to Beth and we’ll see what we can do!
The Open Data Case Studies Workshop took place at the end of January in Paris, organised by Europeana and INA (Institut national de l'audiovisuel). The aim of the workshop was to evaluate the potential of ‘Open’ and analyse real life examples of services based on open data and open content in the cultural heritage sector.
Merete Sanderhoff, Researcher at SMK, presenting at Europeana’s Open Data Case Studies Workshop in Paris.
Five case studies were presented from the BBC, Statens Museum for Kunst - the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK), Netherlands Sound and Vision Institute, the Polish Digital Libraries Federation and Europeana. These case studies will form a larger white paper on open data, due to be published later this spring. In the meantime, we will be highlighting each case study on an individual basis. We have already showcased the work Europeana did with partners on Pinterest on the Pro blog and now we’re looking at HintMe, a shared mobile museum platform using Twitter's API to connect collections and engage users in dialogue about art. Users in a gallery can use HintMe on their mobile device to see what others have said about the artwork they are looking at and add their own comments on Twitter using the designated hashtags.
A group of Danish art museums joined forces to develop a shared mobile platform based on open content. SMK initiated the collaborative pilot project between 11 Danish art museums. One of the main objectives was to build a mobile tool for art interpretation and engagement to be used by many museum partners based on the following three common principles; all Public Domain content is freely shareable and re-usable, an existing platform is utilised without custom-building a new one, and target users take part in creating and developing the experience. We caught up with Merete Sanderhoff, Researcher at SMK and asked her a few questions to get some more insight on the project:
What is the ‘big idea’ behind this project?
MS:Basically the main idea for us was the close collaboration between art museums in Denmark to explore the benefits of opening up collections for re-use online. As a result of re-licensing these collections, we wanted to facilitate our visitors to start using mobile devices as in-gallery tools, enabling them to engage with the museum, artworks and each other online.
How did the project create value, both for end-users and participating institutions?
MS:We believe that through opening up collections and utilising the viral power of Twitter, we are exposing our collections to the unlimited possibilities of re-use across the web – essentially enabling digitised art collections to become useful and relevant in new ways. I like to think that we are bridging the gap between institutions, their collections, visitors, and online engagement. As a result, we are creating proactive dialogue online, which in the end encourages the creation of content.
What channels were used and why? Also, what benefits have resulted from this pilot project?
MS:In order for the project to scale we wanted to use a platform that already existed, therefore we utilised Twitter because it provided us with the functionalities that we needed, for example, content production is manageable and hashtags offer a simple way to tag individual artworks. As mentioned in the case study, one of the major benefits so far has been the adoption of Creative Commons licences by a number of Danish Museums. By communicating the benefits of CC licences, we hope to attract other museums to open up their collections for re-use on Twitter and other social platforms.
What’s next?
MS:We are interested in exploring ways in which we can make HintMe an indispensable tool for museums. We are also considering how we can increase participation and integrate audio on the platform to enhance the user experience and encourage users to look closer at the artworks. As this is an experimental pilot project, we are interested in hearing your ideas and experiences. As a result of the project there has been keen interest from the Danish educational sector at the prospect of gaining access to more Open Educational Resources from the country's art museums. Furthermore, Wikimedia Commons is keen to harvest more high quality images from Danish art museums, and we are keen to look into the benefits of uploading our collections on Wikipedia. Watch this space…
Try out the beta version of HintMe at http://hints.o8e.dk
You can learn more about what they did and what the results were from the embedded case study below, or alternatively you can download it.
Are you interested in learning more, have a question or simply want to share your experiences? You can get in touch with the author of this case study on Twitter (@MSanderhoff) or directly through email (Merete.Sanderhoff@smk.dk).
Being involved with both culture and technology, Europeana gets to attend some pretty great events that bring the two realms together. Yesterday, we told you about our time at the Paris Book Fair, complete with VIPs. Another exciting event we've been to recently was the FutureEverything Conference 2013.
The FutureEverything Conference 2013 was held in Manchester on 21–22 March 2013. Speakers came from around the world, from prestigious organisations such as Google, Vimeo & the BBC, making the conference, according to its organisers, 'one of the most exciting and inspirational we have hosted in recent years.' FutureEverything was recently hailed by the Guardian as one of the top ten international ideas festivals, alongside TEDx, 99% and South by South West (which our Antoine Isaac attended - read his blog).
The conference and workshops brought together hundreds of delegates from around the world from across the creative industries, new technologies, innovation, arts, public sector and academia. Its three themes for 2013 were those that are instrumental in shaping the digital future: Creative Code, Future Cities and The Data Society.
With UK partners - the BBC, Creative Exchange and Lancaster University - FutureEverything is investigating the potential of a Digital Public Space, which it describes as 'a framework for thinking about the ways in which the arts and culture will reshape themselves in the screen-based, online world'. The Digital Public Space will, say FutureEverything, 'enable digital content to be made as freely available as possible for anyone from anywhere, doing for the whole range of digitised cultural content what the Open Data campaign is doing for publicly-funded datasets. Within the Digital Public Space every digital asset that can be shared will be shared, and as we digitise more of the analogue past this will stretch to encompass the whole of recorded culture.'
In her presentation at FutureEverything 2013, Europeana Executive Director, Jill Cousins said, 'Europeana has a huge number of similarities to the Digital Public Space. It exists so that everyone, everywhere can have unrestricted access to culture and knowledge. It has pushed for open standards and interoperability and for me, it is about creating the backbone, the hub, the space, the commons where others can seize the opportunities presented there and develop new ones.'
You can download the FutureEverything publication exploring the idea of the Digital Public Space, which includes an article by our very own Jill Cousins (page 12).
As well as presenting at the conference, Europeana also partnered up with others to run a Europeana Mashup Workshop at which participants could remix Europeana content with content from other online sources using Mozilla's Popcorn Maker. The workshop focused on introducing participants to the possibilities of hands-on manipulation of historic archives, providing support for participants to explore these resources and their potential. The workshop also encouraged discussion about the potential impact of the emerging digital public space and its affect on knowledge transfer, curation and interaction with culture.
One of the results of the Mashup Workshop was this cute work-in-progress video entitled 'A little film made on Mozilla Popcorn celebrating the job of caravans - Travelling for Pleasure' by Lara Devitt, aka @lil_Madam. It includes photos, videos and text relating to the iconic vehicle that is the caravan, and draws some of its resources from Europeana, all to a soundtrack of Goldfrapp's 'Caravan Girl'.
At the end of March, Europeana participated for the first time in the prestigious Paris Book Fair. Europeana shared a stand with the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) for two days as part of the Europeana Awareness project, which, as its name suggests, aims to raise awareness of Europeana across all EU member states. Throughout the two days, we told visitors all about Europeana and demonstrated how to search for their favourite cultural items on the portal.
The Europeana/BnF stand
Valentine Charles, Europeana interoperability specialist, was representing Europeana at the event. She said:
'The Book Fair was a great opportunity to present Europeana to the French public who may not always be familiar with European initiatives. People were really enthusiastic and particularly appreciated the Europeana exhibitions which allow them to explore Europeana content while learning more about its context. It was really interesting to get direct feedback from the audience and to discuss their interests and the topics of their research with them. Being at the Book Fair was also a fantastic experience for a book lover like me!'
All ready at the Europeana/BnF stand
Two very important guests received their own guided tour of Europeana during the event - French President, François Hollande, and Vice President of the European Commission, Neelie Kroes.
French president François Hollande is shown a demo of Europeana
Valentine Charles (right) shows Neelie Kroes (left) the Europeana portal
A huge thank you from Europeana to our partners at the BnF for inviting us share their stand. Merci à tous!
Version française
A la fin du mois de mars, Europeana était présente au prestigieux Salon du Livre de Paris. Elle partageait le stand de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) pendant deux jours au titre du projet « Europeana Awareness » qui, comme son nom l’indique, vise à promouvoir Europeana parmi tous les Etats membres de l’Union européenne. Pendant ces deux journées, nous avons expliqué à nos visiteurs le fonctionnement d’Europeana et comment rechercher leurs objets culturels favoris sur le portail.
Valentine Charles, spécialiste de l’interopérabilité, représentait Europeana lors de cet événement : « Le Salon du Livre était une belle opportunité pour présenter Europeana au public français qui n’est peut-être pas toujours très au fait des initiatives européennes. Les visiteurs étaient très enthousiastes ; les présentations ont été particulièrement appréciées. Elles ont permis aux visiteurs d’explorer le contenu d’Europeana et d’en apprendre plus sur le contexte de sa mise en place. C’était très intéressant d’avoir des retours directs du public et de parler avec les visiteurs de leurs intérêts et de leurs projets de recherche. Le Salon du Livre a été aussi une expérience formidable pour la passionnée de livres que je suis ! »
Une démonstration privée d’Europeana a été proposée à deux hôtes de marque : le Président de la République, François Hollande, et la Vice-présidente de la Commission européenne, Neelie Kroes.
Un grand merci à tous nos collaborateurs de la BnF pour nous avoir invités à partager leur stand !
Légendes
Le stand Europeana / BnF
Fin prêts sur le stand Europeana / BnF
Présentation au Président de la République, François Hollande
Valentine Charles (à droite) présente le portail Europeana à Neelie Kroes (à gauche)