Europeana Photography KICK-OFF MEETING

by Valentina Bachi

Update for the Reader: Starting from the 1st of December 2012 the coordination of the EuropeanaPhotography project is transferred to the University of Leuven. Alinari 24 Ore withdrew from the project. The photographic images of Alinari Archives remain nevertheless part of the project content.

A freezing cold Firenze welcomed with northern winds and a couple of snowflakes the beginning of EuropeanaPhotography project.

19 partners represented each by one or two persons, from 11 EU countries plus the Commission Project Officer Mr. Krister Olson from Sweden met at Alinari's picturesque library to sum up and plan the EuropeanaPhotography project during a very friendly and motivated kick-off meeting.

The welcome speech of Mr. Claudio de Polo

The welcome speech of Mr. Antonio Scuderi

After the welcome speeches of Mr. Claudio de Polo, president of Fratelli Alinari s.p.a. and Mr. Antonio Scuderi, CEO of Gruppo 24 Ore, the meeting was hosted and guided by Andrea de Polo the Project Manager with the assistance of Antonella Fresa of Promoter in her role of Technical Coordinator of the European project.

Mr. Krister Olson, Commission Project Officer

Mr. Krister Olson, the project officer of European Commission, congratulated with all the partners for the success of project proposal at European Commission, and followed the whole meeting and the participants' interventions with great attention and spirit of cooperation.

Beside a general overview of the project, targets, objectives, work-plan and reporting, the work-packages leaders informed about next coming activities:

Among others, Frederik Truyen of Leuven Catholic University talked about content and themes of the project, to be further investigated in the next meeting; Roxanne Wyns of KMKG (the federal museums of Belgium) well explained the hot matter of multilingual cultural repositories, with special focus on harmonization and indexing, Nikolaos Simou of National Technical University of Athens illustrated the innovative aggregation and mapping tool named MINT, within a very “user-friendly” presentation of complex technical matters; finally, Andrea de Polo of Alinari 24 Ore, the Project Manager of EuropeanaPhotography, talked about IPR and future sustainability of the project.

The other partners of the project came from the whole Europe: TopPhoto from UK, Imagno from Austria, Parisienne de Photographie from France, PolFoto and Workers' Museums from Denmark, Ayuntamiento De Girona and the Generalitat of Catalonia from Spain, United-Archives from Germany, National Academic Library Information System NALIS from Bulgaria, Museums of Photographic History and The International Centre for Information Management System and Services ICIMSS from Poland, the Theater Institute of Bratislava from Slovakia, Lithuanian Art Museum from Lithuania, ICCU from Italy. They participated the meeting with deep attention and proper questions and interventions, and shared the atmosphere of mutual cooperation – especially towards those partners who came for the first time into a EU project and felt at the beginning a little bit shy.

During the 2-days meeting, Alinari 24 Ore invited the partners to a very interesting and exclusive tour of its palace with an overview of their advanced digitizing systems (80 MegaPixel  technology from Leaf / Phase One) and the top moments of visiting the Archive of ancient photographs and the incredible glass-plates negative collection, plus the visit to the ArtPrintworks explaining the original, artisanal printing process.

Last but not least, on day 2 after the conclusion of the meeting, those partners who were not forced to go in order to catch a train or a plain, had time to enjoy a tour of Alinari National Museum of Photography MNAF which was as well an amazing, cultural and artistic experience.

Impossible to imagine a nicer kick-off meeting, and so full of promise: next date for the EuropeanaPhotography partners is 11^th-12^th April in Leuven to deeply discuss about content and themes of the ancient photography to be brought to Europeana.

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