Innovate your photographic heritage and your future business!

Prof. Fred Truyen of KU Leuven recently published an interesting article on his Digital Culture blog, under the title Europeana Space Photo pilot: Innovate your photographic heritage…and your future business! The article tells the commitment the E-Space project is devoting through its Photo Pilot to demonstrating a range of possibilities offered by apps, Europeana API's and a multitude of tools developed by the open source community to come up with innovative models involving historical and present-day photography, with monetising potential and investment appeal.

Investigated possibilities are grouped around three main focus

• Museum applications providing access to Europeana and similar resources can yield new types of visitor-experiences;


• Storytelling web applications and apps allowing for users to create new stories by mixing historical images from Europeana and other public sources with user-generated content;


• Augmented reality applications enabling historical images to be layered with actual experiences and other material, such as maps and social user data.

Silver gelatine glass plates reprinted in HDR with very high resolution give a totally new photo experience, with these beautiful girls laughing at you from decades away.
Gaston Paris | location unknown (France), 1935 Young women at a fun fair. Roger-Viollet collections © Gaston Paris/Roger-Viollet

«The web and the smartphone have changed photography irrevocably» Truyen observes. «The classic business models have suffered from this […] in particular, the IP-based business models underlying the photo industry are under strong pressure, forcing photo archives, photo agencies, museums and publishers to innovate or perish […] But of course the new situation also holds tremendous opportunities. Some of those are currently underexploited». E-Space aims to explore and exploit those opportunities, trying to find «the links between the photographic heritage content, the wide variety of general public, amateurs, pro-ams and professional developers through an intermediate software architecture that provides real role identification and task burden sharing while at the same time improving transparency on rights […] This is the place for innovative, sustainable, professionally maintained infrastructures. In this way Europeana Space hopes to contribute to the overall success and relevance of Europeana».

Read the full article on Fred Truyen's Digital Culture blog

About the author:
Fred Truyen (°1961) holds a PhD in Philosophy (1991) and is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven, Belgium. Head of the Faculty's Computer Department since 1989, he is currently chairman of the ICT Council of the Group Humanities and Social Sciences at KU Leuven.
Fred Truyen is a member of the Institute for Cultural Studies, where he leads the CS/Digital Media lab.