Digital meets Culture

cooperation agreement signed between the two Europeana related projects

A cooperation agreement was recently signed between E-Space and Europeana Sounds. The two BPN are joining forces under the common umbrella of Europeana to develop synergies and enhance the access, dissemination and reuse of digital cultural heritage. The scope of Europeana Sounds, that is also a Best Practice Network, is opening the gateway to Europe’s sound and music heritage is the core of Europeana Sounds.

Tens of thousands of audio items dating back to the invention of the first sound recorders are waiting to be discovered in numerous museums, archives and libraries throughout Europe. With their aggregation and digitisation, the voices and sounds of Europe will become accessible online to the widest audience. To realize this vision, Europeana Sounds will:

Increase the amount of audio content available via Europeana and improve geographical and thematic coverage by aggregating recordings with widespread popular appeal
Improve their access by enriching descriptions, developing techniques for cross-media and cross-collection linking
Develop audience-specific sound channels that will improve search facility, navigation and user experience
Promote the creative reuse of recordings
Identify and advocate recommendations on how to resolve domain constraints and improve access to out of commerce audio content, working with music publishers and rights holders
Build a network of stakeholders: specialists in technology, rights issues, software development and sound archives. The network will expand to new content-providers and mainstream distribution platforms to ensure the widest possible availability.

http://www.europeanasounds.eu/

Next Europeana Sounds conference will take place in Vilnius on 4 November 2016: http://www.europeanasounds.eu/europeana-sounds-conference-2016

RMIT is one of Australia's original tertiary institutions and a global university of technology, design and enterprise. Its European hub now joins RICHES network of common interest.

RMIT Europe joins RICHES affiliate partners

We are glad to announce that a Cooperation Agreement was recently signed between RICHES and RMIT Europe, for research exchange and cross dissemination.

Based in the vibrant city of Barcelona, Spain, RMIT Europe is focused on extending RMIT’s global reach across research, industry and student mobility. RMIT is one of Australia’s original tertiary institutions and a global university of technology, design and enterprise. Its European hub, which was established in 2013, includes a team of researchers and professional staff focused on delivering research impact and global student experiences.

The RMIT Europe team match RMIT’s research strengths and priorities with European funding and collaboration opportunities. Fostering global mobility for RMIT students is also at its core, whether it is hosting PhD students at the European hub in Barcelona for fieldwork or facilitating study tours and connecting students with study programmes and industry across Europe.

RMIT website: www.rmit.eu

The latest version of veraPDF is now available.

veraPDF version 0.10 released

The latest version of veraPDF is now available for download in the PREFORMA Open Source Portal. This marks the end of the PREFORMA project’s first re-design phase.

Version 0.10 has the following feature enhancements:

Conformance checker:

new implementation of the XMP validation
proper CharSet / CIDSet validation

Command line:

processes stdin if no file paths are supplied for use in *nix pipes;
directory and recursive sub-directory processing; and
text mode output with summarised output.

Test corpus:

initial set of PDF/A-2 test files

There are also a number of bug fixes:

Conformance checker:

fixed CMap / WMode validation
minor fixes in PDF/A-2b and PDF/A-3b validation profiles

Command line fixes:

all CLI output for a single file now in one XML document; and
error output now all goes to stderr, keeping stdout clean.

Visit veraPDF’s page in the PREFORMA Open Source Portal at: http://www.preforma-project.eu/pdfa-conformance-checker.html

Download veraPDF 0.10 at: http://downloads.verapdf.org/rel/verapdf-installer.zip

Release notes are published at: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/releases/tag/v0.10.7

veraPDF is building the definitive, open source PDF/A validator. Please download and test the software. If you encounter problems, or wish to make suggestions, please add them to the project’s GitHub issue tracker. Your feedback is very important, it helps to improve the software.

Keep up to date with the latest developments of veraPDF by subscribing to the veraPDF consortium’s newsletter.

Led by the Open Preservation Foundation and the PDF Association, the veraPDF consortium is developing the definitive open source, file-format validator for all parts and conformance levels of ISO 19005 (PDF/A). The software is designed to meet the needs of memory institutions responsible for preserving digital content for the long term.

The veraPDF consortium is funded by the PREFORMA project. PREFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) is a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme.

European Commission, 25 Avenue de Beaulieu Brussels, 7 March 2016

European Standardisation of cloud computing contracts, SLAs and procurement

This workshop offers an opportunity to learn of progress in the standardization of Cloud contracts and SLAs by ISO-liaison body SLALOM and cloud procurement by PICSE, two EC-backed initiatives.

Delegates can contribute to the emerging standards and understand how they can use the emerging results within their organisations.

The European Open Science Cloud envisages a trusted, open environment for storing, sharing and re-using data and supporting Open Science practices.

How can best practice procurement procedures, cloud contracts and SLAs affect the establishment of such environment? Join PICSE (Procurement Innovation for Cloud Services in Europe- www.picse.eu) and SLALOM (Legal & open model terms for cloud SLA and contracts www.slalom-project.eu) and join the debate.

The workshop will consist of two sessions: a morning SLALOM meeting with the EC DIGIT services and selected invitees and afternoon SLALOM/PICSE public workshop. The workshop will be the opportunity to present to public procurers and policy makers the advances made in the cloud procurement and contract field and to establish a set of call for actions for the next 5 years.

Venue: European Commission CNECT unit premises, 25 Avenue de Beaulieu, Room 0/S 1, 1160 Brussels.

Agenda: find the agenda for the event at http://bit.ly/1WKJv6x

Registration: register for the event at http://bit.ly/1LeG6vL

Two events organised by AppHub in Brussels to promote open source innovation

CloudScape and Net Futures 2016 dissemination opportunities

The AppHub team is glad to welcome you and your partners involved in open source innovation in Brussels, at two upcoming events, with interactive support for your project and AppHub Store demontrations.

Do not miss these opportunities to deploy and run your software on multiple clouds, physical and virtual infrastructures. We’ll assist you to bring your project into the AppHub Open Source Marketplace, and to improve the portability of your open source code through the AppHub Factory.

1- Join us for a demo of the European open source marketplace or a talk on AppHub at CloudScape 2016, March 8-9. More information: http://l.ow2.org/cloudscape2016

2- Learn about open source governance and quality best practices at NetFutures AppHub booth, April 20-21. Bring your own software and configuration process at the AppHub workshops scheduled on April 21-22, also in Brussels. More information, agenda and online registration: http://l.ow2.org/awnf/

We are looking forward to see you soon in Brussels!

Europeana hopes to promote the adoption of the IIIF technology by demonstrating its value.

Europeana aligns with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)

As part of the Europeana Cloud project, a document proposing data modelling solutions for representing digital objects (such as images) and full-text with a particular focus on Newspapers resources was just released.

One of the use case focuses on the interoperability with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). IIIF is a standard for serving and consuming high quality images online, with the ability to instruct a server about the desired resolution, or image manipulations such as rotation and zooming.

Europeana hopes to promote the adoption of the IIIF technology by demonstrating its value and, from a more technical perspective, by making Europeana’s own technical stack (including the Europeana Data Model and the Europeana Collections portal) more interoperable with IIIF implementation initiatives.

Read more on Europeana’s Blog

Sketch model from a discussion on EDM and IIIF at IIIF Ghent meeting. Glen Robson, CC BY, from Europeana blog

Madrid, 22-24 June 2016

E-Learning 2016: New Strategies and Trends

This conference seeks to anticipate the future of education, offering a critical inside look into the current trends and resources being used in teaching and learning environments.

The 2016 e-learning strategies and trends will be explored through the presentation of case studies, practical applications and the analysis of data related to students’, faculties’ and organizations’ performance.

Professors and researchers from all over the world are invited to participate in the conference to present their research and field experiences and get updated on the latest trends and innovations in e-learning.

The event provides teachers and experts the unique opportunity to contribute to this global vision of shaping the future of learning.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

Learning Analytics: how to use data to benefit students, teachers and administrators
Games and simulations as new problem-solving tools
Customized learning: personalized and responsive feedback system
Creative, collaborative and video-based learning

The conference will be jointly organized by the University of the Basque Country, Madrid Open University and GUIDE Association, leading institutions in the field of e-learning and technology-based education.

Visit the Conference website.

Visit the GUIDE Association website

Coventry (UK), 4 March 2016 - Digital Echoes Symposium 2016.

(Re)Collecting the Past: (Re)Making the Future

(Re)Collecting the Past: (Re)Making the Future

4th March 2016 – Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University

For the 6^th edition of the Digital Echoes Symposium, we focus on participation as one of the most prominent legacies of the digital, in particular how it invokes processes of collectivity, democratisation and decentring. We consider participation as a process, a framework for access and production, but also increasingly becoming a philosophy and a culture. In response to this theme, we invite researchers and practitioners in dance, the arts and the humanities, to reflect on practices of collecting, archiving and safekeeping, how these traces are being used to configure new ways of imagining futures, and how such practices highlight the legacy of the digital on humanistic and artistic disciplines.

As the title suggests, we invite a reflective and critical examination of digital archival practices, with a focus on dance and neighbouring art forms. We look at the future through a frame of making, or crafting, which evokes discourses on materiality and immateriality, tangible and intangible, conversion and representation. Through representation in digital formats ephemeral performative acts gain tangible qualities. Yet tangibility does not mean fixation; as digital representations are manipulated, stored, accessed, retrieved and re-used they are simultaneously objectified and re-formed, as they are increasingly used and re-used in different formats and in new contexts. We invite contributions that consider the impacts of public/user participation on archival practice and research, and their legacy for the future.

Themes

● The politics of participation in performing arts archival and documentation practices: How does public or citizen involvement in archival practices affect established hierarchies and canons? How does it affect taken for granted ideas about whose ideas and practice are given visibility and represented, and how?

● Collectivity and co-creative practices: What are the potentials and problematics of collectives? How does co-creation function in artistic and archival practices? How do collaborative relationships between archivists, technologists, artists and researchers cultivate generative interdisciplinary exchanges? What are the meeting points or sticking points? How might we create innovate archival projects that cross disciplinary frameworks?

● The reuse and reconfiguration of artistic and cultural content: The reuse of cultural content, and the ways that users might enrich existing sources through creative activities.

● Between amateurism and citizen science: What are the sources of legitimacy for user involvement? What distinguishes citizen science from amateurism? What are the boundaries of involvement, so that the foundations for research credibility and validity are not affected? What are the forms, best practices, promises and limits of crowdsourcing?

● Epistemologies, languages, vocabularies: Which forms of knowledge are cultivated and disseminated through participatory archival projects? How might linguistic frameworks usher in fresh forms of thinking and reveal underlying frameworks?

● Impacts on practice. How does the reuse of cultural content feed back into artistic and scholarly practices? How does the fictional user inform on the development of archival practices?

● Processes and tools: What processes, flows, methodologies are there that support rewarding ways of involving the user and the public in storing, classifying, and configuring access pathways to archival material? What digital tools, platforms and infrastructures?

Agenda:

9.15 – 9.45 Registration
9.45 – 11.00
Digital Art Studio / Welcome and Keynote Presentation
Just Fun Enough to go Completely Mad About: on games, procedures and amusement
Matthew Fuller
Chair: Sarah Whatley
11.00 – 12.00
Digital art Studio / Panel 1: Impacts on Practice/Processes and Tools
Zoi Dimitriou
Greg Marshall
Chair: Emma Meehan
Performance Studio / Panel 2: Emerging Projects
WhoLo DancE (Sarah Whatley and Rosa Cisneros)
Error Network (Sita Popat and Sarah Whatley)
Virtual Museums (Antonella Fresa and Neil Forbes)
Chair: David Bennett

12.00 – 13.30 Lunch

13.30 – 14.00
Performance Studio / Silent Lecture
Emilie Gallier
14.00 – 15.30
Digital Art Studio / Panel 3: Reuse and Reconfiguration of Artistic Content
Monica Dantas
Valeria Lo Iacono
Marisa Zanotti
Chair: Rebecca Stancliffe
Performance Studio / Panel 4 Choreographic knowledge, data and
evidence in the body archive; new ways of thinking about archival
encounters and dialogues
Rachel Krische
Lisa Kendall
Laura Griffiths
Chair: Eline Kieft

15.30 – 15.45 Tea and Coffee

15.45 – 17.15
Digital Art Studio / Panel 5: Participation and Documentation in
Digital Performance Practices
Sarah Rubidge
Teoma Naccarato
Matthew Morrison
Chair: Victoria Thoms

Venue: The Institute for Creative Enterprise (ICE)

Coventry University Technology Park

Parkside

Coventry

CV1 2NE

Organising committee: David Bennett, Hetty Blades, Rosamaria Cisneros, Rebecca Stancliffe and Sarah Whatley.

In this hackathon in particular, we focus on concepts and business models rather than the development itself.

E-Space Photography Hackathon in Leuven, a great success!

by Fred Truyen, KU Leuven.

The Photography hackathon “Hack your Photo Heritage” took place on 25-27 February 2016, hosted at the FabLab of KU Leuven in Heverlee (Belgium). People attending were students, developers, cultural heritage professionals, photography people. Some teams came already with some ideas, but many individual attendees were still looking who they might join.

The first day 25 February was an inspiring session with many international speakers; the Technical Coordinator Antonella Fresa presented the context of the E-Space project and highlighted the link with Europeana, which gave James Morley, Europeana representative at the event, an opportunity to show the different possibilities that Europeana offers for re-use through Europeana Labs. Very important was a short insight from Simon Cronshaw (Remix Summits), on what the focus is for the judging criteria. In this hackathon in particular, we focus on concepts and business models rather than the development itself. Many technologies in photography relevant to GLAM are available, but are not yet packaged in a way that broad commercial use and practices can be supported.

[Show as slideshow]

We also demonstrated the available tools, such as the E-Space WITH environment developed by partner NTUA, which allows for sophisticated storytelling and story sharing with images from sources such as Europeana, DPLA, Rijksmuseum, British Library and others. The slot allocated to team assembly allowed the participants to discuss and share a lot of ideas. Not all of those ideas, often the at first sight most compelling ones, are possible to turn into a useful application. There is always a part that is technology driven and above all market driven. Besides technology readiness levels, the readiness of a market, an audience, and more importantly a professional sector ready to take it up, to move forward towards a practice incorporating the new tools is of critical importance. The evening session offered a series of short pitches by speakers with an interesting pedigree in creative reuse of heritage.

The following days of the event were busy of work by the teams, out of which the 3 best concepts were selected by the jury and will fly to an intensive business modelling workshop in London.

Read more on the Photography Pilot and hackathon HERE.

How the York Museums Trust started opening up its collection

New case study by OpenGLAM: Think big, start small, move fast

by Lieke Ploeger, Open Knowledge Foundation.

OpenGLAM has just released a case study on the open data release last year of the York Museums Trust. The study was written as part of the Open Knowledge Foundation involvement in Europeana Space project, and describes how the York Museums Trust went about publishing their online collection, as well as the effect this had, including different examples of the reuse of their content.

Replica Roman Figurine, York Museums Trust, YORYM : 2006.2914

By publishing the collection fast, and allowing people to reuse their material, even though it was not yet perfect, they managed to engage with their audience, stimulate reuse and generate new interest in their collection and museums. It is exactly this type of approach (think big, start small, move fast) that Michael Edson, Associate Director/Head of Digital at United Nations Live Museum for Humanity, identified as on of the patterns that accelerates change in organisations last year at the Openlab workshop in December 2015 (inspiring the case study’s title).

We hope that the story of how York Museums Trust opened up their rich collections can inspire other institutions to take steps in this direction, because, as Martin put it: “To just say the content is not good enough for us, and therefore no one can see it, did not sit right with me”.

The full case study is available from: http://openglam.org/2016/02/24/think-big-start-small-move-fast/