Digital meets Culture

in the Summer 2014 issue an extensive article appeared about Europeana Space

Innovate: the applied research magazine from Coventry University

From futuristic car design to helping children with dyslexia, Innovate magazine showcases the diverse range of applied research activities taking place at Coventry University.

Coventry University’s approach is in facts “Research Excellence with Impact” and in the years the University has earned a strong reputation for enterprise and innovation, which helped to secure the Times Higher Education “Entrepreneurial University of the Year” award in 2011 and the status as “Modern University of the Year” in 2014.

The Summer 2014 issue of the Innovate magazine features a 2-page article about Europeana Space, developed by the Project’s Coordinator Sarah Whatley and by Marion Doyen, Business Development Manager at Coventry University.

The article explains the purpose of Europeana Space, as well as its structure and objectives, and states the ultimate aim of our project: to stimulate jobs and growth in and across the creative industries, through the creative reuse of digital cultural content.

Download the full article here (PDF, 248 Kb)

Download current and past issues of Innovate here: http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/research-excellence/innovate-magazine/

hosted at the National and University Library in Zagreb, an important conference was the occasion to disseminate the project to a valuable audience

Europeana Space disseminated in Croatia

An important conference hosted at the National and University Library in Zagreb saw the participation of Marinos Ioannides from the Cyprus University of Technology CUT with a speech in the session dedicated to Availability of Information and Documentation.

Marinos Ioannides

Although the topic of the speech was focused on the importance of e-documentation and on the current initiatives in the digital documentation/preservation in Cultural Heritage, the event was an important gathering of experts and professionals in the domain of cultural heritage preservation.

So, it was also a valuable occasion to disseminate Europeana Space to a audience of Scientific Community (higher education or research) and Industry representatives, as well as Policy Makers and Medias from various EU nationalities.

The conference title was “Protection of Cultural Heritage from Natural and Man-made Disasters” and it was held on 8-10 May 2014. This conference is part of a three-year project aimed at the development of guidelines for a strategic plan for the protection of cultural heritage from disasters and the formulation of a proposal for introducing amendments to the existing legislation, as well as at the determining of the key institutions and individuals which will be involved in the development and implementation of this strategic plan.

There was also a long discussion at the end of the invited presentation by Marinos Ioannides related to Europeana Space project objectives and pilot cases. Moreover, a leaflet indicating the current activities of CUT (including the participation to Europeana Space project) was distributed during the event.

The programme of the event is available here: http://chp.nsk.hr/en/programme/ along with the speakers’ presentations.

'All About Imaging: Transactions' symposium was organised by the Faculty of Media, Arts and Design of the University of Westminster

Open & Hybrid Publishing pilot @ Transactions event

Joanna Zylinska

Joanna Zylinska from Goldsmiths, University of London and Jonathan Shaw from Coventry University were invited speakers at the ‘All About Imaging: Transactions’ symposium, organised by the Faculty of Media, Arts and Design of the University of Westminster, London, with the co-operation of the Imaging Science Group of The Royal Photographic Society, on 22-23 May 2014.

They gave two presentations about open access projects, also discussing the Europeana Space pilot on Open & Hybrid Publishing at length.

Jonathan Shaw

The audience was a mixture of academics, professionals and amateurs interested in photography and image science, and was intended to create opportunities for knowledge exchange, demonstration and discussion and to traverse discursive boundaries between disciplines, to build shared vocabularies, mutual understanding and new synergies.

Learn more about the event here: http://www.rps.org/news/2014/april/transactions

Download the relevant slides of the presentations about the Open & Hybrid Publishing pilot (PDF, 573 Kb)

The Coordinator Fred Truyen will be keynote speaker at the congress organized by the University of Sheffield

Europeana Photography @ Digital Humanities Congress

Europeana Photography will participate in this important conference, organized every 2 years in Sheffield, with the keynote speech of the coordinator Fred Truyen (KU Leuven). The purpose of the congress is to promote the sharing of knowledge, ideas and techniques within the digital humanities.

Digital humanities is understood by Sheffield University to mean the use of technology within arts, heritage and humanities research as both a method of inquiry and a means of dissemination. As such, Europeana Photography is a very concrete example of the use of technologies to enhance cultural heritage.

The speech by professor Truyen is:

“All Our Yesterdays”: Europeana and the Phenomenology of Photographic Experience through the Framing of Digitization

When the partners in EuropeanaPhotography embarked on the journey to digitize over 400.000 early photographs for Europeana, few would realize that their very concept of the photograph would change forever.

While sifting through often unseen and unpublished photos from Europe’s top collections, a fascination grew among the collaborators of the involved musea, archives and photo-agencies for what was captured on these dusty glass negatives, daguerreotype plates and albumen prints ranging from 1839 to 1939.

What was there was not only revealed through the digitization, but urrevocably reframed into an new visual experience. Questions about the very nature of what in the end the elusive “photo as object” is, and its ramifications for archival practices, became unavoidable. In this talk, looking through the lenses of old photographers who were priviliged wittnesses of Europe’s history, we will zoom in on different aspects from a Digital Humanities perspective: curation, digitization, metadata provision, rendering and digital preservation.

The conference takes place on 4-6 September 2014.

Registration and more information here: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/hri/dhc

DEADLINE Monday 16th June

Europeana Space – Questionnaire for the Pilots (technical requirements)

On the 3rd November, a valuable workshop including several EU projects was the occasion to disseminate Europeana Space

Europeana Space at Euromed Congress 2014

Project Coordinator Professor Sarah Whatley spoke about Europeana Space project during a focused workshop, dedicated to analyse the stategies for cultural heritage in the new digital age, held during the important congress Euromed in Cyprus (3-8 November 2014).

Marinos Ioannides, Sarah Whatley and Antonella Fresa

Europeana Space was presented to the congress’ wide audience of international cultural institutions as the new Best Practice Network of allied partners who intend to explore new ways for the creative re-use of digital cultural heritage. The final aim of Europeana Space is to pave the way for unlocking the business potential of cultural heritage for both cultural Institutions and creative industries.

The audience at Euromed 2014 congress

The workshop is organized by Promoter, who is the Technical Coordinator of Europeana Space, and included representatives of several important projects in the domain of digital cultural heritage.

The title of the workshop is “The Digitization Age: Mass Culture is Quality Culture. Challenges for cultural heritage and society” and took place on 3rd November at 4 pm.

Download the workshop’s agenda (PDF, 438 Kb)

Visit the Euromed 2014 Congress website: http://www.culturalheritage2014.eu/

Europeana Space in the poster session of the congress

To define best practices for text digitisation and long term preservation.

MoU between DCH-RP and SUCCEED

A Memorandum of Understanding has been signed between DCH-RP and SUCCEED projects for the promotion and presentation of the respective results and for the organisation of joint events and other activities, focusing in particular on the definition of best practices for text digitisation and long term preservation.

DCH-RP (Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for Preservation) is a Coordination Action supported by the European Commission under the FP7 e-Infrastructure Capacities Programme, to design a Roadmap for the implementation of a federated e-Infrastructure for preservation of DCH content. The Roadmap will be supplemented by practical tools for decision makers and validated through a range of proofs of concept, where cultural institutions and e-Infrastructure providers work together on concrete experiments.

SUCCEED (Support Action Centre of Competence in Digitisation) is a support action funded by the European Union that promotes the take up and validation of research results in mass digitisation with focus on the textual content. Succeed aims to improve the availability of tools and resources, fosters the transfer of knowledge, the creation of research consortia and explores the role of emerging business models, funding opportunities and public-private partnerships to improve large-scale text digitisation techniques. The action will be implemented through the Impact Centre of Competence in Digitisation, an output of the IMPACT FP7-project which gathers and exposes digitisation tools and resources. The Centre will sustain the actions beyond Succeed since a legal entity will be substantiated and a roadmap for its long-term sustainability will be defined during the action.

To promote the use and quality check of common standards for text digitisation and long term preservation.

MoU between PREFORMA and SUCCEED

A Memorandum of Understanding has been signed between PREFORMA and SUCCEED projects for the promotion and presentation of the respective results and for the organisation of joint events and other activities, focusing in particular on the use and quality check of common standards for text digitisation and long term preservation.

PREFORMA (www.preforma-project.eu) is a Pre-Commercial Procurement project co-funded by the European Commission within the framework of the FP7 ICT Programme with the aim to address the challenge of implementing good quality standardised file formats for preserving data content in the long term and to give memory institutions full control of the process of the conformity tests of files to be ingested into archives.

SUCCEED (Support Action Centre of Competence in Digitisation, http://succeed-project.eu) is a support action funded by the European Union that promotes the take up and validation of research results in mass digitisation with focus on the textual content. Succeed aims to improve the availability of tools and resources, fosters the transfer of knowledge, the creation of research consortia and explores the role of emerging business models, funding opportunities and public-private partnerships to improve large-scale text digitisation techniques. The action will be implemented through the Impact Centre of Competence in Digitisation, an output of the IMPACT FP7-project which gathers and exposes digitisation tools and resources. The Centre will sustain the actions beyond Succeed since a legal entity will be substantiated and a roadmap for its long-term sustainability will be defined during the action.

Paris, 28 November 2014

Succeed in digitisation. Spreading excellence

The Succeed project is organising at Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) the conference “Succeed in digitisation. Spreading excellence”, to be held on November 28th, 2014.

Succeed is an EU funded project that promotes the take-up and validation of tools and resources for mass digitisation.

The conference schedule will focus on the following blocks based on the main outcomes of Succeed:

Libraries’ experiences in the take-up of tools.
Results on competitions.
Roadmap for the future of digitisation in Europe.
Interoperability of tools for text digitisation.
Recommendations on formats, standards and licensing schemes related to digitisation.
Panel discussions on digital humanities / digital conservation

The attendance to the conference is free, but registration is required. To register, please follow this link.

For further information, please visit http://succeed-project.eu/succeed-digitisation

Muscat, Oman, 10-11 December 2014

e-AGE 2014 Intercontinental Connectivity of the Pan Arab Network

Under the Patronage of His Highness Sayyid Taimur Bin As’ad Al Said, the Arab States Research and Education Network – ASREN, announced its fourth annual event “4th International Platform on Integrating Arab e-Infrastructure in a Global Environment – e-AGE 2014” taking place on 10-11 December 2014 in Muscat, Oman. The platform was hosted by The Research Council (TRC) of Oman.

What is e-AGE all about?

Integrating Arab e-infrastructure in a Global Environment, e-AGE, is an annual international event organized by the Arab States Research and Education Network, ASREN. e-AGE is in line with ASREN’s major objectives related to creating awareness, promoting R&E collaboration and joint activities and establishing human networks in order to facilitate collaboration and cooperation among researchers and academicians in the Arab region and the rest of the world.

In e-AGE 2014, the main theme was “Intercontinental Connectivity of the Pan Arab Network”. ASREN started concrete steps towards interconnecting researchers and academics across the Arab States by launching its first PoP in London Telicity and working with its partners on new PoPs in UAE, Egypt and the Maghreb region. ASREN is also supporting the development of NRENs in some Arab countries. ASREN aims to give special attention and more focus on users and how the e-Infrastructure can support their needs in terms of services and applications. More sessions are dedicated to the users to present their research and education activities and then to identify how these users can be better served by NRENs.

Topics of interest

Research collaboration in energy, environment, health, climate, water, agriculture, biology, economy, medicine and other pressing global issues and problems.
Perspectives on NRENs, including challenges, operation, sustainability, funding, governance, business models, security and services.
Access to research and education resources, repositories, libraries and contents, clouds, grids and HPCs.
Connectivity options including technologies, services, cables, circuits and equipment.
Internet developments and impact on R&E networks.
e-Services like e-Science, e-Government, e-Libraries, e-Learning, e-*…
Virtual Research Environments, Science Gateways, Federation of Identities, eduroam, eduGAIN …

Events and Activities

ASREN is becoming more visible and more active in the region and beyond. It has developed a new shareholder scheme with more Arab NRENs joining as well as more supporting organizations. Following on the success of e-AGE in 2011, 2012 and 2013, e-AGE 2014 included events, workshops, meetings centered on the following themes:

The 7th Event on Euro-Mediterranean e-Infrastructure
The 4th annual meeting of ASREN
AROQA 6th Annual Conference
EUMEDCONENCT3 Meeting
Technical Workshops on R&E networking (to be announced)

Moreover special sessions were dedicated to specific domains, mainly focusing on experiences in connectivity and e-Infrastructure, applications and services in variety of scientific domains and case studies with impact indicators and measures. It is also important to show how research infrastructure created benefits to communities and collaboration. It is still critical to show how research connectivity can promote collaboration and innovation. Different discussions were stimulated during e-AGE to drive outcomes and concrete results on practical steps towards developing a regional e-Infrastructure.

Venue

Grand Hyatt Hotel, Muscat, Oman

Important dates