Digital meets Culture

By Neasan ONeill

We live in a digital age we no longer commit knowledge to vellum or paper, storage solutions that have stood the test of time. Now everything is created, consumed and, hopefully, stored on computers. It is this last area that is of particular concern, how can we ensure that valuable digital information will remain accessible and usable? This is where digital preservation comes in.

EGI: What is the goal of the Networking Session?
Claudio Prandoni: Our aim with the session is to present to the whole digital preservation and e-infrastructures community the new opportunities offered by the pre-commercial-procurement launched by PREFORMA project. We are interested in engaging with everyone from the open source community and developers to standardisation bodies and memory institutions. At the end of May we launch a call for tender to develop and deploy a suite of open source tools that allow memory institutions to check that the files stored in their archives conform to a specific standard.

EGI: Who would you like to attend the session?
CP: The tender is quite broad and we want to have a wide range of stakeholders involved. So at the session we would love to see any potential supplier like SMEs, research centres or universities that have some experience in the field of standardisation and quality checks. However they are not the only people who should come along, we are interested in memory institutions and cultural heritage organisations coordinating or representing them, developers, research organisations, standardisation bodies, funding agencies, best practice networks and other projects in the digital culture, e-Infrastructures and policy arenas. There is a place for anyone interested in preserving our digital heritage.

EGI: What will attendees learn from attending?
CP: We hope attendees will have a better understanding of what PREFORMA does and how they can get involved, including funding opportunities. But most importantly for us is the opportunity for them to give us feedback and advice and ask specific questions around the issues and challenges that PREFORMA is addressing, helping us to improve and refine the requirements and the specification of the tender

The “Pre-commercial procurement on digital preservation” networking session will be held at 11am on Wednesday 21st at the EGI Community Forum in Helsinki.

You can find more information on the PREFORMA website at http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/article/preforma-egi-community-forum-2014

Source: http://www.egi.eu/news-and-media/newsfeed/news_2014_014.html

A joint initiative which involves several projects co-funded by the European Commission

A new registry of services and tools for digital preservation

DCH-RP (Digital Cultural Heritage – Roadmap for Preservation) and the partners of the Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry, i.e. The Digital Curation Centre (DCC), The Digital Curation Exchange (DCE), National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA), The Open Planets Foundation (OPF) and Preserving digital Objects With Restricted Resources project (POWRR) are investigating the possibility to join their efforts to set up a common registry of services and tools useful for preserving digital information for the long term.

The aim of this registry is to help decision makers selecting quality, mature, sustainable (maintained) and portable tools to be used to plan and implement their digital preservation strategy.

The idea that is currently under discussion is to merge and integrate the work that has been done to set up the DCH-RP registry in the Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry (COPTR), in order to collate the knowledge on preservation tools in one single place, thus providing a unique and sustainable reference point to the whole digital preservation community.

The DCH-RP registry of services and tools

The DCH-RP registry collects and describes information and knowledge related to tools, technologies and systems that can be applied for the purposes of digital cultural heritage preservation. It also reviews existing and emerging services developed and offered by R&D projects, public organisations and commercial solution vendors.

Whilst providing a broad overview of the existing solutions, the registry initiative focuses on analysing those services and tools that can enable cultural heritage institutions to benefit from the capacities of e-Infrastructures including cloud and grid systems.

Tools and services are categorized by purpose, technologies required, resource formats supported and domain-specific application, among many other criteria. Alongside this functional description, an attempt has been made (for a subset of the tools and services covered) to provide assessments of each. In the first iteration, assessment criteria chosen have been: popularity, support level, portability, scalability, licensing model, and modularity/openness of architecture.

Help us to select the most relevant and used services for digital preservation!

In order to improve the registry, we prepared a survey to rank the services that are listed.

The questionaire, which is anonymous, is intented to determine what services are especially interesting and used by the DCH community.

Please help us in identifying the most relevant services by filling in this survey!

The results will be taken up while working in the next iteration of DCH-RP registry and in the set up of the common registry of services and tools for digital preservation together with the partners of the Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry.

Claudio Prandoni and Paul Wheatley

Stockholm, 3-4 June 2014

Joint DCH-RP/EUDAT workshops on digital preservation

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

On the 3rd and 4th of June 2014, the National Archives of Sweden hosted in Stockholm two workshops organised by DCH-RP in cooperation with EUDAT on the theme of digital preservation of cultural data.

Workshop 1: Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for Preservation

In focus of this workshop were the possibilities and challenges connected to long-term digital preservation of on one hand cultural heritage institutions’ holdings and collections and on the other hand research data. The aim was to present the intermediate results of work conducted in the frame of the EU projects DCH-RP and EUDAT, both looking into distributed infrastructure solutions. The results will be taken into account for the final version of the Roadmap for the long-term preservation of Digital Cultural Heritage content, which is due by the end of September 2014 and which represents the main outcome of the DCH-RP project.

Workshop 2: The Concept of Trust – Research data and Cultural Heritage Data

The second workshop had its focus on collaboration issues between the DCH-RP and EUDAT projects on the concept of trust. The aim was to discuss the needs for trust models suitable for digital cultural heritage data and e-science and their use in distributed preservation architectures. The discussions was based on three case studies mirroring different situations involving cultural heritage information and research data.

PROGRAMME

Download here the programme of the event.

PRESENTATIONS

Workshop 1: Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for Preservation

Introduction & different aspects of digital preservation (Börje Justrell, Director Operational Support, the National Archives) – download
The EU project Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for Preservation (DCH-RP) (Antonella Fresa, Technical Coordinator, DCH-RP) – download
Digisam (Sanja Halling, Senior Advisor, Digisam) – download
European project EUDAT (European Data Infrastructure) (Per Öster, Director Research Infrastructures, CSC-It Center for Science Ltd, Finland) – download
Digital preservation among cultural heritage institutions (Sanja Halling, Senior Advisor, Digisam) – download
Proof of concept DCH-RP (Eva Toller, Principal Administrative Officer, the National Archives) – download
Trustbuilding: State of the art in Digital Cultural Heritage (Raivo Ruusalepp, Digital Preservation Expert, The Ministry of Culture, Estonia) – download
Trust & Risk: Two sides of the same coin? (Börje Justrell, Director Operational Support, the National Archives) – download

Workshop 2: The Concept of Trust – Research data and Cultural Heritage Data

Research information EUDAT (Raphael Ritz, Head Data Science and Services Computing and Data Centre of the Max Planck Society and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics) – download
Research information EUDAT (Ingrid Dillo, Head Policy Development and Communication, DANS – Data Archiving and Networked Services) – download
Cultural Heritage and research information (Kevin Holston, Curator, the Swedish Museum of Natural History) – download

Rome, 16 May 2014

Best Practices for the Fruition and Promotion of Cultural Heritage

Best Practices for the Fruition and Promotion of Cultural Heritage:
EAGLE & Wiki Loves Monuments
&
Award Ceremony Wiki Loves Monuments Italia
EAGLE Special Prize

The opportunities offered by modern technology for the safeguarding and fruition of cultural heritage are virtually boundless, yet their successful implementation requires that all players involved (public institutions, private sector, sector operators) adopt new attitudes.
This event, event organised by EAGLE, Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy e Wikimedia Italia with the support of Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Roma, aims to serve as a platform for sharing knowledge and good practices while stimulating reflections on the role of digital technologies in the preservation and promotion of cultural digital heritage.

At the end of the event, the winners of Special EAGLE prize for WikiLovesMonuments Italy will be announced. An award will be given for the best photograph of an ancient inscription within a participating monument of the WikiLovesMonuments contest.
Special EAGLE prize for WikiLovesMonuments Italy seeks to promote the intrinsic testimonial value of inscriptions and to do so in such a way that this patrimony, which exists right under the eyes of the world yet often goes barely noticed, emerges and gains the visibility that it deserves.

www.eagle-network.eu
www.wikilovesmonuments.it

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Registration

Participation in the event is free of charge but places will be limited.

Further Information

The language of the conference will be Italian. Coffee breaks will be provided.

For any further information, please contact: info@eagle-network.eu.

Date & Venue

Venue: Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Sala Conferenze, Piazza dei Cinquecento 67, Rome

Date: May 16, 2014

Have questions about Europeana network of Ancient and Greek Epigraphy & Wiki Loves Monuments? Contact EAGLE- Europeana Network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy

Report of the Information Day organised by the project on April 4th in Brussels

PREFORMA Information Day: follow up

On April 4th, 2014, PREFORMA organised an Information Day in Brussels to present the call for tender, which will be launched as part of the pre-commercial procurement.

The event, hosted by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA), was successfully attended by almost 20 representatives of SMEs, research centres, universities and enterpreneurs coming from all over Europe to hear the presentations and to interact with the representatives from the PREFORMA project, asking questions and providing useful feedback.

Furthermore, the event has been webcasted and recorded to allow people who could not come to Brussels to participate remotely.

After a welcome message from Erik Buelinckx (KIK-IRPA), the project Coordinator Börje Justrell (Riksarkivet) introduced the context and the objectives of the PREFORMA project and of the pre-commercial procurement. Then, Bert Lemmens (Packed) presented the challenge brief, giving an overview of the requirements and specifications of the tender. Antonella Fresa (Promoter), the PREFORMA Technical Coordinator, followed illustrating how to get information about the tender, how to participate to the call and which are the different phases of the procurement, from the publication of the call until the evaltuation of the proposals. After a short break, the last three presentations covered how the design phase will be organised (Peter Pharow, Fraunhofer), the mechanisms which will regulate the evaluation of the prototypes (Nicola Ferro, University of Padua) and the open source approach which stands at the basis of the PREFORMA project (Bjorn Lundell, University of Skövde).

The Q&A session which followed involved many of the attendees around a number of key topics, among which: the usage scenarios to be addressed by the suppliers; the data sets which will be made available by the memory institutions participatng to PREFORMA and those that have to be provided by the tenderers; ideas on sustainability and business models; the conformancy check of the metadata associated to the digital objects; the reporting and feedback process, including the relationship with the standardisation bodies; the possibility to include in the tender other formats or processes.

Finally, in the afternoon, bilateral meetings have been organised with those participants who wanted to enter into more details, ask additional questions and further discuss the opportunity to participate to the call for tender.

Next appointment for exchange and consultation with potential suppliers will be the networking session organised by PREFORMA in Helsinki on May 21st in the frame of the EGI Community Forum 2014. For more information and to register to the event please visit the related blog post.

PRESENTATIONS OF THE INFORMATION DAY

Introduction to PREFORMA (B. Justrell): download presentation

Presentation of the tender (B. Lemmens): download presentation

Website, guidelines and help desk (A. Fresa): download presentation

The design phase (P. Pharow): download presentation

The testing environment (N. Ferro): download presentation

The open source projects (B. Lundell): download presentation

VIDEO RECORDING

Introduction to PREFORMA: Erik Buelinckx (KIK-IRPA)

Introduction to PREFORMA: Borje Junstrell, Project Coordinator (RIKSARKIVET)

Presentation of the tender: Bert Lemmens (PACKED)

Website, guidelines and help desk: Antonella Fresa (PROMOTER)

The design phase: Peter Pharow (Fraunhofer)

The testing environment: Nicola Ferro (Università di Padova)

The open source projects: Bjorn Lundell (University of Skövde)

Questions & Answers

http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/RICHES-Booklet.pdf

RICHES Booklet

Prague, 23-24 April 2014

EUDAT 3rd User Forum – Horizon2020 opportunities and Community collaboration

EUDAT’s 3rd User Forum focuses on close collaboration with communities, organisations and initiatives and how they are integrating and exploiting the current set of EUDAT research data services. The recent Call for Collaboration projects resulted in over 30 applications from a vast range of scientific communities covering, but not limited to, life sciences, atmospheric sciences, marine biology, physics, chemistry, nano-science and materials science, medical science, biodiversity and climate modelling and some will present their tangible collaboration plans.

The User Forum will also be a platform to look at Horizon 2020 opportunities, in terms of outlining EUDAT’s plans for research data management planning support for projects, how collaboration with existing and new users will evolve as well as interacting with attendees on their expectations and requirements for services and support from EUDAT under Horizon2020.
For more details see http://www.eudat.eu/3rd-eudat-user-forum

Taking place at Charles University Prague, the User Forum begins on 23 April at 11:00 and ends at 13:00 on 24 April.

Participation is free of charge but places are limited so REGISTER soon at http://www.eudat.eu/3rd-user-forum-registration

Vienna, 21 May 2014

APARSEN/SCAPE project Satellite Event – Long term accessibility of digital resources in theory and practice

We are delighted to announce the APARSEN/SCAPE project Satellite Event in context of the 3^rd LIBER workshop on Digital Curation “Keeping data: The process of data curation” (19-20 May 2014).

An overview on management aspects such as digital rights management, policies and costs as well as technical aspects with a focus on preservation planning and scalability in digital preservation will be given. Insights into the day-to-day practice of digital preservation will foster the understanding of theoretical concepts developed in the two EU funded projects.

The programme on 21^st May 2014 is organised by APARSEN and SCAPE project and is as follows: https://liber2014.univie.ac.at/satellite-event/programme-satellite-event/

09:00 – 10:30

Sabine Schrimpf /Stefan Hein (German National Library): Digital Rights Management in the context of long-term preservation
Ross King (Austrian Institute of Technology): The SCAPE Project and Scalable Quality Control
David Wang (SBA Research): Understanding the Costs of Digital Curation

11:00 – 12:30

Sven Schlarb (Austrian National Library): Application scenarios of the SCAPE project at the Austrian National Library
Krešimir Đuretec (Vienna University of Technology): The SCAPE Planning and Watch Suite
David Giaretta (Alliance for Permanent Access): Digital preservation: How APARSEN can help answer the key question “Who pays and Why?”

Location:

Austrian National Library, Palais Mollard, Herrengasse 9 (Attention: not the main building of the Austrian National Library!), 1010 Vienna, Austria

In case you are attending the 3rd LIBER workshop register here: https://liber2014.univie.ac.at/registration/

If you only want to attend the Satellite Event and the SCAPE training workshop (see below), please register here: http://scape-aparsen-workshop.eventbrite.co.uk

More information on the event can be found here: https://liber2014.univie.ac.at/satellite-event/programme-satellite-event/

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Following the joint APARSEN and SCAPE satellite event, the final SCAPE training workshop will take place on the afternoon of 21 May from 13.30 – 18.00, and on 22 May from 09.30 – 16.30 at the Austrian National Library:

Exhibit A: The Evidence for Effective Digital Preservation

This course offers best practices for the curation and publication of experimental data on the web. This is demonstrated by applying the principles of 5 Star linked data to:

data generated from digital preservation testing and experimentation, and
the metadata about the tools and data that the published data depends upon.

Further information about the event

will be added to the SCAPE website shortly at: http://www.scape-project.eu/

and you can register at: http://scape-aparsen-workshop.eventbrite.co.uk

More information on APARSEN can be found here: http://aparsen.eu/

Opening event was held on 11th April 2014, with international guests

All Our Yesterdays @ Pisa, Museum of Graphics, Palazzo Lanfranchi

photo by Fabrizio Sbrana

All Our Yesterdays, the great multimedia and photographic exhibition about early photography, finally opened in the Palazzo Lanfranchi Museum of Graphics, in Pisa, on Friday 11^th April, with a very crowded vernissage event.

Guests of the opening ceremony: the Major of Pisa and the Chancellor of Culture, representatives from the University of Pisa and the Museum of Graphics, together with the project’s partners coming from all over Europe to celebrate this exceptional event.

The program of the day begun early afternoon with the plenary meeting of the Europeana Photography project, devoted to digitize about 430.000 photographs with historical, artistic and cultural value belonging to the first 100 years of photography. The project, which includes many important archives, agencies and photo-museums, is co-funded by the European Union and in its latest review about the project’s progress and quality it was evaluated by the experts of the European Commission as “excellent”.

Photo by Rudy Pessina

Among the initiatives of the project, All Our Yesterdays is the occasion to see how life was in Europe in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The new born medium of photography framed faces and life in a period of great change, where horses and agriculture made way to, the machines and industrialization, where work and life where harder than nowadays and where no videogames and TV could entertained in the free-time. A period where there was war but also technological and societal progress; and although everyday life was different from how we know it, joy and sorrow, stories and dreams turn out to have been strikingly similar to ours.

from left, Pietro Masi (curator of the Exhibition and General Manager of Promoter srl), Dott. Antonella Fresa (Director of Promoter srl), Dott. Marco Filippeschi (Major of Pisa) and Dott. Dario Danti (Councillor for Culture and Chairman of the Museo della Grafica) – (photo by Federico Parenti)

The vernissage started at 6 pm with speeches by the local authorities, the project’s coordinators and the representative of Europeana, the great European digital library, which the project is so much linked to. The cocktail party and opening visit of the exhibition then followed.

The timeline – Photo by Rudy Pessina

All Our Yesterdays was free entrance and was open until 2nd June; every Thursday and Sunday a digitization desk is available for digitizing the family pictures brought by the visitors (digitization service for free).

Learn more on www.earlyphotography.eu

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

Pisa, Palazzo Lanfranchi, 11 April – 2 June 2014

FREE ENTRANCE

Under the patronage of: Comune di Pisa, Università di Pisa, Regione Toscana

Presentation by Wiebe de Jager, Europeana Foundation (PDF, 1.36 Mb)

Video presentations:

“All Our Yesterdays” teaser: https://vimeo.com/89421896

“All Our Yesterdays” teaser (italian language): https://vimeo.com/89421899

EuropeanaPhotography – presentation of the project : https://vimeo.com/89421902

Download the printable version of the Press Release (PDF, ENG – ITA)

Download the full Media Kit of the Exhibition here

Photo by Rudy Pessina

On 1st April 2014 a Memorandum of Understanding has been signed between the two projects

MoU between DCH-RP and OPENAIRE

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.

OPENAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) is an initiative supported
by the European Commission under the FP7 e-Infrastructure Capacities Programme with the following main objectives:

build support structures for researchers in depositing FP7 research publications through the establishment of the European Helpdesk and the outreach to all European member states through the operation and collaboration of 27 National Open Access Liaison Offices;
establish and operate an electronic infrastructure for handling peer-reviewed articles as well as other important forms of publications (pre-prints or conference publications).
work with several subject communities to explore the requirements, practices, incentives, workflows, data models, and technologies to deposit, access, and otherwise manipulate research datasets of various forms in combination with research publications.

The main objective of the Memorandum of Understanding that has been signed by the two projects is to evaluate the possibility to reuse data made available by OPENAIRE in the Proof-of-Concepts organised by DCH-RP targeted at demonstrating how e-Infrastructures can be of benefit for the DCH community, in particular for the preservation of digital cultural content. Data can be harvested from the OPENAIRE portal, a gateway to all user-level services offered by the e-Infrastructure established, including access (search and browse) to scientific publications and other value-added functionality (post authoring tools, monitoring tools through analysis of document and usage statistics).