EUreka3D project: latest updates on 3D digitisation of heritage collections | Digital meets Culture

“The EUreka3D project coordinated by Photoconsortium has just started the action on high-quality 3D digitisation, which will make great collections of cultural heritage 3D digitised objects accessible to everyone in the Europeana website.

The content provided by project partners is very diverse, and ranges from monuments at risk to archaeological objects, early cinema items and filigree paper moulds. EUreka3D will aggregate on Europeana about 5,000 new 2D and 3D records, digitised in high quality from various providers: CUT Cyprus University of Technology, Bibracte, Museo della Carta and CRDI Ajuntament de Girona, some of which have never featured on Europeana before.

The project is also creating a cloud-based platform managed at EGI the European Grid Initiative. dedicated to Cultural Heritage Institutions offering advanced services and tools for digital collection management, especially with 3D objects and their metadata and paradata management….”

Europeana Translate Event – How machine translation & multilingual access impacts cultural heritage | Europeana Pro

“This online event will present the Europeana Translate project outcomes, describe the methodology followed, the results obtained, and the impact of machine translation on improving user experience in the cultural heritage sector. Speakers will also reflect on machine translation and multilinguality in the cultural heritage domain and discuss this from a broader perspective with external insights.

You can expect presentations about the OCCAM (OCR, ClassificAtion & Machine Translation) project by Tom Vanallemeersch; information about the results of the EnrichEuropeana+ project by Sergiu Gordea and Henk Vanstappen, who will explore the automated translations of heritage data in the Bruges’ project Grenzeloos. This will be followed by a panel discussion and Q&A where the speakers, joined by some of the Europeana Translate partners, will discuss the theme of machine translation and multilinguality further. Participants will be invited to share questions and perspective on automated translations in the cultural heritage domain and possible challenges for the future….”

Explore how Europeana Subtitled increased access to audiovisual heritage | Europeana Pro

“Europeana Subtitled gathered seven major national broadcasters and audiovisual archives from seven European countries to provide high-quality audiovisual materials to Europeana. The project combined AI technology and audiovisual cultural heritage to produce high-quality closed captions and English subtitles for local video content, and created a platform to allow organisations to run crowdsourcing campaigns to revise captions using state of the art editing tools. 

Europeana Subtitled also supported cultural heritage professionals with the use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) technologies in the cultural sector through an online training suite consisting of video tutorials, documentation and guidelines, and worked with teachers and museum educators to create learning resources with audiovisual content. 

Finally, the project engaged audiences through crowdsourcing events and editorial activities on the Europeana website, in particular, through the ‘Broadcasting Europe’ page and ‘Mass-media and propaganda’ online exhibition….

The Subtitled content is publicly available and videos can be enjoyed directly on the Europeana website, while you can also access freely reusable content with more than 3,000 records in the Public Domain….”

WorldFAIR Project (D13.1) Cultural Heritage Mapping Report: Practices and policies supporting Cultural Heritage image sharing platforms | Zenodo

Abstract:  Deliverable 13.1 for the WorldFAIR Project’s Cultural Heritage Work Package (WP13) outlines current practices guiding online digital image sharing by institutions charged with providing care and access to cultural memory, in order to identify how these practices may be adapted to promote and support the FAIR Principles for data sharing.

The report has been compiled by the Digital Repository of Ireland as a key information resource for developing the recommendations forthcoming in Deliverable 13.2. The DRI is Ireland’s national repository for the arts, humanities and social sciences. A Working Group of cultural heritage professionals has been invited to contribute feedback.

There are well-established standards and traditions driving the various approaches to image sharing in the sector, both local and global, which influence everything from the creation of digital image files, their intellectual organisation and level of description, to statements of rights governing use. Additionally, there are technological supports and infrastructures that have emerged to facilitate these practices which have significant investment and robust community support. These practices and technologies serve the existing communities of users well, primarily the needs of government, business and higher education, as well as the broader general public. Recommendations for adapting established collections delivery mechanisms to facilitate the use of cultural heritage images as research data would ideally not supersede or duplicate processes that also serve these other communities of users, and any solutions proposed in the context of the WorldFAIR Project must be made in respect of these wider contexts for image sharing.

New from WorldFAIR! Cultural Heritage Mapping Report: ‘Practices and policies supporting Cultural Heritage image sharing platforms’ – out now – CODATA, The Committee on Data for Science and Technology

“New WorldFAIR Project Deliverable 13.1 ‘Cultural Heritage Mapping Report: Practices and Policies supporting Cultural Heritage image sharing platforms’ outlines current practices guiding online digital image sharing by institutions charged with providing care and access to cultural memory, in order to identify how these practices may be adapted to promote and support the FAIR principles for data sharing.

This report looks closely at the policies and best practices endorsed by a range of professional bodies and institutions representative of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (the ‘GLAMs’) which facilitate the acquisition and delivery, discovery, description, digitisation standards and preservation of digital image collections. The second half of the report further highlights the technical mechanisms for aggregating and exchanging images that have already produced a high degree of image interoperability in the sector with a survey of six national and international image sharing platforms: DigitalNZ, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Europeana, Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive and Flickr….”

Over €4.4 million granted to four new projects to enhance the common European data space for cultural heritage | Europeana Pro

“The Europeana Initiative is at the heart of the common European data space for cultural heritage, a flagship initiative of the European Union to support the digital transformation of the cultural heritage sector. Discover the projects funded under the initiative….

We are delighted to announce that the European Commission has funded four projects under their new flagship initiative for deployment of the common European data space for cultural heritage. The call for these projects, launched in spring 2022, aimed at seizing the opportunities of advanced technologies for the digital transformation of the cultural heritage sector. This included a focus on 3D, artificial intelligence or machine learning for increasing the quality, sustainability, use and reuse of data, which we are excited to see the projects explore in the coming months….”

Job vacancy Head of External Relations and Advocacy | Europeana Pro

“As head of external relations and advocacy at the Europeana Foundation you will manage and develop strategic positioning and relationships to maximise the impact of the Europeana brand in the digital cultural heritage landscape and contribute to strengthening Europeana’s role vis a vis Member States. 

Working directly to the General Director, you will develop narrative and messaging that promotes organisational values and objectives and develop the strategy for engaging with key EU stakeholders.

Working closely with the MarComms team and the Member States Liaison officer, you will develop and deliver an advocacy and stakeholder engagement strategy to support an integrated organisational approach to communications, marketing and stakeholder engagement and you will lead corporate communications and advocacy activities as part of that approach.

This position is key to the success of Europeana as it creates understanding and awareness of the organisation, the value it provides and its role in the cultural, digital and political landscape.  …”

Europeana Conference | Europeana Pro

“Europeana 2022 will take place from 28 – 30 September 2022. It will be a hybrid conference, and we hope to welcome cultural heritage professionals from around the world both in person, to the KB, National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague, and digitally. We aim to explore how we can collaboratively build a common data space for cultural heritage and raise voices from across the sector to empower digital transformation and explore the role digital cultural heritage plays in today’s and tomorrow’s world. …”

Automated search in the archives: testing a new tool | Europeana Pro

“Archives Portal Europe, the online repository for archives from and about Europe, aggregates archival material from more than 30 countries and 25 languages – all searchable through one simple search engine.

In order to help researchers navigating this Babylon of languages, Archives Portal Europe have created an automated topic detection tool that expands the keyword search of a single user to create semantic connections with other documents in different languages. This testing session will allow users to preview the tool (currently in its alpha version), test it, and provide fundamental feedback for its development, and will have prizes! …”

Europeana and the Open GLAM survey – Douglas McCarthy

“There’s a lot of open access cultural heritage out there – well over 60,000,000 items – but naturally, it is dispersed across the thousands of digital platforms where GLAMs publish collections. This presents the Open GLAM survey with a challenge: how to keep track of new and updated open data? …”

 

Elisabeth Niggemann and Joke van der Leeuw-Roord reflect on their time on the Europeana Foundation board | Europeana Pro

“As the Europeana Foundation begins a new chapter of its story, with Martina Bagnoli taking on the role of Supervisory Board Chair, Elisabeth Niggemann and Joke van der Leeuw-Roord – two long-standing, highly respected and influential Supervisory Board members who will step down in early 2022 – reflect on their time working with and guiding the development of the Europeana Foundation….”

Europeana’s partnership with OCLC brings cultural heritage to new audiences | Europeana Pro

“In October, we were delighted that our partnership with the global library cooperative OCLC came to fruition by making millions of cultural heritage items from Europeana available through the database WorldCat. We speak to Tim Martin, Director of Business Development and Publisher Relations at OCLC, to find out more….”

Council agrees on a negotiating mandate on the Data Governance Act

“Both the EP and Council texts contain amendments concerning the role of Open Access Common resources. In response to the initial DGA consultation, we submitted feedback to the Commission where we highlighted the fundamental role played by these resources in the overall data ecosystem. To safeguard this key function, it is important that Open Access Commons resources are not negatively affected by the DGA.

The Parliament’s text contains an addition in recital 37a stipulating that the provisions established by the DGA are without prejudice to the ability of non-profit organizations to make data and content available to the public under open licenses. This amendment would clearly signal that Open Access Common resources fall outside the scope of the DGA. As such, it would recognize their key role in today’s digital ecosystem.

The Council text includes a new definition of data intermediaries stipulating that only for-profit services fall into this category. If included in the final compromise, this addition would ensure that existing Open Access Resources, like Wikipedia or Europeana – which are generally recognized as not-for-profit – are not subject to the requirements that the DGA will impose on intermediaries.

Taken together, these two modifications would ensure that Open Access Commons resources are not subject to additional requirements that could endanger their modus operandi. To safeguard their position in the DGA and increase legal clarity, both Council’s and Parliament’s contributions therefore need to be included in the final text….”