Improvisation sessions
Day 1 – Monday 7 December 
Track 2: Stand up for yourself!
Organizing influence for heritage collections
Saskia van Bergen
Saskia van Bergen works as a Project manager for the Innovations and Projects Department of Leiden University Library. She is responsible for projects focusing on the digital access to Special Collections, and deal with the management of digitization, cataloguing and digital collections. Saskia also participated in several national projects, like Early Dutch Books Online (now Delpher) and the Dutch portal for academic heritage Academischecollecties.nl.One of the strategic goals of Leiden University Library (UBL) is to encourage the use of the heritage collections in research, education and by the general public. UBL has implemented several infrastructural improvements to make possible that these collections are included in the regular catalog. Currently, we are in the process of implementing a new repository infrastructure as well. This repository must meet the requirements of external portals (Europeana, ArchiveGrid), research infrastructures (CLARIN, DARIAH) and heritage architecture (NDE) with regard to access, usability and sustainability.
Together with other Dutch libraries, UBL is also moving towards an international context. The coming year all libraries will switch from cataloging in the Dutch union catalogue to the international WorldShare platform. These cooperations offer advantages in terms visibility, usability and sustainability, but the special needs of heritage collections cannot always be fulfilled in international systems designed for general collections. This is not unique for Leiden. Just think of the specialized but local thesauri that are now replaced by general, standard versions.
Although curators and managers dealing with heritage consider their collections essential for the image and profile of their institution, the general feeling is that the collections are at the same time too small to be able to make a difference. They feel dissatisfied with this situation, but believe they do not have the power to change it. In this session we want to turn this tide. Together with the audience, we want to investigate how we can organize influence. How can we give Calimero the tools he needs to turn him into a Goliath?
The lean-back table: smart-TV and media players for cultural heritage
Olaf Janssen
In the ever increasing battle for user attention most cultural heritage institutions still primarily concentrate on the browser (website, laptop, desktop) to reach audiences, far fewer rely on the mobile-first (tablet, smartphone, apps) paradigm.
The second bias is towards lean-forward content consumption – typically characterized by individual users having short spans of attention – as opposed to the lean-back paradigm of the TV, with its big screens in collective social settings, inviting for longer spans of attention.
I believe the heritage industry should explore the yet uncharted lean-back territories of smart-TV, media center and – for the boldest explorers – even hospitality TV in hotel environments.
In this session I would like to share and discuss these ideas. To make things manifest, I will show some results of my hands-on experiments with the open Kodi (www.kodi.tv – media center software) and RaspberryPi platforms.
Olaf Janssen is the Wikimedia and Open Data coordinator of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands. In that role he is the man-in-the-middle between the Wikimedia community and the knowledge, collections and data of the KB . In 2013 he initiated the first Wikipedian-in-Residence project in the Netherlands. He was closely involved in the early years of Europeana and was one of the founders of The European Library.