Poster sessions

Day 1 – Monday 7 December  Track 1: Lose your modesty!

“Oh, Analog is Analog and Digital is Digital, and never the twain shall meet”?
Rob Blaauboer & Paul Manwaring

Is it true, to paraphrase English writer Rudyard Kipling: “Oh, Analog is Analog and Digital is Digital, and never the twain shall meet”? I believe it is not so. Both have their unique strengths and the combination of the two allow for exiting new ways to bring your collection to your visitors. One of the ‘children’ of the marriage of analog and digital are beacons. Beacons are (cheap) small radio transmitters that send out a signal that smartphones can pick up. They allow for precise positioning and navigation with an accuracy of 50 cm. This allows pinpointing of your visitors and what they are looking at. Imagine the new ways of bringing the collection (and the stories behind them) to the visitor. At the same time giving insight to what your visitors look and how the navigate. Did you know that an often asked question in museums is: could you point me to the toilet?

In this workshop we explore the possibilities of beacons for heritage institutions. We will, in a live setting, add layers of information to an existing object (e.g. a painting) and give a taste of what beacons could bring beacons. This, without high investments in either hardware or software, but bundled ‘as a service’ with a possibility of a shared infrastructure and group buying. It is our vision that this technology should be available to all heritage institutions in order to boldly enter the ‘digilog’ world.

Do you want a million page views with that? – Strategic alliances between GLAMs and Wikipedia
Arne Wossink

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s the vision behind Wikipedia and its sister projects. But even with almost 5 million articles on the English Wikipedia alone and 27 million media files on Commons, the Wikimedia movement has still only begun to scrape the surface of what’s possible. To make all this happen, cooperations between Wikimedia projects and GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) are more common than ever. And it is not only Wikipedia that benefits from such cooperations. Wikipedia solidly ranks in the top 10 most-visited websites worldwide and thus reaches an audience that most GLAMs can only dream of. This poster seeks to give an overview of the different types of strategic alliances that are possible between Wikimedia projects and GLAMs. Benefits of each type of alliance will be presented. The poster will use examples from the GLAM-Wiki cooperations in which Wikimedia Netherlands is a partner, such as a project where the Rijksmuseum uploaded images of birds and Wikipedians and specialists help to identify the species, or Wikipedia Collections; a special app for museums which uses content from Wikipedia to contextualize their own collections and exhibits.

Research data: forever and for everyone?
Ingeborg Verheul

In september 2015 I will start a new job concerning a (national) innovation programme on research data (how to store them for the long term and how to make them reusable). First actions will be a road map and a white paper. The initiative and coordination of this programme lies with SurfSara, a daughter company of Surf. Surf is the ICT provider for higher education and research in the Netherlands.
SurfSara participates in ResearchData.nl, (www.researchdata.nl) and closely works together with DANS and 3TU. In the session I would like to elaborate on the progress made and I would like to discuss wishes, needs, expectations, fears and allergies that are living in the cultural heritage sector with regard to research data.

EUscreen
Maria Drabczyk

Organising an audiovisual archive so that it engages various types of audiences with different needs and areas of interest is challenging. It is even more so when combining collections from over 20 unique European AV archives and broadcast archives in a single access point that presents collections in contextually rich way. EUscreen has taken up this challenge. The goal of this network (that also consists of technology providers and media historians) is to efficiently and with innovative technical solutions at hand provide access and curate AV archive materials appealing to various target groups.

EUscreen is about weaving the web of right people and expertise gathered around the panEuropean challenges and goals to make the audiovisual content and metadata manageable, searchable, findable, and accessible for future reuse. The EUscreen network is the key element itself with a well balanced mix of professionals: academics, AV professionals, technical experts and educators with the aim to support durable and contextualised access to Europe’s television heritage via euscreen.eu, the VIEW Journal, developing new tools, setting up creative partnerships and being actively engaged in shaping EU policy. As a best practice network, securing highstandards in content annotation, discoverability, contextualisation and publication EUscreen has teamed up with European Broadcasting Union and Europeana to introduce high metadata standards to support overall data management and exchange of audiovisual content online. These make a necessary ingredient when thinking about content reuse and creative partnerships, like the collaboration with Historiana on the creation of interactive teaching material using archival footage.

The focus of the presentation will be on highlighting strategic crossborder and crosssectoral Alliances crucial to unlock fully the potential of our common digital cultural heritage. We will share our experience, lessons learned from various types of undertaken collaborations and point the audience to the components indispensable to compose durable coalitions leading to a presentation of rich and diverse portrait of European heritage. Attendees will: learn about EUscreen’s achievements and necessary ingredients essential for creating efficient collaborations with various stakeholders, get the opportunity to compare with a panEuropean network their own experience and discuss challenges met by institutions engaged in improving visibility of the European digital heritage.

Repurpose your data! Towards an open source datahub.
Matthias Vandermaesen & Alina Saenko

The perception of cultural institutions as keepers of collections is changing. These organizations are becoming drivers for the expansion of knowledge and creativity of a broad audience by making data accessible for reuse through modern web-technologies.

A majority of institutions reuse digital information to a limited extent focusing their efforts on core metadata and digital images. A lot of contextual data remains inaccessible for web-applications. Lack of an overall digital mind-set, technologic skillsets, financial means,… prevent the valorization of these data. A good strategy to overcome these issues and leverage the full knowledge reservoir of museums is collaboration.

In 2013 the VKC-partners and CAHF-partners asked PACKED vzw to analyze the digital flows in the three Flemish museums of fine arts and four contemporary art museums in Ghent, Antwerp, Ostend and Bruges. This resulted in a mutual work plan for reshaping the IT-architecture.

So far, this alliance has made it possible to realize various projects for mutual benefit: normalization, persistent identification and enrichment of data, introduction of a data-manager role, exploration of new technologies such as LIDO-xml. In 2015 the partners started to work on the last phase of this trajectory: a joint datahub featuring a RESTful API and to be released as an open source project targeting an interested community of cultural institutions, developers, researchers…

This presentation gives an overview of results of these collective actions, invites the public to exchange thoughts, give feedback on reusable data, API’s and ways of persuading museums to participate in this kind of projects.

Digital Humanities in the KB
Lotte Wilms & Steven Claeyssens

The National Library of the Netherlands (KB) is an active partner in national and international cooperative efforts to develop new knowledge and technology. With this poster, we wish to showcase what the KB offers researchers in the field of Digital Humanities.
The KB has planned to have digitised and OCRed its entire collection of books, periodicals and newspapers from 1470 onward by the year 2030. Already in 2013, 10% of this enormous task was completed, resulting in 73 million digitised pages, either from the KB itself or via public-private partnerships as Google Books and ProQuest. Over 1 million books, newspapers and magazines are currently available via the search portal www.delpher.nl.
Next to this, most of these data sets are freely available for research purposes and we welcome and encourage experiments and new applications. The virtual KB Research Lab shows some of such applications and invites researchers to experiment with our data, new technologies and innovative prototypes. The KB also collaborates with researchers in research projects and fellowships to learn from their research in order to improve the services we provide for Digital Humanists.
This poster will present the various data sets that the KB has available for research, the activities we undertake to work together with scholars in research projects and the services that we offer those who wish to work with our material.

The new museum of Literature: in Bèta forever!
Irma Benliyan

The museum of Dutch Literature will proudly launch its new online museum in January 2016; a place where the museum’s archive is digitally presented to large audiences. This platform is made in collaboration with Huygens ING.

The collection of this museum, mostly consisting of handwritten paper, is not particularly attractive without context for most people. The documents become meaningful and interesting when they are embedded in a ‘story’. Placed in the right context the documents are unique, independent testimonies, which give new insights into writers and their work, and in a broader sense, our cultural history.

This new online museum of Literature will present the stories that have been made, and how the archive has been embedded in the present. It is clear that this is just the beginning of this online museum; the goal is to realize an active online community. A place where the people contribute, learn and also are inspired to read literature…as we believe that people understand the world better when they look at it from different perspectives. And literature provides those perspectives.

It is kept in mind that this online museum of literature will be in Bèta stage forever. It shall never be finished. In this session we want to research our future interactions with all our audiences and stakeholders. How can we keep this online museum exciting, innovative and ground breaking for educational purposes, people interested in literature, researchers…. but also our financial funders?