Table sessions

Day 2 – Tuesday 8 December Track 3: Lose control, gain influence!

Aggregators – single-purpose platform or a gateway to collaboration?
Ágoston Berger

We have used aggregators as gateways to Europeana for quite a while now. But are they a single-purpose platform only or can they be the basis of something greater?
Monguz Ltd, based in Hungary and supplying software for Central and Eastern Europe, is currently working on a number of projects based on aggregator technology that aim to deliver quality value-added data and services compared to the services of individual member institutions. This includes ELDORADO, a national platform for common digitization efforts, unified management of digital legal deposits and interlibrary loaning of printed material that provides a webshop-like public distribution service in Hungary. A similar initiative called BROAD is in the pilot phase in Romania that provides a common digitization platform and aims to create a long-needed union catalog and management service for the legal deposit system. We have built a social portal showcasing the collections of the museums of Lesser Poland that aims to guide potential visitors through the diverse collections the members offer. A similar aggregator dubbed MuseuMAP is in operation in Hungary that builds on technologies both developed by Monguz and those created by Europeana Inside.
We believe that the future of aggregators lies just here – providing value-added services where individual institutions cannot succeed alone. In providing a common platform where the professionals of GLAM organizations can work together, eliminating the usual barriers individual institutions face and providing better access to their invaluable content to the public, we aim to increase the visibility and influence of memory institutions.

Lose control and innovate
Geert-Jan Bogaerts

The world is much smarter than you are, even if you have the best experts working for you. The wisdom of the crowds is not a wholly antiquated idea! If you want to truly innovate and get ahead, you need to source this smartness. That’s what Dutch broadcaster VPRO is trying to do: structure innovation along specific research and programming guidelines and build and use a network to research and execute projects with.

The network itself needs to be diverse in scale, in expertise, and in types of organization. Only then is it possible to really get the most out of it.

In this table discussion, we will elaborate on this mechanism and talk about its merits and limitations. Limitations are often imposed because of rights issues. As a media organization, we often work with outside producers that we share the rights with. Contract negotiations almost always involve some kind of stipulation on public re-distribution after initial publication in digital forms. If the project really fits well into our research and programming guidelines and some kind of innovative experiment is thus called for, public redistribution under some kind of creative-commons agreement is a requirement in these negotiations.

What does it cost?
Marcel Ras

Digital curation involves managing, preserving and adding value to digital assets over their entire lifecycle. The active management of digital assets maximises their reuse potential, mitigates the risk of obsolescence and reduces the likelihood that their long-term value will diminish. However, this requires effort so there are costs associated with this activity. As the range of organisations responsible for managing and providing access to digital assets over time continues to increase, the cost of digital curation has become a significant concern for a wider range of stakeholders. Establishing how much investment an organisation should make in its curation activities is a difficult question. If a shared path can be agreed that allows the costs and benefits of digital curation to be collectively assessed, shared and understood, a wider range of stakeholders will be able to make more efficient investments throughout the lifecycle of the digital assets in their care.

NCDD will start a project to collect cost data and compare these data between organisations, helping to identify opportunities for increased efficiency, better systems and processes and enabling valuable exchanges of information between peers. In this round table we will discuss how organisations working in a variety of different domains can more cost-effectively look after and account for the digital assets in their care. So in five years time (2020) it should be easier to design or procure more cost effective and efficient digital curation services because the costs, benefits and the business cases for doing so will be more widely understood across

OpenGLAM benchmark survey: Diffusion of Open Data and Crowdsourcing among Heritage Institutions
Joris Pekel

In a survey among heritage institutions in Finland, Poland, Switzerland, and The Netherlands we examined the diffusion of various Internet-related practices within the heritage sector. The practices examined comprise the exchange of data with other institutions, the digitisation of heritage objects, open data/open content, the use of social media, as well as collaborative content creation. During this session the main outcomes of the survey will be presented. In particular:

• Diffusion of innovative practices among heritage institutions such as open data, digitisation, collaborative content creation and LOD.
• Expected dynamics of adoption of open data, open content and crowdsourcing.
• Driving and hindering factors of open content and crowdsourcing.
• An outlook into the next 5 years.

Controlling the uncontrollable?
Jeroen Padmos

The Netherlands is among the top ten knowledge economies in the world. Information has become a valuable asset and an ICT plays an important role in our digital information society. The exponential growth of digital information poses unprecedented opportunities. In the Netherlands, however, there is an often underestimated threat, namely that the governmental information management finds itself in a deplorable state. Because of this it is only with great difficulty to meet up with the basic requirements placed on open government. Just recently a parliamentary inquiry committee expressed her frustration about the poor availability of crucial information. In a spasmodic reaction government develops many standards, frameworks of standards and guidelines. In this session, the value of archives in the twenty-first century is discussed: is the current archival practice able to come to terms with the rapidly changing need of information and must we keep on trying to control the uncontrollable?

How open data is gaining rapidly impact for archival collections
Tim de Haan

The traditional business model of an archive is to attract as much as possible (physical) visitors within our building, our readingroom and our website. Tourniquets in our building are used to record the amount of visitors. We count the number of requested documents or the number of websiteclicks. This principle is nowadays still leading in the perspective of enter up the (re)use of our (online) collection. Try to gain as much listings, credits and for example revenues as possible. Cultural entrepreneurship is essential in this business model.
Due to open data this model is under pressure. Through a variety of reasons we’re offering as much of our collection material open and accessible as possible. Without frantically controlling this information output.
The impact of this open collection is gaining importance. However we’re lacking the proper tools measuring this impact it is clear that offering the material freely through Europeana or Wikipedia the impact is much bigger than the keeping the material “closed” in our own websites and webshops, waiting for the potential customer someday to pass by. In this session the shift in models is explained, what will be lost but more what can be gained.

Get Linked! – Sponsor Table DEVENTit
Peter van Diermen

This chef’s table has the title: Get Linked! This refers to the connections layer of the Dutch National Strategy Digital Heritage. In this layer, data from various collections and disciplines get connected into the semantic web. The way to do this is to link to standard vocabularies through standard thesauri like the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic names (GTN), The Heritage Thesaurus of the RCE, etc.

The chef’s table will present a roadmap to get linked to the semantic web through Linked Open Data and discuss the technologies needed and hazards of this trail in relation to current heritage collections.

The presenter of this table is drs. Ing. P. (Peter) van Diermen, director of DEVENTit BV. DEVENTit is the supplier of the Atlantis software for collection management and portal creation. In this respect, providing tools to get linked is an everyday challenge.

Axiell’s Annotation Service : Multiple online vocabulary sources in one view to make your data Linked-Open automatically – Sponsor Table Axiell
Rene van den Heuvel

More and more vocabulary resources are available online to help annotate and describe collections. Examples of these resources include the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), but also RKD Artists, DBpedia events, Dbpedia people, ICONCLASS and Wordnet. It is now easier than ever to use these resources in your collection management system in an integrated way.

Axiell launches a new Annotation Service that brings these online resources together to use directly in your collection management system. Not only will this help improve the quality of the metadata, but it will also automatically make this metadata Linked-Open. Every time a term or name is selected from an online source, it’s URI is also picked up as well as source information. These URI’s become part of the collection and can be shared with others to link your data. In addition to this, alternative languages for the selected terms and names are picked up so that your metadata automatically becomes multilingual.

The Annotation Service is available for Axiell’s collection management systems (Adlib, Emu, Calm and Mimsy XG) as well as for other CMS.

This session will show how the Axiell Annotation Service works and how it can be implemented.