Day 2 – Lose control, gain influence!

Table sessions

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

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

Agoston BergerÁgoston Berger, MSc in neurobiology, BSc in software engineering (University of Szeged, Hungary), is a software architect and developer specializing in memory institutions. He has 6 years of experience at Qulto – Monguz Ltd, a company supplying collections management systems (CMS) and custom-built interactive solutions for cultural institutions, where he is head of R&D department and CMS development, including the flagship product, Qulto. He has been involved in larger projects both national and European, such as Europeana Inside or GOP-1.2.1-11-2011-0002 (automated refactoring on legacy systems) as coordinator and developer, as well as regional and national data aggregation projects such as MuseuMAP and Malopolska Digital Cultural Heritage.

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

Geert-Jan_BogaertsGeert-Jan Bogaerts is Head of the department Digital Media of Dutch broadcaster VPRO. Responsible for digital channels and innovation and distribution strategy. Member of management team. Entrepreneur in his new media consultancy named Raker. Taught at the University of Groningen, consulted on new media strategies, lectured and headed workshops at different media and marketing companies.

Journalist and editor with 15+ years of experience in financial reporting and international political and economic affairs. International experience during long-term stay in the US, North Africa/Middle East, Belgium. Involved in developing new media/internet strategy at de Volkskrant. Active in webdevelopment, Zend Certified Engineer.
Specialties: Strategic development, internet innovation, publishing, journalism, web development/programming.

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

Marcel Ras[1]Marcel Ras is Program Manager for the Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation (NCDD). The NCDD was founded in 2008 by a group of public organisations, which consider the long-term preservation of digital data collections to be one of their core tasks. The coalition aims to construct a shared organizational and technical infrastructure to ensure the long-term usability of digital files. This cannot be done all at once. A realistic approach would involve a gradual build-up, taking into consideration the differing responsibilities, roles, velocities, and means of all parties involved.

NCDD acts as a platform for haring knowledge in The Netherlands and as coordinator of collaborative projects in order to establish a national infrastructure. In this role Marcel is manager of the work programme Digitaal Erfgoed Houdbaar (Sustainable Digital Heritage) which is carried out a two-year programme of the Digital Heritage Network (NDE) and financed by OCW. In this work programme heritage organisations are collaborating in establishing a set of services, procedures, policies and standards to guarantee long-term access to digital information in The Netherlands in a cross-domain field. Marcel is NCDD’s Program Manager since January 2014 but has some years of experience in Digital Preservation. He started his Digital Preservation
 career at the national library of The Netherland (KB) where he set up a web archiving program. From 2007 until 2011 Marcel was manager of the e-Depot department at the KB and responsible for acquisition, ingest and long term storage of digital publications in the library. As program manager for the International e-Depot he became responsible for the development of the international e-journals archiving program of the KB in 2011. Marcel received his M.A. degree from Nijmegen University in Ancient History and Archaeology in 1992. After some of years of Archaeological field survey in Turkey and Italy, he joined the Post-Graduate training on Historical Information processing at Leiden University as Head and teacher of the training school. From 1999 to 2005 he worked as a consultant for the Digital Heritage Association and was involved in many digitization- and standardization projects in The Netherlands. As of 2005 Marcel embarked on his digital preservation mission.

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

Joris Pekel is the community coordinator cultural heritage at the Europeana Foundation. At Europeana he closely works together with memory institutions to open up cultural heritage data for everybody to enjoy and reuse. He is also coordinator of the OpenGLAM Network that promotes free and open access to digital cultural heritage held by Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) and brings together organisations, institutions and individuals that share this goal.

“I want to live in a world where all public information is made freely available for anyone to re-use without any restrictions, and where everybody has access to high-quality material from hundreds of institutions form all over the world.”

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

Jeroen_PadmosJeroen Padmos is trained as a historian of society and is currently working as open government advisor at the National Archives of the Netherlands with a special interest in archival disclosing policies and practices.

“A paradoxical world in which there is potentially more information, but in which the issues of sensitivity and access may result in less material being released.”

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

Tim de HaanTim de Haan is currently working on public access and open data at the Dutch Nationaal Archief. In the last years he was involved in opening the collection data(bases) as open data. He was also the liaison for the archive during the Wikipedian in Residence project with the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and Wikimedia Nederland in 2013/2014. In his other work as vice chairman of the gebiedscommissie Delfshaven he initiated the Wiki Delfshaven with an open spending section for the local awarded grants.

“Our archive website attracts yearly around 1,2 million visitors. Our open data images on wikimedia , wikipedia’s image repository generates monthly twenty times amount of visitors(24 million), finding lemmas illustrated with images from the archive! So aks yourself: Where is your (online) relevance?”

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

Peter_van_DiermenPeter van Diermen is the director of DEVENTit BV, a softwarehouse with a specialization in collection management and portal construction software. Their main product is Atlantis, a fully webbed solutions for various types of collections and markets.

With a bachelor and master degree in computer science and in information technology, he started off as a software developer in tailor made software at a company specialized in financial solutions. In 1998 he started DEVENTit BV through a management buy-out. Atlantis was in an early development stage then. Over the years DEVENTit evolved from a company in tailor made financial software to standard software solutions for collection management and portal construction. With the growth of the company his role changed from a lead developer toward general management and is leading in the strategic directions their Atlantis software platform has to go and which markets are targeted.

“Ït’s not about how you can do it but how the market wants you to do it.”

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

Rene van den HeuvelRene van den Heuvel is Senior Consultant and Sales Manager for Axiell in The Netherlands. Axiell is
the leading technology provider for the cultural heritage sector. Rene has extensive experience in this sector providing and implementing Adlib solutions for the management of collections. He has been involved in the evolution and extension of Adlib over the years and is currently taking part in the implementation of the new annotation service.

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.