Table sessions
Day 2 – Tuesday 8 December 
Track 4: Power to the people!
Open Image Archive
Fredrik Andersson
Fredrik Andersson is a Digital Coordinator at The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl Museum. In this role he is, amongst several work areas, in charge of the technical aspects of Publishing open data from the three museums on different platforms such as Wikimedia Commons and SOCH (Swedish Open Cultural Heritage). He’s very committed to the importance of licensing data and image files with open licenses according to valid metadata standards and he’s been involved in international projects such as Europeana and Google Art Project.The entire image archive from the Swedish government agency, LSH (consisting of three museums: The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl Museum), is available on the internet. All of the images are published under open licenses, nearly half of them in high resolution. The objective of the project ‘Open Image Archive’ was to make the museums’ image archives freely available to the public. The project consisted of three parts:
- Develop the web interface for our collection database, in order to be able to display high resolution images.
- Deliver linked open data and images to K-samsök – the Swedish national aggregator for cultural heritage data. This would allow users to collect and build new applications using the data.
- Donate all of our high resolution images to Wikimedia Commons in order to increase the reach of the material.
The result of this project is better quality data and increased possibilities for the use and re-use of our material, for example for children preparing school work, for innovators building applications or for researchers who can study objects closely, through high resolution images. We hope that this will contribute to building a platform for an increased use of our cultural heritage and that people around the world will benefit from this step.
When the digits are all that are left
Hendrik Hameeuw & Daniel Pletinckx
Hendrik Hameeuw is a research fellow at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and at the Belgian Federal Scientific Institute of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels. He graduated as archaeologist (2003) and Assyriologist (2002) and has since specialized himself in the use of new imaging techniques for cultural heritage artefacts and archaeological sites. He has participated in archaeological excavations in Syria for many years and has conducted imaging missions in Egypt, Turkey, multiple places in Europe and the US. Hendrik is member of the steering committees of the Digital Humanities of his university and of Dariah-FED in Belgium. In collaboration with the department of Electric Engineering (ESAT) at the University of Leuven Hendrik was from the start involved in the development of the Portable Light Dome (PLD) system; the first fully operable multi-directional light reflectance system using the principles of photometric stereo (PS). He has also used RTI and photogrammetry techniques on museum objects and in the field on rock art sites in Sweden and Egypt. Currently he coordinates a pioneer project and several WP’s in network projects all concerning the development of new multi-directional light systems which includes the automated acquisition and visualization of UV, Bleu, Green, Red and IR light spectra.
Daniel Pletinckx was trained as a civil engineer, with specialisation in information technology. He gained extensive experience in system design, quality assurance, digital image processing and synthesis, 3D and virtual reality through a career of 15 years in private industry. Currently, Daniel Pletinckx is director of Visual Dimension bvba, a SME dealing with ICT based innovation in cultural heritage and tourism. Visual Dimension specialises in new, efficient ways for creation of and interaction with 3D digital heritage assets. The company is active in European projects, such as the European Network of Excellence V-MusT.net that focuses on virtual and digital museums, and 3D-ICONS that provides 3D content of World Heritage monuments and sites through Europeana.Earthquakes, tsunamis, great fires, volcano eruptions, …; they have all destroyed the great achievements produced by mankind over the centuries. But the most fearful force has, at all times, been humans themselves. Whether it is the destruction of heritage sites to make place for the Olympics in Beijing, the dynamiting of the Bamiyan statues, the burning of the Timbuktu manuscripts or the demolishing of mausoleums of holy men in Syria and Iraq, people always seem to come up with justifying reasons. Strategies to overcome this must be formulated. The seven wonders of the world – of which only the Gizeh Pyramids survived – have taken a central position in our understanding of great architectural accomplishments which were lost, to be remembered only thanks to ancient writings. Today the odds are more favorable. Over the last 150 years, architects, engineers and archaeologists produced technical drawings of many heritage sites, digitalization projects and efforts are ongoing everywhere and imaging techniques allow reconstructions unthinkable up until recent times. But what to do with them? What is their accuracy? Do we have complete datasets linked with metadata? What is to be considered as a complete dataset? What has not been registered? Templates, protocols and standards should be developed to ensure their sustainability. When all of that is settled – if the original is lost or no longer accessible – why should we not enlist such assemblages of digital data to a class of protected virtual world heritage, a Second Life!
Want to know what your users want? Work together with them and find out!
Lotte Wilms & Steven Claeyssens
Lotte Wilms works as project leader Digital Scholarship at the Research department of the National Library of the Netherlands and is responsible for the Researcher-in-residence program. She has a BA in English Language and Culture and an MA in Medieval Studies from Utrecht University. She works at the KB since 2008 on various projects, such as the IMPACT project (www.impact-project.eu / www.digitisation.eu), Europeana Newspapers and the digitisation projects Staten-Generaal Digitaal and Early Dutch Books Online.
Steven Claeyssens studied Germanic Philology (Ghent University) and Book and Publishing Studies (Leiden University) and obtained his PhD from Leiden University (history of publishing). Today he is Data Services Coordinator at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands.How do you know what your users want? You talk to them and ask them this exact question. However, we learned that you get to know this even better if you work with them! Invite them into your organisation and set up a project that benefits both of you. And yes, that benefit could also just be to get a better understanding of their wishes.
The Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, has introduced a Researcher-in-residence program where we invite early career researchers to join us for a six-month research project using the digital collections of the KB. We have a programmer, data and content specialists available for them, and a desk in our offices. Together we then tackle a research question of their choosing. The end result of the project should ideally be beneficial to a wider (academic) community and will be published on the KB Research Lab. The researcher is hired from the university or research institute and will thus receive his or her regular salary, but is freed up for this project.
During this Table Session I will introduce our projects and open up the floor for institutions to talk about how they involve their users in their daily activities. Together we shall then discuss how the cultural heritage sector can increase the collaboration between users and institutions to benefit from the great opportunities that working together can provide.
Crowdfunding: the power of people for your creative projects
Milena Popova
Milena Popova is the head of the re-user services team at Europeana and aims to improve the distribution and re-use of digital cultural content by the creative industries and on the key markets of tourism, education and research. She oversees the further development of Europeana’s distribution infrastructure (Europeana Labs as a central element) and manages the relations with a diverse re-use partner network (from innovative labs to sister EU projects, such as Europeana Space and Europeana Food & Drink) and demonstrator projects. Her special focus lies on education, tourism and Smart Cities initiatives. Among her latest projects are Europeana on Google’s Field Trip app and the iTunes U project resulting in Europeana’s first Multi-Touch book and iTunes U course on WW1 theme. Prior to this position, Milena worked for German and Bulgarian software companies in marketing and business development roles.Crowdfunding is the practice of raising small amounts of money from a large number of individuals to finance a new (business) venture. It has grown in popularity globally as it expands the pool of investors beyond the traditional circle of owners, relatives and venture capitalists and benefits from the powerful outreach of social media.
In this session we will introduce you to crowdfunding as an alternative funding strategy for cultural heritage projects. We will warm up with a first-hand story of Europeana and our partner Platoniq about the experiences with Platoniq’s crowdfunding platform Goteo.org, with special focus on cultural projects.
Then, together, we will:
• Discuss where and how crowdfunding bring most value, e.g., suitable types of projects and main benefits
• Identify risks and barriers for implementation and how to overcome them, e.g., how to design a successful crowd-funding campaign
• Share plans for such projects in 2015 and list help and partners
Innovation and Knowledge Spillover
Trilce Navarrete
Trilce Navarrete is researcher with interest in the historic and economic aspects of digital heritage. Her research is driven by an interest to support understanding of the role of digital heritage in our lives and to increase efficiency, equity and effectiveness in the (re)use of heritage knowledge. She started researching the adoption of computers at work since 1999 in the heritage field. An important source of inspiration has been the spark of (sharing) knowledge across generations. Her PhD thesis from the University of Amsterdam is entitled A History of Digitization: Dutch Museums. Trilce has actively participated in international communities as speaker, researcher, and organizer. She regularly presents at different universities, at conferences and academic meetings, generally around the subjects of heritage, digital, policy and cultural economics. Trilce is currently Postdoc at the University of Southern Denmark and Guest Researcher at the University of Amsterdam. She has been involved in the Heritage institutions hold the physical evidence of our world, serving as intergenerational memory. The strength of collections lies in their usability: collections can support knowledge exchange and innovation. Allocation of resources is driven by organizational goals (e.g. education, access, research) but also reflects the market environment, which increasingly questions financial remuneration. If heritage organization can feed the creative industries, which in turn feed the economy, how can free flow of information be ensured in a way that allows the riches to be shared back to the source?
This session will involve the presentation of key results on the national and institutional ability to support innovation through digital activities across Europe and a discussion on challenges and opportunities to use the networked market of information to empower the user while being empowered as heritage organization.
Power to the teacher
Klaas van der Veen & Vibeke Roeper
Vibeke Roeper is an education specialist with a background in cultural heritage and literature. She currently works as Head of Education with Cultuurcompagnie Noord-Holland, and from january 2016 will be Managing Director of Plein C, a consultancy business specializing in implementing arts and cultural heritage in primary education.
Klaas van der Veen is an independent designer with a simple goal: to make people love places. How can we present heritage in a way that inspires and informs the (future) visitor? How can we make sure new ideas for our heritage or our environment propagate and thrive? At Explanation Design he initiates and manages the design of any digital and physical means that help convey the spirit of buildings, cities and landscapes. His company partners with organisations or companies dedicated to ‘place’ and its past, present and future.‘Power to the teacher’
Better education should be built on empowerment of the teacher. Educational material is not entertainment for the pupils, nor impressive technology, it is purely a tool to improve the teacher-pupil interaction. How can we enable institutions, teachers and pupils to use heritage to create a meaningful interaction with it?
Customization
In the future teachers will create lessons about heritage, using open collections. Anything is possible. What is realistic, effective or efficient? Shouldn’t certain basic knowledge, with proven ways to convey it, be available as a base layer, ready to add any content to?
Sharing
The sharing of collections is not enough, the heritage field will need to provide education staff, teachers and pupils with a thematic selection of heritage from a network of collections. Our ‘Heritage Education Program’ (Erfgoedleerlijn) does that, but what will it evolve into?
The interaction with the DISH audience is about:
- team: which experts do you need, and why, now and in the future?
- what is needed to enable the teacher to use our tools?
- how can we nudge heritage people to share their digitised collection?
- the future: can heritage organisations link directly with teachers?
The things presented are:
- our view on heritage and the role of digitisation
- our take on the key components of improving education
- specifics about our project Erfgoedtools, examples of our other digital education projects
- live demo of tools for making and playing games with digitised collection items
MapMyVisit, a personal collection for all your visitors! – Sponsor Table Guide ID
Petra Brinkhof
Petra Brinkhof is Business Manager for Guide ID. Petra has spent the last 10 years working in the Heritage and Cultural field. Working for numerous companies who specialize in different parts of the field. In her career Petra has worked on a wide range of projects, including Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum, The National Maritime museum and the Hermitage Amsterdam. Before working in the heritage field Petra spent over 13 years working in international sales. In her current job for Guide ID(since 2013)she enjoys the challenge of combining commercial interests with educational and visitor services projects.In this table session we will discuss about new business models that we can create with MapMyVisit. MapMyVisit is designed to help cultural institutes to connect with their visitors. With MapMyVisit it’s possible to offer their own personal tour to all visitors, after their visit. The visitor activates his or her tour with an email address at a console. This can be done before after or during the tour. The Podcatcher tracks which stops are listened to and the visitors can bookmark their favorite stops along the way as well.
Based on the collected data a personal webpage is created, which the visitor can view via a personal email link. Here, visitors can view which stops they listened to, which stops they missed and which stops they bookmarked as their favorites, during the tour. The stops are displayed with images, text and audio. This makes it possible for visitors to re-live the tour at home or share their experience with a friend or family member. Within this personal webpage museums are able to link the visitors to all social media outlets, web pages, ticketing page, membership page, web shop etc. What MapMyVisit does is to create a long term connection between the site and their visitors, and it extends the experience after visit. Besides this it creates a legacy for the collection and it helps museums to increase visitor numbers, repeat visits and revenues streams from their web shop. It can It can even create new revenue streams via online printed merchandise sales.
New ways to present and experience digital content – Sponsor Table CCS
Claus Gravenhorst
Claus Gravenhorst joined CCS Content Conversion Specialists GmbH in 1983, holds a diploma in Electrical Engineering (TU Braunschweig, 1983). Today he is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at CCS leading business development. For 10 years Claus was in charge of the product management of CCS products. During the METAe Project, sponsored by the European Union Framework 5, from 2000 to 2003 Claus collaborated with 16 international partners (Universities, Libraries and Research Institutions) to develop a conversion engine for books and journals. Claus was responsible for the project management, exploration and dissemination. The METAe Project was successfully completed in August 2003. Since 2003 he is engaged in Business Development and promoted CCS technologies as a speaker on various international conferences and exhibitions. In 2006 Claus contributed as a co-author to “Digitalization – International Projects in Libraries and Archives”, published in June 2007 by BibSpider, Berlin. From 2012 to 2015 he was collaborating with 18 European partners in the Europeana Newspapers Project, partially funded under the EU ICT PSP programme, and took care of the conversion of 2 million newspaper pages to highly structured content.Apart from collecting born digital items, cultural heritage institutions are currently using technologies and services in the field of high quality digitisation and conversion to create digital content from their valuable print collections. Once digital, this enables a variety of different access scenarios to meet the needs of today’s users.
An obvious mission of the cultural heritage community is to share the knowledge that their treasures represent, with society as a whole. And the public, along with the active research community, has high expectations as to how the material is presented: Make it user-friendly, fun and fast! So do we have the right strategies and tools in place to meet these goals?
The key is to attract and engage today’s demanding users. But we can only do that with the expertise and knowledge of librarians: It is their know-how after all that allows valuable digital content to be curated into inspiring packages that go hand in hand with the creative new ways for access and presentation being developed.
The industry is currently working on technologies to make digital content available on touchpad/touchscreen devices and let users interact with the content. Based on a brief introduction of these technologies and products, a new approach for presenting curated digital content will be drawn up and discussed.
Who determines our digital heritage for the future?
Patrick Timmermans
Patrick Timmermans is Director of Erfgoed Brabant (Brabant Heritage), What is the role of the expert? What value should be allocated to the voice of the public? Who actually determines what our cultural heritage for the future is? To what extent can we apply to the digital cultural heritage domain what we apply in the traditional cultural heritage domain? Should we leave the representation of us, of our life and times for the next generation be in the hands of experts, makers or to the general public? Most recently a participative programme was organised by Erfgoed Brabant during the Dutch Design Week inviting heritage professionals, policy makers, experts and the audience the reflect on this question. Patrick will share the experiences of this programme and will invite the participants at the table to discuss the how these outcomes relate to the digital domain.
Circulations of culture. A study of piracy?
Aleksandra Janus
Aleksandra Janus is an Open GLAM specialist at Centrum Cyfrowe, PhD candidate at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, a researcher and activist. She is especially interested in the politics of heritage and the potential of re-use of open heritage resources. She is involved in numerous initiatives promoting openness and participatory models of work in the GLAM sector. Member of the Open GLAM Benchmark Survey team and one of the authors of a report on Polish part of the project. She was a speaker at i.a.: the MuseumNEXT conference (Barcelona 2012), Inclusive Museum Conference (Los Angeles 2014) and annual conferences of ICOM Comcol (Berlin 2011, Cape Town 2012).The domain remaining out of control of the state and the market is very varied. We lend and borrow books and records. We watch films uploaded to YouTube, but also we download them from websites and p2p networks. Usually we do not think whether we do it legally or not. And the facts of the case may be varied – there is content made available on the web illegally, but we may also use many materials in accordance with the law. Wanting to become familar with and understand new practices one may not assess them in advance, let alone condemn them as illegal or wrong. Only knowing their scale, character and consequences may we assess the influence of new circulations of content on the sphere of culture. Do we talk about „piracy”? We prefer to talk about a social exchange of content and its informal circulation. And that’s what our study is about.