6. Europeana supports economic growth:
Creative Industries in Europe are
growing fast (estimated 7% per annum)
and they need fuel.
Europeana provides that.
To date 770 businesses, entrepreneurs,
educational & cultural organisations
are re-using our data in websites, apps
and games.
9. Europeana Creative
The Europeana network of museums, archives,
libraries, creative industry companies and hubs
Building a virtual Europeana Lab to make reusing digital cultural heritage content easy
10. Europeana Labs
An innovative space for use by developers,
media artists, entrepreneurs and creatives to
access the content, data, tools & services of
Europeana the Digital Service Infrastructure
for Cultural Heritage.
Launching early 2014 with a couple of pilots
15. What will Europeana Labs give you?
The Europeana Access to a large database of inspiring
(rights cleared!) cultural digital data for new,
interactive applications
Access to a large amount of (rights cleared!) assets for
new products, with ready-made APIs and IPR
frameworks
Somewhere to demonstrate, apply or use the tools and
services you develop
I would like to talk about a couple of the ways that I think your project can help Europeana and therefore all of the Digital Cultural Heritage from our memory institutions. This is not exhaustive and does not cover much of what ITN-DCH is setting out to do but in the time we have I would like to concentrate on input – i.e. how your research into the sustainability and standardisation of digital cultural heritage and indeed improvements in the digitisation process will be a major contribution and output – how you might wish to make use of our soon to be launched Europeana Labs service to create new services and tools for users
Europeana is an investment in the future of Europe. Europe’s cultural richness and diversity is being made available digitally to the wider world and to its own citizens, for mutual understanding, for democratic access to our shared past and as fuel for creativity & new business.
Europe, Parliament, Council and Commission should be very proud of their achievement to date. They have tried to lift us beyond the economic alliance.
Europeana has been a major catalyst in the digital shift for the cultural heritage institutions across Europe. It has created access to culture online and is now together with this ecosystem poised to become a catalyst for innovation. BUT there is still a lot do and this is where projects such as Initial Training Networks for Digital Cultural Heritage come in.
Europeana is not the standalone portal you see here.
It is an ecosystem of contributors of cultural heritage data, researchers and technologists who can manipulate and enrich that data, a network of professionals who create policy for the use and reuse of the data and recently a growing group of creatives, developers and entrepreneurs who will exploit that data, under open, fair and agreed conditions.
. It has developed repositories of metadata and content from actually 2300 museums, libraries, archives and audio visual institutions from all European Union & EFTA countries. This data is standardised, harmonised, multilingual, rights labelled and made interoperable. And is now beginning to be used in classrooms, in augmented reality tourism, in serious games, etc. It is an underlying resource to be further distributed and exploited. It is already in Commission speak a “digital service infrastructure” and is on the cusp of helping to create new things from old clothes. i.e fuel for economic growth
But it is a resource that needs to be enriched, to be sustained, to be preserved, to be used in new environments which is where the work of ITN-DCH comes in. Anything that supports the long term availability of our digital cultural heritage so that it can be reused in new and exciting ways helps deliver the impacts Europeana is looking to create.
We pull in the digitally available material of our cultural heritage institutions and enable it to work together so that it can be pushed or pulled out by communities wanting to view, reuse, research and discover our cultural heritage. It is in the first part of this supply chain that the work of this project can provide many improvements. In the Europeana Data Model, in Semantic signatures, in enrichment of data etc. Everything that improves the access, discoverability and eventual reusability of this material
Having improved this data, the aim is that users can find this material in places they already use, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, thematic sites, educational Apps, tourism apps, the list can be endless and it is scaleable. And that therefore Europeana can have a least 3 major impacts -
I want to mention one of these impacts in a little more detail as it goes to the second area where I think this project can help
We have some great examples in the API being reused by the memory institutions themselves to take back content that is about their countries heritage, that belongs or contributes to their collections, Or its reuse in education such as this site of the national science museums which is powered by Europeana or our wonderful Open Culture App which came out of Glimworm, our next speaker, developing Muse in a Europeana Hackathon and launching it as the Rijksmuseum reopened physically being able to apply the same basic software and idea to a wider set of Europeana data.
Your work can improve the ways we can reach and use this data.
We are putting in place the infrastructure to make this all easier to achieve. So this is the dream, we hope to have up and running within the next 18 months. Where cultural content institutions place their material to be enriched and where all types of uses, professional, gamer or fashionista can view their own heritage in ways they want and contribute back. So memory institutions reach a wide and varied set of users, by working together on solving issues and making use of the multiplier effects
Which brings me to the final area I want to talk about. Europeana Labs
And we’ve started to set this up under a project called
A network…..
Buidling a ….
that