We’re excited to see that our friends over at Culture24 have announced Let’s Get Real 2011, a 2-day conference (20th and 21st September 2011) built around the theme of how best to evaluate success online. (more…)
The following notes are taken live at the European Commission’s Member States Expert Group meeting. Opinions expressed are the author’s own.
INTRODUCTION
The meeting was introduced by Mr Khalil Rouhana, Director of Directorate E (Digital Library Initiative) at the European Commission. (more…)
Recently, the Europeana Foundation ran a survey to find out whether people would be willing to sign their new Licence Agreements. It wasn’t a wholly straightforward question since, for the first time, the Agreements specifically included the ability for unknown 3rd parties to put the metadata contained in Europeana to commercial uses. Permitting commercial uses is vital if Europeana is to achieve its ambition of publishing metadata about Europeana digital cultural content as Linked Open Data, and of sharing it with partners such as Wikipedia. (more…)
I was invited along to the offices of We Are What We Do the other day for a get-together to discuss the launch of HistoryPin.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with HistoryPin, it is essentially a web-based and mobile application which encourages young people and old people to ‘pin’ their photographs and the stories they tell to a map of the world. The web platform and iPhone app will be ‘launched’ (the web platform’s already been available for a while in a basic form) on the 11th July. (more…)
I was asked recently to summarise the current UK situation for museums and the digital agenda for some overseas visitors. Here’s what I said: (more…)
It’s a simple question. How much would it cost to Digitise everything in Europe’s museums, archives and libraries? Answering it turned out to be one of the biggest challenges the Collections Trust has ever faced. (more…)
The Collections Trust has announced OpenCulture 2011 - a 2-day Collections Management event for the UK and international community.
The first international event to focus on current and next-generation practice in Collections Management, OpenCulture 2011 features a Great Collections Management Exhibition and Trade Fair and a conference addressing key themes in Collections policy and practice, including:
Delegate fees start from as little at £66 plus VAT and there are attractive earlybird discounts for people registering before December 2010.
Find out more about this exciting event and register online at http://www.openculture2011.org.uk
The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that I recently accepted the role of Chair of the Europeana Council of Content Providers and Aggregators.The Council is a cross-industry body which connects content providers and aggregators including museums, archives, libraries, broadcasters and publishers throughout Europe.
I have taken on this role because I believe that there stands before us an opportunity to transform the way that digital cultural content is discovered, used, curated and distributed, and in the process to take culture to an entirely new and much larger audience.
I am really excited about the Council and the opportunity it presents to have these important cross-cutting conversations in an open forum. This is why I would like to extend an invitation to content providers and aggregators throughout the UK to join the Council and to become part of this conversation.
Every type of organisation or project that provides or will provide content to Europeana is welcome to join the Council. To join, all you need to do is register at http://www.version1.europeana.eu/web/guest/councilregistration
There is a full meeting of all Council members annually, and other meetings as needed. The first of these will be a plenary meeting, to be held in Amsterdam on the 13th and 14th October. At this meeting, we will be setting out an ambitious work programme designed to help us overcome some of the key obstacles to the emergence of a Digital Economy based on aggregation and distributed re-use.
Members join the Council in order to:
Members are asked to communicate the value of providing content to Europeana to their own national and domain networks, but apart from participating and sharing information, there are no responsibilities or costs associated with membership of the Council.
More information and a full list of current members of the Council is given at: http://www.version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-foundation/content-council
For further information, please contact feedback@europeana.eu. I am always keen to talk to anyone about Europeana and what it can do for their organisation, so do please leave me a note on this blog, or email me at nick@collectionstrust.org.uk to find out more.
Every once in a while, things shift imperceptibly but fundamentally on their axis. Devout views, long-held, become the laughable fancies of childish innocence. Entrenched positions become blurred as tectonic plates beneath them start to grind into motion. And so it is, it seems, with ‘Digital’.
Digital. The banner under which museums, libraries and archives unite. The ultimate priority of Governments across the Western world. The word has become axiomatic - ‘Digital Britain’, ‘Digital Economy Bill’, ‘Digital Culture’. But like all axioms, it is ultimately meaningless. Or at least, it means so many things that it has lost its way in a semantic miasma.
