OpenCulture

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:

• Share best practice and common standards between museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections.  Seek common solutions to issues affecting holders of digitised heritage material
• Enable knowledge and technology transfer between different institutions, domains and countries
• Improve users’ experience by integrating all types of content through Europeana
• Enrich their content by displaying it alongside related material from other countries, other domains
• Be part of an award-winning, highly visible portal that is the focus of political attention
• Demonstrate the relevance of cultural and scientific heritage institutions to new generations of users

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.

With typical journalistic aplomb, the Telegraph article (Nicolas Sarkozy fights Google over classic books - Telegraph, 06.01.10) focuses on the easy story, and in so doing focusses on entirely the wrong thing. The real news is not so much the French Government’s well-documented antipathy to the Google Books settlement, but that embedded within France’s £30bn fiscal stimulus package is an investment of more than £680m in the Digitisation of ‘our museums, our libraries and our cinematographic heritage’. (See also articles in the FT, Lesoir.be and in the French press )

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Saturday morning saw me arrive bleary-eyed in Leeds to give a presentation to the Social History Curators Group about ‘Social History and Social Media’ - essentially a look at three key questions confronting the Social Historian in the digital age:

• Given that everyone’s experience and creative output is now spread across an extraordinary range of channels and platforms, how can we hope to curate digital Social History?
• Given that two of the central tenets of the new generation of digital services are collectivism and radical trust, what is the redefined role of a curator going to look like and how do we communicate it to the public?
• To what extent can the new technological tools, and the philosophies hich underpin them, be harnessed to the work of capturing and curating social history?

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‘Digitisation in Europe’, the very phrase sends a thrill of excitement through most people. It’s right up there with a Premiership goal or a Big Brother eviction. But what happens in Europe is important, whether you realise it or not. Most of the issues which museums are grappling with - copyright, digitisation, funding - are being addressed across Europe and in the European Commission, and their work often has a direct impact on us.

Last week I was in Luxembourg for the 4th meeting of the European Member States Expert Group on Digitisation. The purpose of the Group is to share knowledge and information about what is happening in European Member States and to work on issues of common interest.

The theme for this meeting was ‘Europeana, Europeana, Europeana’. For those of you that haven’t read my previous posts, Europeana is the European Commission’s search engine of cultural information, and it also happens to be one of the EC’s proudest achievements.

This means that any and all European funding streams which even vaguely relate to creating digital content are being diverted to drive content into Europeana. Put it this way, in the next 4 years, you won’t be able to get money from Europe (and from a number of UK funders too) unless the content you produce is available to Europeana.The drive to get metadata and thumbnail images into Europeana is even having a direct influence on the current EC Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy.

So how will the UK respond to this priority? Well, in several ways. In a formal sense, the main element of our participation in Europeana is to aggregate cultural information into the PN Discover Service, and from there to serve it up to Europeana. The Collections Trust has also agreed to participate, on behalf of the UK, in the Europeana Content Contributors Advisory Panel. This means that content which you make available to the PNDS will also automatically be made available to Europeana.

The Collections Trust is also the UK coordinator for the EuropeanaLocal and ATHENA projects. The aim of these projects is to support smaller local and regional museums in getting their content online and into Europeana. Expect to read much more about this topic on this blog soon!

Finally, the main announcement at the Luxembourg meeting was that the European Commission’s Structural Funding Programme is set to release millions of Euros into the digitisation of cultural content over the next few years. The Collections Trust is liaising with the Information Society Directorate at the Commission about these funds, and further information is to be posted here in the coming year.