International

On Monday last week Collections Trust hosted the second Europeana-UK Conference at the Kingsway Hall Hotel in London.

Over 75 attended the conference this year, an increase of 25% on 2009. Organisations included the full range from nationals to small local museums, and all parts of the UK were represented.

As with last year the conference was part the work of the ATHENA Project, one of the Europeana Group projects providing content to Europeana. ATHENA is funded under the eContentplus programme, a multiannual European Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable.

The day began with Nick Poole, CEO of Collections Trust giving a:

• Keynote

In it Nick attempted to answer three questions about Europeana: What is it? Why should I care? Do they have any money they can give me?

Next came a couple of presentations on Europeana. The first from Jon Purday, Senior Communications Advisor, Europeana Foundation, on:

• Europeana Strategies

This looked at: The political vision; aggregation model of content delivery, the value of providing content to Europeana; opening up access to the data; and focusing on users.

The second presentation was from Robina Clayphan, Interoperability Manager, Europeana Foundation, on:

• Europeana Metadata - ESE to EDM

The lastest version of the current metadata schema, Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE), was explored. This is Dublin Core based ‘application profile’. A discussion of Europeana’s content ingestion followed. Finally the new, RDF based, Europeana Data Model was unveiled.  

Just before lunch there were a series of short presentations from representatives from some Europeana Group projects:

• Kate Fernie, MDR Partners - CARARE
• Lena Stanley-Clamp, European Association for Jewish Culture - Judaica Europeana
• Mary Rowlatt, MDR Partners - EuropeanaLocal
• Margaret Birley, Horniman Museum - MIMO

Each of gave an overview of the project and highlighted the key aspects their work.

After hearty lunch I gave a presentation on:

• ATHENA

Here I gave an overview of the project and introduced the new ‘harvesting schema’ LIDO (Light Information Describing Objects.

Next we had a presentation, by Steve Luther (Evolutions), Michael Selway (System Simulation) and James Stevenson (V&A), on the

• ICON project (the movie slide is not active)

This aims to look at the exploitation of 3D models that have been created by cultural organisation in commercial situation such at film and TV post-production.

The last presentation was from Phill Purdy, Collections Trust, who covered the:

• Culture Grid

This included the why, what and how of this UK national content aggregation, together with its relationship to Europeana.

The last part of the day was a panel session with some of the speakers and covered questions that arose from the earlier presentations. In particular there was a spirited discussion on the use of SKOS and terminologies in general.

So did the conference meet its objectives - of informing the UK cultural community about Europeana and how the work of Collections Trust fits in?

A year on there is still an audience that needs to be informed, or reminded, about Europeana and what in can offer to them. In general I think we succeeded in doing this. In particular I would highlight the new Culture Grid which in some ways is in advance of what Europeana is doing at the moment. However they are catching up so Collections Trust needs to stay on its toes!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 12:19 pm and is filed under ATHENA, CARARE, Culture Grid, Europeana, EuropeanaLocal, LIDO, MIMO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.