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!

Europeana has just harvested, and put online in its portal two major collections. Both were harvested from our national aggregator - Culture Grid. The first is c93,000 records, from many organisations, in the Vissual Arts Data Service collections. At the same time the c55,000 English Heritage’s ViewFinder images were also made available.

VADS has served the academic community for over 12 years and has published a large set of visual art collections that are available free and cleared for use in the UK for learning, teaching and research.

Highlights of the c50 collections available on VADS include:

• African and Asian Visual Artists Archive
• Central Saint Martins: Museum & Study Collection
• Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland
• Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi
• Crafts Study Centre: University for the Creative Arts at Farnham
• Design Council Archive: Design Archives, University of Brighton
• Design Council Slide Collection: Manchester Metropolitan University
• Imperial War Museum: Concise Art Collection
• Imperial War Museum: Posters of Conflict
• John Johnson Collection: Political Prints
• NICE Paintings: The National Inventory of Continental European Paintings
• Peter King Archive: London Metropolitan University
• Public Monuments and Sculpture Association
• Sir Henry Dryden Collection
• Textiles Collection: University for the Creative Arts at Farnham

English Heritage ViewFinder are historic photographs of England held by the National Monuments Record (NMR). The earliest are from the 1850s, and are for those with an interest in social, industrial, architectural and archaeological history.

Taken together these two collections represent a significant contribution to UK material on Europeana.

Today the results of the elections to the Europeana Council of Content Providers and Aggregators were announced.

We are pleased to announce that Nick Poole, CEO of Collections Trust was one of six persons elected. Nick was in the most hotly contested section of the election, that for cross domain bodies.

The Council is a new body within the governance of Europeana and represents a voice within it for those who are actually providing the content.

In addition to Nick here are the others who were elected to the council.

• Francisco Barbedo (Portuguese Archives);
• Anne Bergman-Tahon (Federation of European Publishers);
• Kjell Nilsson (National Library of Sweden);
• Henning Scholz (Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity);
• Hans van der Linden (Flemish Government).

The first meeting of the Council will take place later in the year when 3 of its members will be elected on to the governing body of Europeana Foundation. This last is a new change of name from EDL Foundation which reflected the Foundation within European digital libraries.

It is also a major venue for the dissemination of the Italian led ATHENA project.

The main aim of the annual event is to:

“Provide a forum for the user, supplier and scientific research communities to meet and exchange experiences, ideas and plans in the wide area of culture and technology. “

The attendees get up to date news on EC and international arts computing initiatives. Projects in the visual arts field, archaeology and history are showcased. Technical demonstrations are given.

This year’s subjects included:

• 2D - 3D image acquisition;
• Leading edge applications in galleries, libraries, education, archaeological sites, and museums;
• Mediterranean initiatives in technology for cultural heritage;
• Integrated digital archives for cultural heritage and contemporary art;
• Management of museums by using ICT;
• Impact of new mobile communications;
• Human computer interaction for cultural heritage;
• Copyright Protection;
• Culture and e-government;
• E-learning;
• Application of digital terrestrial television;
• 3D developments and applications;
• Cultural tourism and travel applications;
• Art and medicine.

Even running over three days and with a technical exhibition running over the period to cover all this in any depth was an herculean tasks. Luckily there are a set proceedings for the papers presented and they will make interesting reading.

The ATHENA project was presented in a joint session with STACHEM project.

STACHEM stands for ‘Science and Technology for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean’.  Its goal is to:

“.. contribute to a regional strategic plan for research infrastructures devoted to archaeological sciences and digital heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean, and simultaneously to support and complement the design and planning process….”

Presentations were on:

• GIS 2D/3D in the knowledge process of cultural heritage;
• Integrating archaeological excavation diaries with GIS and 2D/3D data in the CIDOC CRM framework;
• A novel approach to GIS 3D documentation and description of of archaeological features.

ATHENA gave presentations on:

• GIS Guidelines for Digital Cultural Content;
• SIGECWEB: the Italian national informative system for cataloguing cultural heritage;
• LIDO - Lightweight Information Describing Objects.

As you can see there is some overlap in the area of GIS, but this is not a large part of the ATHENA.

On LIDO I answwered the questions:

• Why LIDO?
• What is LIDO?

For those who cannot wait for a full publication of LIDO, which will take place later in the year, here is the:

• Text of the LIDO presentation.

The EVA conference also served another pupose. Because the event gave the opertunity to have many people from many countries at the same time it allowed us to discuss the next EC-funded project proposal the ATHENA network want to put in. More later….

For the UK this process has been relatively simple because of our lead, when compared with most of Europe, in having a national aggregator. The Culture Grid has an OAI-PMH feed which allowed Europeana to harvest content directly without human intervention at our end.

The first work that needed to be carried out was the mapping of the metadata in the Culture Grid to the Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE) format being used by Europeana. With this in place it was possible for us to provide OAI URLs for the separate collections in the Grid. Europeana ingests the data, produces indexes and caches a thumbnail image where available.

On the Europeana portal only the descriptions of a provider’s content is held and a small preview image are stored. Links are given to the content on the provider’s own website directly. This means that Europeana does not hold the content itself.

Organisations with content in Europeana via Culture Grid are:

• Beamish Treasures;
• Bedes World;
• Bowes Museum;
• Durham County Council;
• iSee Gateshead;
• Kirklees Images;
• Lambeth Landmark;
• Leodis (Leeds);
• Picture The Past (East Midlands);
• Portable Antiquities Scheme;
• Tyne and Wear Imagine.

As content becomes available it will also be ingested by Europeana. Already planned is content from:

• Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge);
• Visual Arts Data Service;
• Wiltshire Heritage Museum (Devizes).

 The adoption of SPECTRUM will help Ukrainian museums manage their knowledge and information more effectively, as well as supporting greater mobility of collections between the Ukraine and the UK.

Vladyslav Pioro, Chief of Information and Analysis Department, Ukrainian Center for Museum Development commented:

“There is an ongoing process of revision of the regulatory system in the field of museum work in Ukraine being undertaken by a working group of the Ministry for Culture and Tourism. New editions of standard documents, in particular in the areas of conservation, accountability and the use of museum valuables are being developed. SPECTRUM, which has been adopted as a standard for museum work in many European countries, is a key input to this process. It will be translated into Ukrainian and given a broad presentation in the professional environment here. The Center thanks the Collection Trust for the readiness for cooperation“

The Ukrainian agreement follows on from a similar one a few years ago with Flanders (Belgium) and the Netherlands to produce two Dutch language versions. Nick Poole has written recently visited the Netherlands to brief museum directors on developments in the UK.

SPECTRUM is an open standard, maintained and developed as part of our mission to promote best practice in the heritage sector. CT has over 6 thousand free non-commercial licences in over 100 countries with individuals and organisations (both large and small). Commercial use of SPECTRUM is only open to SPECTRUM Partners.

Collections Trust welcomes the translation and localisation of SPECTRUM by anyone. The first stage of this does not need to be a formal agreement with us. You can translate and localise parts of SPECTRUM or a relevant factsheet (see: http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/manage_information).

To download the UK version of SPECTRUM, and agree to the non-commercial licence, go to:

http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/spectrum

I know this blog is supposed to be about international matters but I could not resist telling you about a new book of copyright that my colleague Naomi Korn and myself have written: Copyright: a practical guide. It’s selling fast!

The aim of the guide is to be basic information for anyone wishing to manage copyright associated with objects in your collection. It is aimed at archive, library and museum professionals and provides a ‘first stop’ for collections managers, archivists, curators, librarians, volunteers, students and organisation top management.

However don’t just take my word for it. This week we received a review which we commissioned from Heather Caven at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Heather and her colleague Therese Crawley gave the book a resounding endorsement, concluding that:

“This Guide is a clear introduction to copyright minus the legal jargon and haze of confusion that can tend to surround this subject. If you are coming to the world of copyright for the first time, need a refresher, or are reviewing how you work with rights in your organisation this book is a good starting point.”

The full review is available on the Collections Trust website

The book is the latest in a growing series of ‘pratical guides’ that includes at the moment:

• Documentation (by Margaret Harrison and Gordon McKenna)
• Pest Management (David Pinniger)
• Collections Management (Susanna Hillhouse)

To order have a look at: http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/books

Collections Trust is also open to looking at going into partnerships for translated and localised versions of all our publications.

Last month a Europeana v1.0 project workshop in Berlin on the Europeana Data Model (EDM). This will a high level definition of data within the Europeana system. This should allow Eurooeana to enrich data within the portal, and go some way to enable the semantic web for cultural content

Later in the month to Frankfurt to represent museums in a Europeana Connect project meeting on ‘persistent identifiers’. These are the pieces of data that:

• Uniquely identify something: digital content, objects, places, persons, organisations, events, or anything else you might want to refer to, particularly over the Internet;
• Are ‘guaranteed’ to not to change;
• Lead to some information about the thing being identified.

A familiar example of a persistent identifier (PI) is a book’s ISBN number. With this you can find the book in a library catalogue, on the Web and in a bookshop. Its usefulness is apparent to human. However the hidden usefulness is that it can be used by computers to provide services. Not having an ISBN would make all this very difficult.

In the context of Europeana the things that need to have PIs are the ‘digital objects’ that it has metadata describing and links to. The major difficulty for Europeana is that the links regularly become broken - they are not persistent. The result of this is that about a million of the 6 million records on Europeana do not lead to anywhere.

Therefore they are looking to set up a system which will support persistent identifiers. If content providers have them they will be rewarded by their content being more prominent in the Europeana portal. Unfortunately only national libraries have been looking at the use of PIs in any serious way. For archives and museums they are only vaguely on the the horizon.

Between European travel I took part in a workshop at London Bridge on linked open data. This is about exposing, sharing, and connecting data, including cultural heritage data, on the Web. The purpose of the workshop was to come up with a set of principles that museums, libraries and archives can subscribe to. These priciples will form the basis of future work to enable this.

Finally to an ATHENA plenary meeting in Berlin where amongst other things we discussed work in this area. As part of my presentation there I showed a couple of relevant videos:

• Meet Abbey a ‘digital native’ - a little girl’s ‘view’ on what we need to be doing
• Sir Tim Berners Lee on The Next Web at TED

The next two deliverables, that Collections Trust is responsible for, in the ATHENA projects are in this area:

• D3.4. Assessment of requirements for persistent identification of objects, collections and institutions, in concertation with Europeana;
• D3.5. Technical and policy infrastructure to support persistent identifiers.

However in disscussion with partners it was felt that it would be appropriate to extend the work to include all issues about finding and connecting ’stuff’. The work kicks off with a meeting of the WP3 Working Group next week at London Bridge. Here I shall be giving an introduction to the subject. There will be also be discussion of experiences and the way ahead.

Watch this space!

Just back from 3 days in a snowy Luxembourg where the first review of the ATHENA project took place at the European Commission offices.

As with all EC project reviews there was a set pattern to the proceedings. These start about a month before the review when the Commission choose two independent reviewers and send them the deliverables (the project results) for them to read.

In the case of ATHENA not all deliverables were reports. A large section of our work is an ingestion and data mapping tool which allows partners to upload their metadata and map it to the new metadata harvesting schema LIDO. The data is also converted to the current Europeana data model ESE (Europeana Semantic Elements - Dublin Core based). Therefore the reviewers were given access to the online tool.

The day before the review workpackage leaders met to have a dry run of the presentations that they will be making. Timings are inportant as there is only a limited time allowed for the review process. The run through also gave the chance to ‘polish’ presentations.

On the big day:

• The project makes its presentations;
• The reviewers ask questions;
• They go away to make their deliberations;
• Come back to give the result of the and possibly make suggestions.

The whole process went very well with all the deliverables being praised for their high quality. Even the owl logo of the project was mentioned as a great piece of work! There were some helpful suggestions on how the project should proceed, but these were in the spirit of improving an already good body of work.

Needless to say the project was given the go ahead to continue into its second half.

The only problem with the whole process was the sudden snow storm that closed Luxembourg Airport for the night about half an hour before I was due to fly out!

I have just spent the last week leading and teaching at a couple of workshops, in Rome and Berlin, for partners of the ATHENA project.The aims of the workshops were:

• Familiarise those who attended with the ATHENA system for ingesting and mapping content into an aggregation;
• Give an introduction to the new metadata harvesting schema LIDO (Light Information Describing Objects).

The workshop in Rome was filmed and you can see what happened at:

http://www.athenaeurope.org/index.php?en/159/training

This page has all the relevant information you will need.

LIDO (pronounced LeeDoe) is a harvesting schema that holds rich information about museum objects and the events (e.g. creation and use) associated with them. It is designed to work in the ‘service environment’ of a museum’s online collections database or portal. Here it should be possible to provide the user a much more engaging and useful experience than has been possible before.

LIDO is a development of:

• CDWA Lite;
• Museumdat;
• SPECTRUM.

The schema is also on course to be the standard for European projects providing content to Europeana. ATHENA has had interest from:

• MIMO;
• Judaica Europeana;
• EuropeanaLocal;
• APEnet;
• Sterna.