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2Culture Associates Ltd.

2Culture Associates Ltd.

Author Archives: kfernie27

Europeana Archaeology

15 Friday Nov 2019

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2Culture Associates is a partner in the Europeana Archaeology project which began in February 2019 and runs until July 2020.   The project is funded under the European Commission’s CEF Program Telecoms strand, and is coordinated by the University of Vilnius, Faculty of Communication.

The main objectives of the project are:

  • to make available new high quality digital content for Europe’s rich heritage of archaeological monuments, historic buildings, cultural landscapes and artefacts to users of Europeana
  • and to raise the quality of existing content for the archaeological and architectural heritage already available in Europeana
  • while also facilitating the re-use of resources by encouraging institutions to make their content available under open licenses

2Culture Associates role in the project is to provide support and advice, particularly on descriptive metadata for the archaeological and architectural heritage.

For more information about the project see its website: https://europeanaarchaeology.carare.eu/

Safeguarding heritage data

25 Friday Jan 2019

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I am currently working on a project for Historic England looking at ways of safeguarding the heritage records held by local authorities and Historic England itself.

The “national security copy” project is one of a series of interlinked projects under the Heritage Information Access Strategy (HIAS), which are designed to simplify and improve public access to heritage data held or generated by Historic England, by Local Authority Historic Environment Records and by other bodies.

The Historic Environment Records (HERs) maintained by local authorities in England hold a wealth of information about the archaeology, buildings, sites and the history of an area.  They are a primary source of information for planning, development-control work and land management.  The information is usually held in a database linked to a Geographic Information System and references.

The aim of the National Security Copy project is to make sure that there is a secure copy of the complete heritage record for England, including all the data held by local HERs and  by Historic England.  This will be a dispersed resource, with each host organisation being responsible for the security of their part of the data and for safeguarding it in the event that funding is withdrawn for a service.  This means that more than eighty different organisations each have a role to play.

The aim of this project is to agree best practices for safeguarding heritage data.  Most local authorities have good data backup, security and disaster recovery arrangements in place.  But there are differences in practice and one aspect of the project is agreeing best practices and making sure that there is a shared understanding and commitment to a code of practice for the National Security Copy.  A key principle in all this is making sure that this important heritage data will continue to be accessible should disaster strike.  This might happen in the form of a technical failure, or as a consequence of local authority funding cuts.

Part of my role is to consult HERs on their current policies and practice with regard to the storage and security of their digital and paper-based records, and the principles for the National Security Copy. The result of the project will include recommendations on best practices for data security that  can be readily implemented and monitored by HERs and HE, and a draft Code of Practice or protocol for access to the National Security Copy.

 

Seeing the light of day – archaeological archives

24 Friday Feb 2017

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Archaeology is in a special position when it comes to archiving because the objects and data are often the only things that survive of a site. As new housing and development takes place, archaeologists are busy excavating to record archaeological evidence before it is destroyed. Securing the resulting archives for future uses involves care, attention and facing up to some challenges.

The aim of the “Seeing the Light of Day” project is to develop a sustainable solution to the management, accessibility and long-term preservation of archaeological archives in the South West of England. Across the region there are differences in practice and in local situations and both publicly funded and independent museums collecting these archives. Many of the issues that museums and archaeology units are facing are well known (see http://archives.archaeologyuk.org/ for a summary of initiatives since 2002).  The fundamental issue comes down to funding – for storage, specialist staff and access initiatives.

The “Seeing the Light of Day” project, is funded through the Arts Council England’s Museum Resilience Fund.  It is led by the Wiltshire Museum in a partnership with the South West Museum Development Partnership, South West Museums Federation, Historic Environment Teams and Association of Local Government Archaeological Officers in the South West, Historic England, the Chartered Institute for Archaeology Archives Group, the Society of Museum Archaeologists and the 5 largest archaeological contractors active in the South West.

The project is managed by David Dawson, Director of the Wiltshire Museum, which has appointed myself (Kate Fernie) and Paddy McNulty to work on the project.  My brief focuses on the museum issues. Together we are consulting with planning archaeologists, contractors and museums. Our aim is to develop business models and guidance on how to deliver funding for archaeological archives from developer contributions, models for sustainable, shared storage where these important archives can be properly looked after and the public access promised under the National Planning Policy Framework can be delivered.

Looking beyond storage and deposit of archaeological archiving we aim to identify approaches to unlock the community and academic research potential of archaeological archives both physical and digital.

Image showing the archives preparation and storage at Wessex Archaeology

Wessex Archaeology Archives processing and storage, January 2017

“Archaeological archives consist of the records and finds made during an archaeological project. The documentary archive includes written records, drawings, photographs and digital data. The material archive includes artefacts such as pottery and metalwork, or environmental remains such as animal bone” Historic England

Summer school – archaeological datasets

14 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by kfernie27 in training

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I recently had the honour of being invited to participate as a tutor in a summer school on the curation of archaeological datasets organised by the Digital Curation Unit of the Athena Research Centre for ARIADNE.  The school took place in Athens from the 12th to 17 June this year.  Case study presentations The participants at the school included both early stage researchers, experienced archaeologists and experts in digital curation from Lithuania, Italy, France, the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Bulgaria, Greece and Canada.

The aim of the school was to focus on curating archaeological data from fieldwork projects, museum object collections, commercial and community archaeology, and the issues around making legacy data from past projects accessible to archaeologists and scholars today and in the future.

In addition to lecturers introducing specific topics the young researchers taking part in the school were invited to present their case studies and to describe the challenges that they are facing in working with their datasets.  A really interesting set of projects (covering numismatics, ceramics, cremation burials, place names and the web of maps, conceptual modelling and integrating the fieldwork legacy of hundreds of field teams) were introduced and worked on throughout the school in a series of sprints.  All the participants were divided into groups to focus in depth on particular case and then worked together to develop a “solution space” or plan to meet the challenges, which was presented by the researchers on day four.

Data transfer group_Neil Ferris photoOn the formal side, I presented the work carried out to develop the CARARE metadata schema.  I described some of the choices that we made and the issues we faced in developing a schema to integrate archaeological and architectural heritage inventories from 25 different countries.  In my lecture I introduced some of the work that we’ve done with controlled vocabularies, time and space.

The final day-and-a-half comprised of an expert forum, which set out to explore the future of archaeological curation based on the legacy of data and resources from past (and future) projects.  Costis Dallas began the session by asking ‘is archaeology in serious trouble or does it stand on the threshold of new advances?’

The forum then focussed on some of the challenges and advances that can be foreseen for the discipline such as advances in knowledge representation, communication and visualisation, sustainability and openness of data.  On the final day we were divided into groups to discuss our vision for the archaeological digital curation infrastructures of the future!

You can read more about the summer school on the ARIADNE website: http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/News/DCAK2016-summer-school

2Culture content in Europeana

21 Tuesday Jun 2016

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CARARE, Europeana, LoCloud Collections, Wiltshire Heritage

During LoCloud training workshops I established my own digital library using the LoCloud Collections service.  It was easy to set up the digital library and, taking advantage of the free storage plan, I uploaded a small collection of my own photographs of Wiltshire Heritage.

Screenshot of 2Culture Collections

2Culture Collections

I uploaded five images and created simple metadata records using the management interface.  The LoCloud Collections service then allowed me to design the template for my collections website, which you can see at https://2culture.locloudhosting.net/.

The really cool part of the LoCloud collections service is that it automatically creates a remote harvesting target for each new collection.  Recently we put this service to the test, harvesting the 2Culture Collection’s target using the MORe aggregation service established for CARARE.  The metadata was harvested as Omeka-XML, transformed to EDM using a metadata mapping, then enriched before being provided to Europeana.

My small collection of images is now available on Europeana, and can be seen at: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/search?f[DATA_PROVIDER][]=2Culture&view=grid

Screenshot showing Europeana search results

2Culture content in Europeana

 

LoCloud in Paris

25 Wednesday Feb 2015

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CARARE, Europeana, LoCloud, Metadata

Recently we participated as part of the LoCloud team at the second international Europeana Tech conference, which was held in Paris on the 12th to 13th February.

Hackathon

The first event was a hackathon organised by the LoCloud project and hosted in the Lab at the Google Culture Institute in Paris.  The idea was to invite developers to try out some of the services that have been created by the LoCloud project and use these to come up with some innovative applications.

Image showing the developers at work in the Lab at the Google Culture Insitutie

Hackathon in progress in the Lab at the Google Culture Institute

The developers were working in a pretty amazing space – the Lab has a gigapixel display wall, which was being used to display some of the results of the Institute’s very high definition scanning of artworks.  But this didn’t distract them from the hack!  The five teams who took part came up with some interesting applications during the day to present to the judges.

Photo of Kate Fernie speaking in front of the display wall at the Google Culture Institute

Kate Fernie congratulating the developers who took part in the LoCloud hackathon

I was honoured to chair the judging panel for the Hackathon – fellow judges included Costis Dallas (Athena Research Centre and University of Toronto), James Helmsley (Europeana), Andy Neal (Digital New Zealand) and Ingrida Vosylute (University of Vilnius).  The applications that the developers presented to the panel were very varied.  Two teams came up with map based applications for end-users – one for crowd-sourcing the addition of map locations to archives of photos and the other a route planning app for tourists.  A third team proposed creating links between archive items and news from cultural institutions.   The final two applications were designed to help with managing the process of ingestion – one to quality check metadata and the other to help project managers to monitor the progress of people working in the system.

IMG_1411The winning application was developed by Vangelis Banos and is for checking the quality of metadata being into a repository.  The application uses the LoCloud MORe API key to check for common metadata problems such as invalid date formats, author names, language codes – and is configurable in a way that allows repository managers to design additional checks.

Europeana Tech conference

After the excitement of the LoCloud Hackathon, came the Europeana Tech conference.  This was the second edition of the conference and this year was held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.  With more than 250 delegates from the Europeana Tech community and some impressive keynote speakers there was a very lively atmosphere.

Photo of Rimvydas Lauzikas presenting during the Europeana Tech conference

Rimvydas Lauzikas presenting the LoCloud Historic Place names service

LoCloud was well represented at the conference.  Rimvydas Lauzikas (Vilnius University) presented a “lightening talk” about the LoCloud historic placenames service – beginning by asking the audience if they knew the locations of Albion and Atlantis.

Runar Bergheim presenting during the Europeana Tech conference

Runar Bergheim presenting the LoCloud Geo-coding service

Later Runar Berheim (Avinet) presented the LoCloud Geo-coding service as part of a panel session on data quality.  This focussed on ways of improving and enriching metadata quality using automatic techniques and also crowd sourcing.  The LoCloud geo-coding service enables curators to upload metadata so that they or a crowd of users can check or add map locations using place name gazetteers and map bases.

A personal highlight for me was presenting with Valentine Charles (Europeana) the work that we carried out to map the CARARE metadata schema to the Europeana Data Model as part of the data modelling session.

Kate Fernie

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International Archives Day – preserving personal memories

09 Monday Jun 2014

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The 9th June is International Archives Day with events going on in Archives across the world, the Municipal Archive of the city of Girona decided to celebrate the day by publishing a guide to preserving personal archives, based on the experiences of the archive’s technicians.

The guide covers both paper and digital archives.  It offers a useful starting point for thinking about which documents are important to you and how to organise them to keep them safely.  But it is particularly useful when it comes to digital archives.  More and more personal information being created and stored digitally – from emails to family photos and video as well as important personal documents.  Given the rapid developments in technology, and occasional accidents, which affect whether you can access your information on a personal computer, DVDs, flash memory stick or on a social media site, this guide is a useful starting point to thinking about how to store your personal memories for the future.

The guide is available in English on http://www.girona.cat/sgdap/docs/dia2013_def-eng.pdf.

For more about International Archives Day 2014 see: http://www.internationalarchivesday.org/wordpress/

CARARE 2.0: a metadata schema for 3D objects

21 Wednesday May 2014

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3D ICONS, CARARE, Europeana, Metadata

One of the things about digital data files (whether images, text documents or 3D models) is that they cannot be found, used or kept for posterity without some information about them and the way they were created.

CARARE project logoCARARE was a three-year project (from February 2010 to January  2013) which was funded to make digital content captured by archaeology and architecture heritage organisations available to the user of Europeana. It worked mainly with national heritage agencies, which hold records describing archaeological monuments and historic buildings, images, plans and other materials.

CARARE established a metadata schema based on existing standards used in this domain, such as MIDAS Heritage, LIDO, CIDOC CRM and the Council of Europe’s core data standard for historic buildings and CIDOC’s core data standard for archaeological monuments.  The CARARE project partners used version 1.0 of the metadata schema to prepare their data for delivery to Europeana, by mapping their native metadata to the elements in the CARARE schema.  The project then provided a routine to transfer the CARARE data into the metadata format used in the Europeana portal, EDM.

Using EDM, CARARE modelled a network of connections between heritage assets (archaeological monuments and historic buildings) and other digital resources such as images, text documents, videos and some 3D models. See the CARARE to EDM case study.  The project learnt a lot both from the experience of mapping the CARARE schema to EDM and from providing 2 million records to the Europeana portal.

When 3D ICONS project logo3D ICONS, a project funded by the European Commission, started it was a chance to look again at the CARARE metadata schema.  3D ICONS brought together partners expert in 3D digitization of the archaeological and architectural heritage with as main objectives the quality control of 3D data and establishing a metadata schema to support quality assurance of 3D models.  Building on previous work on the CIDOC CRMdig schema and the principles of the London Charter on the provenance and paradata needed for 3D models, and the CARARE experience of providing data to Europeana, 3D ICONS prepared a second version of the CARARE metadata schema.  The aim is to foster the adoption of a clearer approach to describing the features of cultural object, the techniques and the methodologies chosen for the digitization and the motivation behind the creation of a 3D model.

This work has been published in a paper prepared for Digital Heritage 2013, Marseilles.

References

D’Andrea, A. and Fernie, K., 2013, CARARE 2.0: A metadata schema for 3D cultural objects, Digital Heritage International Congress (DigitalHeritage), 2013, ISBN: 978-1-4799-3168-2

Local content in the Europeana cloud

20 Tuesday May 2014

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Europeana, LoCloud

The LoCloud project aims to make over 4 million items of digital content available through Europeana within two years. In March 2013, the team started its work to facilitate aggregation of digital resources from small and medium local cultural institutions.
Content from local museums, archives, libraries, archaeological sites, and other similar institutions is still underrepresented in Europeana and, in general, on the internet. Cloud-based technology offers an affordable and user-friendly solution for making their content available online. This recently published video explains the project aims and how it can help smaller and mid-size institutions to get their collections on the web.
Screen Shot 2014-05-20 at 10.55.57LoCloud video on you tube

LoCloud is developing a cloud-based technology infrastructure for aggregating local content. It will also provide a number of micro-services offering geo-location and metadata enrichment, multilingual vocabularies for local history and archaeology, a historical place name gazetteer and a Wikimedia application to handle relevant ‘crowd-sourced’ content. Moreover, the project is working on the implementation of a lightweight digital library software for deployment in a cloud environment, compatible with Europeana requirements. This will benefit those data providers requiring a user-friendly, scalable system for cataloguing their digital content and metadata.

LoCloud relies on a large consortium of technical partners, content providers, aggregating services and partners with specific expertise which make together a very strong consortium.

PATHS project draws to a close

02 Sunday Mar 2014

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After three years the PATHS project is drawing to a close. We started our work back in 2011 with funding from the European Commission’s 7th framework programme to carry out research into techniques to find ways of improving and personalising access to the significant amounts of cultural heritage material that have been made available online digital library portals as a result of digitisation initiatives in recent years.

Screenshot of the PATHS user interface

PATHS desktop application

Very large collections can be difficult for users to navigate – it is difficult to find content in the depths of the collection without specialist knowledge about how it is structured and or the vocabulary used to describe the content. The metadata that is available can limit the kind of information retrieval that cultural institutions are able to offer their users.

Discovering interesting ites can be even more difficult in collections where content is brought together from many different institutions (such as in Europeana), where staff are using different cataloguing systems, standards and languages. PATHS aimed to demonstrate the potential for improving users’ experience by exploiting natural language processing to enrich metadata and by implementing state-of-the-art systems in user-driven information access.

One of the major achievements of the PATHS project has been to demonstrate the practical benefits and technical feasibility of enriching the metadata for cultural heritage collections as a means of improving content retrieval, supporting innovative discovery and exploitation.  This addresses a critical issue for cultural heritage institutions across Europe who hold vast quantities of quality content in digital libraries that are currently never found unless explicitly sought. A prototype content enrichment service was released for cultural institutions to trial enriching their content item by item.

The initial deployment of PATHS focussed on browser-based applications on desktops. To demonstrate the flexibility of the PATHS API, the project developed a version of the application for use on iPADs.

Screen shot of the PATHS iPAD app

PATHS iPad app

The project developed a range of tools to visualise the content of the digital library (such as topic maps, thesaurus browse and tag clouds) and to enable users to create and publish their own pathways (of interesting items and related materials) through the collection.   We evaluated the system with users through lab trials and a series of demonstrations and received positive feedback which confirmed that the project achieved its objective of providing tools that enrich users’ experiences of digital libraries. The interactive tools provided for expert and non-expert users to use content and create narratives, tell stories and make personal collections were very well received.

The project also provided an important test bed for Europeana content and the Europeana Data Model (EDM) making recommendations on extensions to the EDM schema to manage semantically enriched content. PATHS made a significant contribution to research into the application of semantic enrichment techniques to cultural heritage content, demonstrating the potential to enrich the simple content metadata to enable novel browsing and information discovery. The techniques used enriched items with links to similar content, created links to related Wikipedia articles, and enabled the collections to be thematically organised into a semi-automatically created hierarchical structure. We explored the potential of generating personalised recommendations based on user profiles, query logs and the similarity of content items, contributing to research in this important area.

Additionally, the knowledge developed through the project with regard to information retrieval, indexing and Web APIs have been invaluable to the development of the next generation of portals.  A prototype content enrichment web service was released and has been adopted for development by the LoCloud project.  The next generation of Avinet‘s map portal, ADAPTIVE, is being built exploiting PATHS technology in its search engine and is a first step on the way towards commercial exploitation of PATHS products.

Throughout the project the PATHS team have researched, developed and evaluated techniques to improve the presentation of digital library content to end users.  Our research activities have led to scientific publications, and the project results form a core technology with expectations for further exploitation in the Cultural Heritage domain. We hope that the knowledge developed through the project will be invaluable in the development of the next generation of portals.

For more information about the project’s results see: http://www.paths-project.eu/eng/Resources

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  • Seeing the light of day – archaeological archives
  • Summer school – archaeological datasets
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  • Europeana Archaeology
  • Safeguarding heritage data
  • Seeing the light of day – archaeological archives
  • Summer school – archaeological datasets
  • 2Culture content in Europeana

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