Tag Archives: Europeana

2Culture content in Europeana

21 Tuesday Jun 2016

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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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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

CARARE 2.0: a metadata schema for 3D objects

21 Wednesday May 2014

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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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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.

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.