Grants

Europeana Fashion is a best practice network co-funded under the CIP ICT-PSP programme and composed by 23 partners from 12 European countries, which represent the leading European institutions and collections in the fashion domain. The consortium will aggregate and provide to Europeana the most outstanding and rich materials about the history of European fashion, include more than 700.000 fashion-related digital objects, ranging from historical dresses to accessories, photographs, posters, drawings, sketches, videos, and fashion catalogues. The Europeana Fashion best practice network aims at: 1) Aggregating and harmonizing existing digital content coming from the most important and interesting public and private European fashion collections, ingesting this fashion-related content into Europeana. 2) Improving interoperability between scattered and heterogeneous collections, promoting the use of the Europeana Data Model and developing tools, such as a specialized Fashion Thesaurus, to best handle the multilingual nature of the aggregated content. 3) Providing access to this digital content also through the creation of a dedicated fashion portal that will serve as a specialized access point to heterogeneous fashion collections across Europe. 4) Developing tools and services for the integration of user generated content that will enrich and complement the standard metadata descriptions and will support the contextualization of the aggregated content through the connection with open content sources like Wikipedia. 5) Actively engaging the European fashion community in museums, universities and in the private sector, raising awareness on best practices on digitization, IPR issues and semantic interoperability developed inside the BPN and in the Europeana family of projects.

Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP.2011.2.1

EuropeanaPhotography is a great and quite unique consortium and project putting together some of the most prestigious photographic archives, public libraries and photographic museums covering specifically the length of time from the beginning of photography (1839 with the first example of images from Fox Talbot and Daguerre) to the beginning of the Second World War (1939). EuropeanaPhotography is therefore covering a precise historical period in order to bring into Europeana some of the most important, precious and beautiful images from a very important period that crated so much changes in Europe in several sectors as a proof of diversity and richness at the same time: from the industrial revolution to the social conquests, from the improvements of the photographic processes (salt print, albumen prints, collodion glass plates to the modern gelatin silver photos to the history of important, unknown and famous photographic ateliers of photography), to the changes of the lifestyle of our citizens, from the changes of our cityscapes to the changes of our landscapes, from the First World War to the Grand Europeans Expo Pavilions......

Funded under: CIP ICT-PSP

3D-ICONS proposes to digitize a series of architectural and archaeological masterpieces of world and European cultural significance and provide 3D models and related digital content to Europeana, with the aim of contributing to the critical mass of highly engaging content available to users. Public fascination with the architectural and archaeological heritage is well known, it is proven to be one of the main reasons for tourism according to the UN World Tourism Organisation. Historic buildings and archaeological monuments form a significant component Europe’s cultural heritage, they are the physical testimonies of European history and of the different events that led to the creation of the European landscape, as we know it today. The project will exploit existing tools and methods, to integrate them in a complete supply chain of 3D digitization to contribute a significant mass of 3D content to Europeana. The project will focus on UNESCO World Heritage monuments and other monuments of outstanding value at European level, to illustrate a particular strand of Europe’s history. The digital content will include overall 3D models and reconstructions, enlarged models of important details, images, texts, videos. It will also include and re-contextualize in 3D, objects belonging to a monument but presently located elsewhere, for example in a museum. The project’s activities will include both new digitization as well as the conversion of some existing 3D data into formats which are accessible for Europeana users. The project’s anticipated impact is making accessible through Europeana an unprecedented quantity of high-quality, 3D, well-organized and attractive information about the masterpieces of European architecture and archaeology.

Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP.2011.2.2

The project aims to technically enable as many content providers as possible to integrate their content into Europeana. Since different providers make their data available in different formats, a tool has to be developed that converts metadata from a diverse range of source formats into the EDM (Europeana Data Model). During the project, this will exemplarily be done for the autograph database Kalliope (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin), the German text archive Deutsches Textarchiv (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften), as well as content of the Austrian national library (Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek) plus a number of other sources. Metadata providers are strongly encouraged to make their data available under CC0, as all other licenses hamper further use by Europeana and scholars. Finally, Europeana is going to provide the aggregated data in a form which allows Digital Humanities scholars to make best use of them. In addition, basic services / functionalities (modeled on the humanities “scholarly primitives”) will be provided by Europeana. In this perspective, the proposed project is in line with theme 2 of the call (Digital Content) and targets its objective 2.1 (Aggregating content in Europeana). The proposed Best Practice Network will respond to all three possible actions, namely: Aggregation of existing digital cultural heritage content (WP1) Alignment of metadata and mappings with the specifications of Europeana (WP2) Improvements in the interoperability of CMSs and the Europeana platform (WP 2 and 3) In tackling these three actions we will take particular care to target one specific user community of Europeana, namely reaserachers in the field of “Digital Humanities” and the way these will interact with Europeana through our WP3. Furthermore, the data migration and enrichment workflow proposed as part of WP2 will be modeled in such a way as to allow for its reuse in the migration of almost any generic and proprietary source to the EDM target.

Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP.2011.2.1

Europeana Awareness is a Best Practice Network, led by the Europeana Foundation, designed to:

• publicise Europeana to users, policy makers, politicians and cultural heritage organisations in every Member State so as to encourage the use and contribution of content, raise awareness of cultural heritage as an economic driver and promote knowledge transfer

• promote its use by a broad public for a variety of purposes including recreation and hobbies, research, learning, genealogy and tourism – engaging users via user generation of content, creation of digital stories and social networking

• develop new partnerships with 4 key sectors which are currently underexploited by Europeana: public libraries; local archival groups; broadcast organisations and open culture re-users (programmers, developers, researchers and activists) •    put in place new distribution channels for Europeana content working with the tourism sector

• further encourage cultural institutions to continue to provide content in particular by: raising awareness of the opportunities provided by the new Europeana Licensing framework; developing mechanisms for collective rights management; and increasing the amount of content in Europeana that can be freely re-used.

A wide variety of media and channels, both online and offline, will be used to ensure promotion of appropriate and consistent messages to different stakeholder groups. The approaches to be used have been chosen so as d to align closely with the goals of the Europeana Strategic Plan 2011-15 and include both top-down and bottom –up activities. The 48 partner consortium brings together leading players with strong track records in the Europeana network in the areas of work to be undertaken, as well as some new players with specific expertise in areas such as PR, User Generated Content and cultural tourism. Every Member State is represented by a Country Partner who will have a key role in continuing the PR work kicked off by the EAwareness campaigns.

Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP.2011.2.3

Linked Heritage has 3 main objectives: I) to contribute large quantities of new content to Europeana, from both the public and private sectors; II) to demonstrate enhancement of quality of content, in terms of metadata richness, re-use potential and uniqueness; III) to demonstrate enable improved search, retrieval and use of Europeana content. Linked Heritage will facilitate and deliver large-scale, long-term enhancement of Europeana and its services. The project will address the problems associated with: - Non-standard descriptive terminologies - The lack of private sector and 20th Century content - The preservation of complex metadata models within the Europeana metadata schema. The consortium includes representatives of all the key stakeholder groups from 20 EU countries, together with Israel and Russia. These include ministries and responsible government agencies, content providers and aggregators, leading research centres, publishers and SMEs. The Europeana Foundation will be involved as subcontractor. Several partners participate in related Europeana ecosystem projects; this guarantees alignment with Europeana’s evolution. In addition, organisations which have not in the past been involved will contribute for the first time to Europeana. 3 million new items will be delivered to Europeana, covering a wide spectrum of types of cultural content.

Funded under: CIP

‘Digitising Contemporary Art’ (DCA) is a 30-month digitisation project for contemporary art, i.e. art made after 1945 - a kind of cultural heritage still largely missing from Europeana which is a single access point for European culture. DCA will create a digital body of high-quality reproductions of 26,921 artworks - paintings, photographs, sculptures, installations, videos and 1,857 contextual documents, which will become accessible and retrievable through Europeana; not only through the use of metadata and thumbnails, but also direct links to large-sized reproductions of each item. DCA will ensure that the rights to all available digital content will be cleared. The content provided, including masterpieces from key artists of most European countries, will fill a gap in Europeana‘s content supply. The main issues to be addressed within the project are the choice of specifications for digitisation and metadata, so that they may be inter-operational, and finding the appropriate aggregation solution for each institution. The exchange with Europeana will be the main outcome of the project. And DCA‘s digitisation process will also contribute to the preservation of the artworks.  The DCA project intends to enhance the online visibility of contemporary art as an essential expression and an invaluable part of European culture, and to stimulate the interest of the general public by introducing a stronger presence of contemporary art to the Europeana portal.

Funded under: CIP-ICT PSP

IS-HELLEANA (Intelligent System for HELLEnic Audiovisual National Aggregator) is a project designed to develop an integrated system that will enable a) the providers of audiovisual material to project their content within a unified and interoperable – way, in the context of an enriched generalized semantic designation of the Greek Audiovisual Reserve and b) the users to search effectively in the content they wish and to participate in the electronic and interactive services provided by the audiovisual material’s providers. The basic tool for the achievement of above objective is a web platform for the semantic unification, management, enrichment and projection of the Audiovisual Reserve. In this context, the main objectives of this project are: The implementation of World Wide Web and Semantic Web technologies and the development of the suitable techniques for the registration and the retrieval of heterogeneous audiovisual material (representation, description and semantic unification of the audiovisual material’s description). The development of the suitable methodologies and tools for the automatic analysis of the audiovisual data (free texts that are contained in the metadata, sound and voice files, pictures and video files) in order to extract knowledge for the enrichment of their descriptive metadata.
The optimization of the services provided to the final users as well as the uttermost promotion of the collaborating institutions’ digitalized material. The development of a National Point for the effective access in audiovisual content constitutes the spark for the further development and the appointment of Greek digital audiovisual content, not only in Greece but in Europe as well.

Funded under: Action "Cooperation" (NSRF 2007-2013) /GSRT Cooperation 2009

CARARE is a proposal to establish over 3 years a Best Practice Network and aggregation service and improve the interoperability with Europeana of the digital content available from the archaeology and architectural heritage domain. It will involve heritage organisations, archaeological museums and specialist archives to expand Europeana's network of content providers and make available the rich diversity of content for unique archaeological monuments, historic buildings and town centres.  CARARE is a Best Practice Network, funded under the European Commission ICT Policy Support Programme, which started on 1 February 2010 and will run for three years. It is designed to involve and support a European network of heritage agencies and organisations, archaeological museums and research institutions and specialist digital archives in: 

• making the digital content for the archaeology and architectural heritage that they hold available through Europeana,

• aggregating content and delivering services,

• and enabling access to 3D and Virtual Reality content through Europeana.

CARARE is one of a suite of projects, funded by the European Commission, to help further develop Europeana. It will play an important role in involving Europe s network of organisations responsible for investigating, protecting, informing and promoting unique archaeological monuments, architecturally important buildings, historic town centres and industrial monuments of World, European and National heritage importance alongside the existing national, regional and local content providers. Such involvement will not only bring together a rich diversity of content about the archaeology and architectural heritage but also adds 3D and Virtual Reality content to Europeana. CARARE aims to enable 2D and 3D content for heritage places to be brought together in Europeana and new services for users. CARARE is co-ordinated by Kulturarvsstyrelsen with MDR Partners.

Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP.2009.2.2

Improving conflict resolution skills among the population at large is of paramount importance for a healthier, more peaceful and productive European society. These skills are best taught in early years, using teaching tools that are appropriate and engaging for today`s children, for whom computer games and social networks are natural parts of life. The Siren project aims to create a new type of educational game, the conflict resolution game, which takes advantage of recent advances in serious games, social networks, computational intelligence and emotional modelling to create uniquely motivating and educating games that can help shape how children think about and handle conflict. The software developed by the project will be able to automatically generate conflict scenarios that fit the teaching needs of particular groups of children with varying cultural background, maturity, and technical expertise, and the desired learning outcomes as specified by a teacher. This will enable the system to be used by school teachers all over Europe, without specific technical training. To realize this vision, a number of advances to the state of the art will be made throughout the various disciplines that members of our thoroughly multi-disciplinary consortium specialize in.

Funded under: FP7 ICT TeL