Grants

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

The goal of the project is to coordinate policy and best practice regarding the use of e-Infrastructures for digital cultural heritage in countries all around the Mediterranean. 

The project will establish and stimulate a network of common interest made up of experts and researchers in all the relevant fields, whose sustainability will be planned on a long term beyond the project duration. The network will share experience, promote standards and guidelines, seek harmonisation of best practice and policy and act as a conduit for knowledge transfer from countries with more experience of e-Infrastructures-enabled e-culture to those who are just beginning to investigate this area. 

The project will be rooted in the reality of research pilots and case studies which will act as exemplars and demonstrators of the issues and the processes which are relevant to establishing cultural initiatives on the e-Infrastructures platform. 

The results will inform a wide-reaching dissemination work-package, including two major public best practice deliverables, one international conference, three technical workshops and one policy workshop. 

The project builds on a wealth of experience in effective international coordination of digitisation, digital cultural heritage and e-Infrastructures-enabled culture. It takes full cognisance and advantage of e-Infrastructures and cultural projects which have gone before and will actively seek interaction and synergies with other projects in this area. The impact on international collaboration and on digital cultural heritage in the Mediterranean region will be substantial.

Funded under: FP7-INFRASTRUCTURES-2010-2

The richness and value of the European performing arts heritage is unquestionable. Even though these collections are now being digitized and published online, they remain scattered, and coordination is lacking between digital libraries and the performing arts field; however, there is a high demand for access to this content. ECLAP fills this gap by creating a considerable, and hitherto missing, online archive for all the performing arts in Europe, and providing solutions and tools to help performing arts institutions to enter the digital Europe by building a network of important European performing arts institutions and archives and publishing content collections on Europeana, the European Digital Library. ECLAP is creating a best practice network, making use of advanced database and delivery tools for the production and dissemination of the rich multilingual European heritage. This will result in cultural enrichment and promotion of European culture, and in improvements in learning and research in the field of performing arts.

Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP

With the support of FIAT/IFTA, the European Broadcasting Union and the EDL Foundation, the EUscreen Best Practice Network aims at achieving a highly interoperable digitised collection of television material. EUscreen builds a network of content providers, standardisation bodies, television research partners and specific user groups by providing multilingual and multicultural access to television heritage. EUscreen develops long-term solutions to rights issues and supports user-led demand and interest for services and content, including the development of use case scenarios for different contexts (research, learning, leisure and creative reuse). The project also provides contextual information for the available resources. EUscreen is a three-year project and started in October 2009. The consortium is comprised of 28 partners and 9 associate partners from 20 EU member states (plus Switzerland and Norway). EUscreen is the follow-up project of Video Active, an online platform with 10,000 items about the history of European television.

Funded under: eContentplus

EuropeanaConnect is a Best Practice Network funded by the European Commission within the area of Digital Libraries of the eContentplus Programme. Its overall objective is to deliver core components which are essential for the realisation of Europeana, the European Digital Library as a truly interoperable, multilingual and user-oriented service for all European citizens. EuropeanaConnect will also add the music dimension to Europeana by aggregating a critical mass of audio content. Europeana provides integrated access to digital resources from museums, archives, audio-visual archives and libraries of Europe. EuropeanaConnect started in May 2009 and will last for 30 months.

Funded under: eContentplus

ATHENA is developed as a project to specifically tackle the gap in existing content provision to the European Digital Library (Europeana). An analysis of the current situation shows that the target set for Europeana can best be met with targeted support for museums and audiovisual archives. This project is developed from the sound existing network of Governmental bodies began in 2001 with the MINERVA project, and continues with “Europeana: the European digital library network”. ATHENA has the objective to: 

• reinforce, support and encourage the participation of museums and other institutions coming from those sectors of cultural heritage not fully involved yet in Europeana; 

• coordinate standards and activities of museums across Europe; 

• identify digital content present in European museums; 

• contribute to the integration of the different sectors of cultural heritage, in cooperation with other projects more directly focused on libraries and archives, with the overall objective to merge all these different contributions into Europeana; 

• develop a plug-in to be integrated within Europeana, to facilitate the access to digital contents belonging to European museums. 

ATHENA will also produce a set of scalable tools, recommendations and guidelines, focusing on multilingualism and semantics, metadata and thesauri, data structures and IPR issues, to be used within museums for supporting internal digitisation activities and facilitating the integration of their digital content into Europeana. All these outputs will be based on standards and guidelines agreed by the partner countries for the harmonised access to the content, and will be easily applicable.  The final aim of ATHENA is to bring together relevant stakeholders and content owners from all over Europe, evaluate and integrate standards and tools for facilitating the inclusion of new digital content into Europeana, so conveying to the user the original and multifaceted experience of all the European cultural heritage. ATHENA will work in close cooperation with existing projects (eg “Europeana: the European digital library network” and Michael, both present in ATHENA) and develop intense clustering activities with other relevant projects.

Funded under: eContentplus