All posts by Marcin Werla

“Culture for Innovation” and Hack4Europe 2012

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On 9 May a major event for all Ministers of Culture and leaders of Europe’s creative industries and memory organisations was held in Brussels. Very positive speeches by Neelie Kroes, Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, and by the Danish Minister on behalf of the current EU Presidency, were followed by statements in support of Europeana by Ministers from a dozen countries. All Ministers had been asked to pick an item from Europeana, and the blogs about their choices can be seen on Europeana’s home page. The full list of choices and the press release are here.

The event focused on building support for the Connecting Europe Facility funding infrastructure, one small element of which will support Europeana long-term as a core service. It was also the opportunity for Mme Kroes to launch the Hack4Europe 2012 competition that will take place over the next 6 weeks (click on image below to enlarge).

The event began with a seminar that looked at different perspectives on open data, called Culture for Innovation – Recommendations for Change. Advocates of digital innovation and GLAM practitioners developed a set of forceful recommendations that were then taken up by the political representatives in the second part of the programme.

The recommendations are:

  • Invest in digitization & preservation – only 15% of our cultural heritage is digitised so far!
  • Rights, rights, rights! Make copyright work in the digital age
  • Explore the new business models based on opening up content
  • Exploit the power of open – data, licences, standards

How to install and use DjVu plugin?

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DjVu format is currently the most popular way of publishing digital objects in Polish digital libraries. It gives several interesting possibilities, which makes it to be considered as a serious alternative to PDF format. The main disadvantage of this format is the fact, that to read DjVu documents additional software is required – this format is not supported natively by the most popular operating systems. To help users with installation of such software necessary to view DjVu files, we have prepared a short video material showing how to do it. If you have troubles using DjVu publications, take a look at our video material and other short educational movies for users of the dLibra Framework Web Application.

“Digitization in cultural and local administration institutions”

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At the end of April in Wrocław a workshop titled “Digitization in cultural and local administration institutions” was organized by Digitalizacja.pl and Wrocław Institute for Professional Activity. As a part of this workshop Tomasz Parkoła and Adam Dudczak from PSNC were also speaking.  They presented the set of software dLibra/dMuseion/dArceo/dLab supporting institutions in digitization and on-line publishing of collections and e-learning courses on digitization and building digital libraries designed for employees of small cultural heritage institutions, available in the Digital Libraries Federation portal.

Hack4Europe! 2012 – Warsaw, Leuven

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Hack4Europe! is a series of hack days organised by the Europeana Foundation and its partners and provide an exciting environment to explore the potential of open cultural data for social and economic growth in Europe. To feel the atmosphere to the event you can read a short summary of one of the events from the last year edition.

This year PSNC is coorganising two hackathons – in Warsaw and Leuven – during May and June 2012. This is part of the activities of Europeana Awareness project.

Hack4Europe 2012 Warsaw is being coordinated by National Audiovisual Institute in cooperation with Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center. The event will take place on 26 and 27 May 2012.

Hack4Europe 2012 Leuven is being coordinated by Europeana Foundation in cooperation with Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center. The event will take place on 13 – 15 June 2012.

Two more hackathons will be organised in May and June by other parties.

Each of these hackathons will bring together up to 35 developers. They will have access to the diverse and rich Europeana collections containing over 20 million records through the Europeana Search API (incl. a test key and technical documentation).

Participants will be encouraged to try out their ideas for creative reuse of the Europeana content and build prototypes showcasing the social and business value of open cultural data. The suggested (but not obligatory) themes are:

  • Going mobile: Applications that bring Europeana to the mobile devices be they smartphones or tablets! Take advantage of geo-data and geo-awareness.
  • Mashing-up: Mash-up with other APIs and combine and enrich Europeana content with other free content from e.g. Wikipedia.
  • Social curation: Applications that allow users to curate Europeana content a share it with the world and each others on social platforms.
  • User annotations: Applications that let users enrich Europeana objects with comments, tags, links to external sources, or links to other Europeana objects. This can be in the form of a game.
  • World War One: Special attention will be on applications built to showcase the human interest side of world war one based on the material collected during the Europeana collection days.

You can find out more about prototypes developed during previous hackathons on this website.

Best prototypes will be awarded prizes in the four categories:

  • best commercial viability
  • greatest social impact
  • most innovative
  • developers’ pick (voted by hackathon participants)

Winners from the individual hackathons will be then further evaluated and one finalist per category will be invited and awarded a special prize during the Digital Agenda Assembly on 21-22 June in Brussels.

If you would like to participate in one of these hackathons, please check out the details and register for:

 

New projects!

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Since the beginning of April PSNC Digital Libraries Team PSNC Digital Libraries Team is involved in new research project funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (grant nr. 0265/IP3/2011/71). The project is titled „Linear logic in the automatic composition of web services”, and is led Michał Kozak, Ph.D.

Second project in which we are involved since few months is Europeana Awareness. It is a larege international project, which aim is to raise awareness about Europeana – both in the context of benefits from cooperation with this portal and in the context of new possibilities which it gives to wide range of end users. PSNC together with the National Audiovisual Institute are responsible for the project activities in Poland.

On-line consultations in the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage

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Ministerstwo Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego zaprasza do udziału w konsultacjach projektu Konkluzji Rady Unii Europejskiej w sprawie digitalizacji i udostępniania w Internecie dorobku kulturowego oraz w sprawie ochrony zasobów. Uwagi prosimy zgłaszać do dnia 20 marca 2012 r. przy pomocy formularza dostępnego pod adresem: http://www.mkidn.gov.pl/pages/strona-glowna/finanse/konsultacje-w-sprawie-digitalizacji.php.