EuropeanaTech Community Work Plan 2022
The EuropeanaTech Community is one of the Europeana Network Association's specialist communities. Explore their work plan for 2022.
The EuropeanaTech Community is one of the Europeana Network Association's specialist communities. Explore their work plan for 2022.
In 2022, the EuropeanaTech Community's aspiration is to grow its role as a facilitator of knowledge exchange within the Europeana Network Association, and support and accelerate the identification and adoption of new and innovative technologies for the cultural heritage sector.
Read and download the full EuropeanaTech Community work plan below. You can also join the EuropeanaTech Community.
An open call will be made during the first quarter of 2022 for those wishing to join the EuropeanaTech Steering Group.
Grow EuropeanaTech’s role as a facilitator of knowledge exchange within the Europeana Network Association.
Support and accelerate the identification and adoption of new and innovative technologies for the cultural heritage sector.
To make these aspirations more concrete, the EuropeanaTech community recognises three main, overarching goals, that are aligned with the intentions of the European Digital Public Space and cover a timespan of several years to come.
1) Further operationalise, at European level, Europeana’s technical achievements so far.
This means developing a strand of activities aimed at upskilling members in areas such as the Europeana Publishing Framework, the Europeana Data Model, data quality, IIIF and multilinguality, with a set of appropriate activities including developing more resources, localising resources and running webinars. This should be done in close collaboration with the Europeana Foundation as well as involving the Network.
2) Continue to explore cutting-edge advancements in our sector.
Similar to our approach to the AI in relation to GLAMs Task Force, we will issue open calls for new Task Forces and explore other cutting-edge advancements that can be used by the cultural heritage sector. Europeana’s Innovation Agenda should also be updated to reflect such advancements.
3) Explore what the new recommendation on the European Digital Public Space means for the EuropeanaTech community, in particular regarding support for smaller cultural heritage organisations.
We intend to run a series of dedicated discussions and actions in this area of activity, including initiatives that are not currently directly related to Europeana’s remit of operation including digitisation and digital preservation. There is a definitive need, especially from small and medium institutions, for support in terms of skills, awareness, availability of costs and resources and services in the Cloud, which would cover all aspects from shelf to Europeana. This would help scale up digitisation efforts in Europe, in a way compliant with shared practices and standards.
In 2022 we will focus - within the above mentioned main goals - on the following priority areas.
Our priority areas of focus directly align with the Europeana 2021-2025 strategy:
“Tech is changing all the time. Reflecting its public service role, Europeana will develop and use cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, e-translation and machine learning in line with the European Commission’s Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI.”
1) From shelf to Europeana: supporting the workflow
In order to reach the goals specified in the European Digital Public Space proposals, organisations will need to increase their digital output and look at each step of the workflow between shelf and Europeana. We aim to encourage and support cultural heritage institutions - especially small and medium sized ones - at each step by sharing available best practices and Open Source tools. As each institution is different, the particular steps will have to be thoroughly adapted to local circumstances, including materials present, budget, the workforce, applicable laws etc. Next to the addition of new datasets to Europeana and opening them up for re- use, this will greatly contribute to the digital skills of the cultural heritage professionals.
2) AI in relation to Cultural Heritage
The Steering Group will continue to support the community with AI related efforts following the conclusion of AI in Relation to GLAMs task force (future work on this topic will be done under a different name). These will include:
Forming a EuropeanaTech AI Working Group. This Working Group will provide a space for discussion and expertise to continue the focused growth of AI within digital cultural heritage.
Coordinating and sharing knowledge from other AI related groups for instance, AI4Media, AI4LAMs, AI+Museums Network.
Starting an inventory on national AI investments across EU27 and exploring the investments made in the Cultural and Creative Industries to highlight its significance.
3) Multilingual discovery and access
The Steering Group will investigate actions to enhance the multilingual coverage of vocabularies and to improve cross-vocabulary alignment. We will look at furthering Europeana’s work with relation to full-text, collaborating and sharing knowledge with the EuropeanaTech community and related centres of competence such as Impact.
4) 3D Content
The Steering Group will follow up on the efforts from the 3D Task Force in relation to 3D standards, accessibility and interoperability of digital representations through:
Dialogue with IIIF 3D community, identifying use cases
Dialogue with 4CH - centre of competence on 3D in cultural heritage to identify common use cases
including reserve list of activities in case there is extra budget by July 2022
Activity | Spending Quarter Amount |
From shelf to Europeana,including updating FLOSS-directory | Q2: 1250 EUR |
AV Task Force | Q2: 1250 EUR |
New opencall /challenge | Q4: 1250 EUR |
Activity | Spending Quarter Amount |
From shelf to Europeana, including updating FLOSS-directory | Q2: 1250 EUR |
AV Task Force | Q2: 1250 EUR |
New opencall /challenge | Q4: 1250 EUR |
*Budget pending final approval