Steering Group composition
Henk Alkemade (Chair)
Andrija Sagic (Co-chair)
Clemens Neudecker
Georgia Angelaki
Paul Duchesne
Johan Oomen
Makx Dekkers
Cosmina Berta
Martin Weiss
Glen Robson
Tiziana Lombardo
Sk Abdul Gafur
Gregory Markus (Community Manager)
Antoine Isaac (Community Manager)
Marloes Bontje (Community Manager)
Community aspiration for 2023
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.
Contribute to the shaping of the common European data space for cultural heritage.
To make these aspirations more concrete, the EuropeanaTech community recognises two main, overarching goals, that are aligned with the intentions of the common European data space for cultural heritage and cover a timespan of several years to come.
1) Capacity building to support adoption of new and existing technologies in view of the common European data space for cultural heritage
This means developing a strand of activities aimed at upskilling members in areas such as the Europeana Publishing Framework, Europeana Data Model, data quality, IIIF and multilinguality, etc. with a set of appropriate activities including developing more resources, localising resources and running webinars.
2) Continue to explore cutting-edge advancements in our sector
An open call to propose and join new Task Forces and explore other cutting-edge advancements that can be used by the cultural heritage sector will be issued in Q2 or Q3. Also, we will explore and showcase relevant developments at our own EuropeanaTech Conference.
Priority areas
In 2023 we will focus - within the previously 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 common European data space for cultural heritage, 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/organisation is different, the particular steps will have to be adapted to local circumstances, including, for example, 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. These will include:
Offering webinars and editorials on Pro to explore the latest AI-related developments and gather insights into the adaptation of selected technology and workflows. Through this, we will provide a space for discussion and expertise to continue the focused growth of AI within digital cultural heritage.
Coordinating, sharing knowledge and seeking collaboration with other AI related groups, for instance: AI4Media, AI4LAM, AI+Museums Network and AI-driven cultural heritage projects under the Horizon 2020 - Research and innovation program.
3) 3D Content
The Steering Group will follow up on the efforts from the 3D Task Force in relation to 3D, supporting the actions in the data space implementation plan. This includes engaging in dialogue with the IIIF 3D community and with 4CH - centre of competence on 3D in cultural heritage.
4) Multilingual discovery and access
The Steering Group will investigate possible 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 automatic translation (e.g. Europeana Translate), collaborating and sharing knowledge with the EuropeanaTech community and related centres of competence.
Task Forces and Working Groups
Linked Data Integration and Publication: Theory and practice Task Force
Workflow from shelf to Europeana Task Force
The EuropeanaTech IIIF working group will continue to support the uptake of IIIF in the EuropeanaTech and Aggregator communities by exploring one off webinars and look to produce documents and other outputs that will help the community implement IIIF, including organising a technical workshop alongside the EuropeanaTech Conference
The Data Quality Committee will continue its work among others on detection of problem patterns.
Contributing to the priorities of the Europeana Network Association
The EuropeanaTech Community work plan for 2023 contributes to the strategic priorities of the Europeana Network Association in a number of ways:
EuropeanaTech will continue its efforts to disseminate and raise awareness of best-practices plus recent innovations within digital cultural heritage R&D, directly aligning and propagating ENA's strategic priority to transfer knowledge across the Europeana Network Association. For instance, via the Linked Data Integration and Publication: Theory and practice and the Workflow from shelf to Europeana Task Forces.
EuropeanaTech will continue to organise opportunities for different community members to communicate with the network at large to promote various milestones or events like EuropeanaTech 2023 and ongoing blog series.
As part of the EuropeanaTech 2023 conference, EuropeanaTech will develop a more diverse and inclusive programme to both highlight the necessity for diversity within technical related matters and the impact that having more diverse voices in the R&D decision making process has across the entire cultural heritage spectrum.
EuropeanaTech will continue to offer support and be open to the activation of Task Forces relevant to EuropeanaTech. While the budget is limited, EuropeanaTech can assist in different ways in terms of dissemination and liaison across various stakeholders and the other communities.
Communications and outreach
EuropeanaTech Conference 2023 - a conference on tech related subjects to be organised in the second half of 2023.
The organisation of webinars linked to our priority areas in order to support the exchange in expertise and engage with our community.
The contribution of news posts and blogs to Europeana Pro.
A re-evaluation of EuropeanaTech Insight in collaboration with the Communicators Community to develop a potential sustainable future plan.
Special issue of Insight on the EuropeanaTech Conference insights.
Reporting on community highlights through EuropeanaTech Twitter and mailing list.
Other activities
In collaboration with Europeana Research, contributing to the effort on Datasheets for Digital Cultural Heritage: a standardised but flexible process for documenting digital heritage datasets, to facilitate better communication between digital heritage institutions and dataset consumers, to encourage transparency and accountability, to mitigate unwanted biases and potential risks and to support digital preservation and access.
Discussing with the Climate Action Community how we can work together on, for example, minimising the carbon footprint of digitisation, processing and dissemination and ensuring that sustainability is always one of our concerns in all projects.
Making sure diversity and inclusion aspects are always taken into consideration in all projects.
Budget
Including reserve list of activities in case there is extra budget by July 2023:
Workflow from shelf to Europeana Task Force - Q2: EUR 2 500
Europeana Tech Conference (extras) - Unknown
Linked Data Integration and Publication: Theory and practice Task Force - EUR 2 500
