Tomas Lidman, National Archivist, Sweden

Chair of opening of the conference and plenary sessions, day one.

Jill Cousins Executive Director for the European Digital Library Foundation
Jill Cousins is Executive Director for the European Digital Library Foundation and Director of The European Library. She has many years experience in web publishing and preparing content for the web. Her past experience includes the commercial publishing world as European Business Development Director of VNU New Media and scholarly publishing with Blackwell Publishing running their online journals service. Prior to publishing she had a variety of marketing and research careers in the information field, including the running of Online Information in London and her own information brokerage, now owned by Thomson. Encouraging collaboration, aggregation, standards and active digitization programmes across Europe is very much part of the current job, but paramount is the need to remain very aware of user wishes in any developments and decisions.

Europeana: A SWOT

Commencing with a demonstration of Europeana.eu, showing the prototype capabilties and potential, many of the strengths and opportunities will be seen but there are weaknesses and threats. These will be covered in the speech with an emphasis on what we can do to solve them. The vision of Europeana is to be an aggregator, a distributor, a catalyst, a facilator, an innovator and a revenue generator. The distance we have travelled to date towards acheiving this vision will be set in the context of what needs to be done. At a political and practical level this will mean dealing with the weaknesses and threats in digitisation, copyright and standards as well as building on the strengths and opportunities.

Ben White, Head of Intellectual Property, British Library

Copyright

The advent of the web, as well as new technology has made mass digitisation a reality. While all things are technologically possible, the legal, cultural and financial context within which projects such as Europeana or the Google Book Project sit present a number of issues. The discussion will focus on Europe and the legal challenges that lie ahead if we are to achieve comprehensive access to European culture online - one of the fundamentals of the Information Society.

Göran Kristiansson, Head of Unit for Development and Coordination, National Archives, Sweden

Chair of parallel session, track 1 B: "Europeana - solution to which problems and for whom?"

Vigdis Moe Skarstein, National Librarian, Norway

Europeana - solutions to which problems and for whom?

The paper will discuss the choice of strategies for the future development of Europeana. To do that it is important not only to analyze strengths and weaknesses of the portal the way it is today, but to ask basic questions like who the future users will be. We must also see the portal in the perspective of competitive services. And - not least ask if Europeana should be an antonomous service or rather be a comprehensive sum of all the different national digital portals in the cultural field within Europe.

Börje Justrell, Director and Head of ICT Department, National Archives, Sweden

Chair of parallel session, track 3 A: "Digitisation: organisation and financing".

Rolf Källman, Head of Department for Heritage Resources, The Swedish National Heritage Board

Coordinated search and usability

Swedish Open Cultural Heritage (SOCH) is a web service for heritage information. It is a development project which started in February 2008 with Swedish National Heritage Board as project coordinator in collaboration with several central, regional and local institutions within the field of MLA. The aim is to make SOCH a platform for a wide range of applications, targeting both old and new users.

In this presentation I will discuss the benefits of open access and the necessity to include citizens and to establish creative collaborations between institutions, authorities and business corporations.

George MacKenzie, Keeper of the Records, Scotland

Coordinated search

Customers of archives and other cultural heritage institutions are increasingly turning to the internet as their principal means of resource discovery. They are generally blind to the professional and organisational differences and simply want swift access to metadata about holdings and, wherever possible, copies of the holdings themselves. In meeting this challenge the National Archives of Scotland works in close partnership with other governmental bodies. The paper will report on two examples: the ScotlandsPeople service for family history (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk ) and the brand new ScotlandsPlaces project which will provide access to historical data based on geographic locators.

Magdalena Gram, Assistant National Librarian, National Library of Sweden

How to organise collaboration?

This paper takes its starting-point in a recently published study on archives, libraries and museums as communicators of memory in European Union projects. It continues with a brief comparison between two large scale projects, World Digital Library and Europeana, and discusses some important components when organising cross-domain collaboration projects. It also points out the risk, that digital services based on insufficient metadata and poor context will serve as information and access industries rather than content and context industries. Copyright conflicts and inconsistencies in relation to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003) are mentioned as aggravating circumstances for participants in the Europeana project. Finally some new questions are formulated.

Monika Hagedorn-Saupe, Deputy Director, Institute for Museum Research, Germany
Prof. Monika Hagedorn-Saupe studied mathematics, sociology, psychology, and adult education at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, at Kings College London, and at the Freie Universität Berlin. Since 1994, she has been Head of the department "Visitor-related museum research and museum statistics" in the Institut for Museum Research. She is responsible for several European projects and acts as the Deputy Director of the Institute.
Since 1997 she chairs the Special Interest Group on Documentation (Fachgruppe Dokumentation) in the German museum association (Deutscher Museumsbund e.V.) and is Secretary of CIDOC, the documentation committee in ICOM. Currently she is a board member of the German Museum Association and represents ICOM-Europe at the EDL-Foundation. Since 2006 she is Honorary Professor at the University of Applied Science HTW in Berlin and teaches museology.

How to organise collaboration?

The presentation will report on some collaboration activities within the field of museums, showing the type of questions typically asked when approaching museum objects, and explain why as a metadata standard for museums more than Dublin Core is needed. Starting from the American "CDWAlite", the "museumdat" harvesting format has been developed. It will be further extended to a European standard for museums within the ATHENA-project, which supports museums to provide their data to Europeana. Some examples from Germany will describe how difficult it is to get small institutions involved. The development of the cross-sectoral BAM-portal for libraries (Bibliotheken), Archives (Archive) and Museums (Museen) in Germany is shown as an example how challenges were overcome when bringing together our knowledge in a cross-domain portal.

Gunnar Sahlin, National Libarian, Sweden

Chair of track 3: "Where are we heading?".

Pelle Snickars, Head of Research, National Library, Sweden
Pelle Snickars is Associate Professor and Head of Research at the Swedish National Library. He is the editor of numerous books on Swedish media history, for example 1897. Media Histories around the Stockholm exhibition (2005), Narrative in different Media (2007) and A Cultural History of Media (2008) - all in Swedish. Internationaly, Snickars has published extensively on both early cinema as well as new media. His latest book is a co-edited volume on the biggest repository of popular culture on the Web - The YouTube Reader (2009).

The Digital as Default?

Within the ALM-sector there are those who are still in doubt regarding "the digital". Digital preservation is as volatile and unsure as it is expensive - so goes the argument. However, binary code is not ethereal, and storage costs keep dropping, although maintenance and service contracts remain a problem. In thruth, digital technology is a blessing for the ALM-sector - a blessing still poorly understood. Binary reality, for once, has a material foundation in the form of nanotechnological inscriptions on the computer's hard disk. Buildings might collapse and server systems might get flooded, but digital information is nearly always retrievable. Hence, as trust and reliability of online technology increases, the ALM-sector needs to start thinking about the possibilities that networked binary technologies offer. If the Web's network of networks of computers and servers can be perceived as one gigantic information processing machine, which through sophisticated and fast communication protocols share bits of data and strings of code, real archival centralization is for example a possibility. Networked preservation is, naturally, also an issue to be dealt with.

Geert Lovink, Research Professor of Interactive media, Hogeschool van Amsterdam

Beyond Heritage: The Politics of Web 2.0 Research

From a perspective of new media research Europe allocated too much of its resources into the digitization of its cultural heritage, leaving the debate over the architecture of the network society to hyped-up IT gurus and business management evangelists. Once again, the future was located in the past. Now that the 1.5 billion Internet users worldwide are preoccupied with social networking and other Web 2.0 activities, digital content is proclaimed dead and "free". The question central in my work has always been how Europe can be liberated from its preoccupation with the archive in order to mobilize its creative energies towards a 'future culture' that is both critical and innovative. How can we develop an intellectual environment that is capable to shape things to come that is not condemned to writing academic histories? In this presentation I will highlight some actual interventions in emerging fields such as the culture of search (beyond Google), critical Wikipedia research and the artistic use of online video in order to prove that a critical techno culture is alive and well.

Ms Majlis Bremer-Laamanen, MA, National Centre for Preservation and Digitisation, The National Library of Finland

Majlis Bremer-Laamanen is Director of the Centre for Preservation and Digitisation at the National Library of Finland. She has been Project Leader and Work Package Leader in several national and international projects.

Some of the onging memberships:
National: National Digital Library: Availability Section, The National Library Management Group, Mikkeli University Consortium Management group.
International ones: IFLA Newspaper Section, EU Member States' Expert group on Digitisation and Digital Preservation.

Digitisation: organisation and financing

Libraries, archives and museums are at the core of the changing information society. We are turning from the document centric web to the real time web. We are dealing with vast valuable collections and their transformation to the digital environment with legal and technical issues and the social web.
In Finland the Ministry of Education is in charge of the "National Digital Library"-project (2007-2011). The aim is to make the electronic material in the memory organisations at large available and enhance the long term preservation of the source material. It is a challenge for culture and science policy to enable digitisation and access to the most important cultural materials, for research, for citizens... The digitisation will be carried out both as outsourced service and in-house activity in e.g. the National Library's National Digitisation Centre. The development work, funding and organisation at the Centre will further be discussed in the paper.

Stefanos Kollias, National Technical University of Athens

Semantic Aggregation, Enrichment and Management of Cultural Content

The presentation will focus on current state-of-the-art and prospects of search, gathering, alignment, enrichment and presentation of metadata and features of multimedia cultural content. Related technologies will be presented, will be related to current procedures in the framework of Europeana and national aggregation developments. Future trends will be examined and their impact on the current developments will be discussed.