Europeana 1989: We Made History!

Europeana 1989 is pan-European project concerning the political and social changes in Central and Eastern Europe in the year 1989; commonly known as the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The project aims to create a vivid and complete picture of the revolutionary events in Europe with stories, photos, videos and sound recordings from every country affected. Personal stories, memories and experiences can help others to better understand what it was like and to see events from a different perspective.

By collecting personal memorabilia and stories from this period, and combining it with institutional collections, Europeana aims to create an engaging user experience.

All items are shared online at www.europeana1989.eu

Memory of the World Digi Declaration

In September 2012, UNESCO hosted the Memory of the World Conference in Vancouver, Canada. Shortly after the event, UNESCO released the ‘Vancouver Declaration on Digitisation and Preservation’, available here:

http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/mow/unesco_ubc_vancouver_declaration_en.pdf

Digital Public Spaces

This publication gathers a range of short explorations of the idea of the Digital Public Space.

They examine the future development of the internet as a zone of engagement as web technologies mature, mobile access becomes dominant and new devices allow us to consume, learn, create and share with each other:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/f.cl.ly/items/153c3F0h1d0a19093u3J/DPS.pdf

The central vision of the Digital Public Space is to give everyone everywhere unrestricted access to an open resource of culture and knowledge.

Leeds Uni Digital Learning Programme

See below for info:

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/forstaff/homepage/381/digital_learning_programme

Google Open Gallery

Google's new initiative Open Gallery gives free tools for artists, museums, archives and galleries to create galleries:

http://www.google.com/opengallery

More about the initiative can be found here:

http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/12/10/google-launches-open-gallery-help-museum-gallery-create-online-exhibits/#!px1eH

Terms and Conditions are as follows:

Your Content in our Platform

Our Platform allows you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.Our Platform will give you the option to make your content discoverable either (a) narrowly, through Google Open Gallery only; or (b) broadly, through both Google Open Gallery and other Google products and services (collectively, the "Discoverability Options").

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Platform, you give Google (and those we work with) a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Platform), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content according to the Discoverability Options you select through the Platform.

The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating and promoting the Platform, and improving the discoverability of your content according to the Discoverability Options you select through the Platform.

You can access and remove your content from the Platform at any time, and we will stop using the content that you provided through the Platform as soon as our systems are able to delete the content from our licensed content databases. Also, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted through the Platform. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Platform.

You are solely responsible for the selection and organization of your content on the Platform. Your use of the Platform is subject to the Google Open Gallery Content Policy. We may suspend or stop providing the Platform to you if you do not comply with our terms or policies.

Because we believe you should decide whether and how to directly monetize your content, you can choose to monetize your content through the Platform; Google will not charge fees for, display advertisements alongside, or otherwise monetize your content through the Platform. If you select a Discoverability Option that allows your content to be broadly discoverable through other Google products and services, the advertising and monetization policies of those other Google products and services will apply.

If you have a Google Account, we may display your Profile name, Profile photo, and actions you take on Google or on third-party applications connected to your Google Account (such as +1s, reviews you write and comments you post) in our Platform, including displaying in ads and other commercial contexts. We will respect the choices you make to limit sharing or visibility settings in your Google Account. For example, you can choose your settings so your name and photo do not appear in an ad.

You can find more information about how Google uses and stores content in the privacy policy or additional terms for particular Platform. If you submit feedback or suggestions about our Platform, we may use your feedback or suggestions without obligation to you.

Horizon 2020

Horizon 2020 is a €80 billion EU Research and Innovation programme with funding available over 7 years (2014 to 2020). Horizon 2020 is the financial instrument implementing the Innovation Union, a Europe 2020 flagship initiative aimed at securing Europe's global competitiveness.

Seen as a means to drive economic growth and create jobs, Horizon 2020 has the political backing of Europe’s leaders and the Members of the European Parliament. They agreed that research is an investment in our future and so put it at the heart of the EU’s blueprint for sustainable and inclusive growth and jobs.

By coupling research and innovation, Horizon 2020 has an emphasis on science, industrial leadership and tackling societal challenges. The goal is to ensure Europe produces world-class science, removes barriers to innovation and makes it easier for the public and private sectors to work together in delivering innovation.

Societal Challenges

Horizon 2020 reflects the policy priorities of the Europe 2020 strategy and addresses major concerns shared by citizens in Europe and elsewhere. One of the challenges identified is called Europe in a changing world - Inclusive, innovative and reflective societies (big on cultural memory). The work programme is available below:

http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/wp/2014_2015/main/h2020-wp1415-societies_en.pdf

Participant Portal

UKRO has released a short explanation on the new participant portal for Horizon 2020 here:

http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/desktop/en/home.html

The new European Commission Research Participant Portal will from now on be the official place to look for Horizon 2020 documentation and the official guidance documents

A Definition of Memory

Jan Assmann:

Memory is knowledge with an identity-index, it is knowledge about oneself, that is, one’s own diachronic identity, be it as an individual or as a member of a family, a generation, a community, a nation, or a cultural and religious tradition (p. 114).

Digital Culture: How Arts and Cultural Organisations in England use Technology

Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Nesta have commissioned independent research agency MTM to track the use of digital technology by arts and cultural organisations in England between 2013 and 2015.

Download the full report or the report summary here:

http://native.artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/DigitalCulture_FullReport.pdf

http://native.artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/DigitalCulture_Summary.pdf

Results are now available from the first year survey of 891 arts and cultural organisations, including digital activities, barriers, enablers and impacts. It shows that arts and cultural organisations have transformed their marketing and operations through digital technology, with many reaching bigger and more diverse audiences than ever before. They are also seeing major benefits for creation and distribution, whilst in other areas like new revenue generation, important opportunities remain.

Further details can be found here:

http://www.museumsassociation.org/comment/17012014-mia-ridge-museums-need-to-explode-the-myth-that-they-are-technologically-backward

Museums on the Web 2013 (MCG)

The Museums Computer Group’s 2013 Museums on the Web conference was held at Tate Modern on 15 November 2013. The theme for UKMW13 was ‘Power to the People’. Links, photos, slides and further information are available at: http://bit.ly/1hi19NB

Time		Session		Speakers
9.30		Registration. Tea and coffee sponsored by Squiz. Game: ‘Curate-a-Fact’ begins.
10:00-10.20		Chair’s welcome, venue welcome and sponsor welcome		Mia Ridge, MCG John Stack, Tate Bert Degenhart Drenth, AdLib
10.20-10.50		Opening Keynote Lessons the Guardian has learnt about community engagement online		Hannah Freeman, Guardian Community coordinator for culture
10.50-11.20		Tea and coffee break, sponsored by Squiz.
11.20-12.20		Learn and play (inside and outside the organisation) Chair: Andrew Lewis, V&A
		First Rule: Talking about Computer Club		Jesse Alter and Simon Delafond, Imperial War Museums (IWM)
		The power of Flickr Commons		Nicole Cama, Australian National Maritime Museum
		Ten Most Wanted: Hunting down missing information about cultural artefacts		Marcus Winter, University of Brighton; Susan Lambert, Arts University Bournemouth; Phil Blume, Adaptive Technologies
12.20-12:50		MCG Annual General Meeting
12:50-1:50		Lunch break, sponsored by Stickyworld
1:50-2:20		Lightning talks Chair: Irida Ntalla
		Jane Finnis, Culture24 – Let’s Get Real. James Morley- GathrIt, a prototype toolset to enable discovery, crowdsourcing and sharing across cultural collections Sarah Saunders, Electric Lane- Attribution – the scandal of lost images on the web Marcus Winter, University of Brighton- Social Object Labels Franziska Mucha, Historisches Museum Frankfurt – Frankfurt Now! an interactive city mode
2:30-3:10		Grassroots meets technology Chair: Anra Kennedy
		Using algorithms and people to put a large radio archive on the web		Tristan Ferne, BBC Research & Development
		‘A great place: a lawless hole with rancid drinks and reckless drunks…’ Multiple voices, multiple memories: Public history-making and activist archivism in online popular music archives.		Paul Long, Birmingham Music Archive / Birmingham City University
3:10-3:40		Tea and coffee break, sponsored by Squiz
3:40-4:40		Communities and citizen history Chair: Juno Rae, Museum of London
		Crowdsourcing a Community Collection (and the After Effects)		Kate Lindsay, Alun Edwards & Ylva Berglund-Prytz, University of Oxford
		IT buddies, virtual volunteers and super-users: Building an online community for Britain from Above		Sandra Brauer, English Heritage
		Diaries of the First World War: Citizen history on the Western Front		Jim O’Donnell (Oxford University)
4.50-5.20		Closing Keynote		Michael John Gorman, Science Gallery
5:20-5:30		Wrap-up and close

BBC signs Memoranda of Understanding with Europeana, ODI, OKFN & Mozilla

The BBC has signed Memoranda of Understanding with the Europeana Foundation, the Open Data Institute, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation to enable them to work together on common priorities including the publication of open data and the promotion of open standards in web development. This is an important step in 'mainstreaming' the role of cultural heritage organisations in publishing open data from their collections, and provides an opportunity to bring collections-related content and information to a far wider audience. For further information, see the Telegraph article on the announcement:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10472903/BBC-throws-weight-behind-open-data-movement.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=market+watch

MLAs interested in sharing their collections information as open data, and making it available to Europeana, should do this through the Culture Grid, which is maintained by Knowledge Integration Ltd on behalf of the Collections Trust.

Sharing data through the Culture Grid involves taking structured data and images from collections systems or accessing an online platform for direct entry. They can then be shared with Europeana via a periodic harvest. Culture Grid also provides access to a range of tools and widgets such as a collections search box generator which can be hosted on organisations' websites.

All data shared with Europeana is shared under the Europeana Data Exchange Agreement (http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/data-exchange-agreement), which permits Europeana to share it under a CC0 license.

Collections Trust are also currently working with a group of software providers under the SPECTRUM Partners Scheme to embed the capability to share data quickly and easily with Europeana into Collections Management Systems (as part of the Europeana Inside project - www.europeanainside.eu).

Measuring the Value of Culture

Measuring the value of culture: a report to the Department for Culture Media and Sport was written by Dr David O’Brien (Leeds Metropolitan University), who carried out a 6-month fellowship, jointly-funded by AHRC, ESRC and DCMS, from April to October 2010.

The report considers several solutions to the problem of how to value culture, giving an overview of techniques from environmental and health economics, arts and humanities research and recent studies on subjective wellbeing. Overall the report concludes that, in the context of HM Treasury’s Green Book, the economic valuation techniques supported by the Green Book should be used by the cultural sector when articulating its value to central government.

In light of this conclusion the report makes three specific recommendations for DCMS and the sector:

* DCMS, in consultation with the cultural sector, should create clear guidance on how to use the economic valuation (rather than economic impact) techniques already deployed across central government and recommended by HM Treasury.
* DCMS should develop closer links with academics working in the area of cultural economics, to use existing and future studies as best practice guidance on the use of economic valuation for the cultural sector.
* DCMS should use existing work in this area to explore the possibility of developing a multi-criteria analysis for cultural decisions, of the type recommended in DCLG’s Multi-criteria Analysis: a manual.

The report can be viewed here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/measuring-the-value-of-culture-a-report-to-the-department-for-culture-media-and-sport

Collections for the Future - Hidden Histories

When it was published in 2005, Collections for the Future aimed to reinvigorate the debate about museum collections and to move it further up the policy agenda. It set out suggestions and recommendations for ways that museums could improve engagement with museum collections and the ideas associated with them: how they could make their collections more dynamic by revisiting approaches to acquisitions, disposal and collections mobility; and how they could work together to share knowledge and develop museum professionals for the future.

Much has changed in the time since the report was published and so in July 2007 the MA published Making Collections Effective, an update to the original Collections for the Future report. Links to each of the reports can be found below.

Collections for the Future report: http://www.museumsassociation.org/download?id=11121

Making Collections Effective report: http://www.museumsassociation.org/download?id=14112

The collections for the Future Report includes references to the hidden histories initiative, stating that:

The MA considers the hidden histories approach to be an important way forward, and will look for ways to support and encourage it. 

New intellectual approaches like these invigorate collections, and museums have a responsibility to be open to all alternative perspectives. And yet it has become clear from the inquiry that the extent to which museums can or should share control over the meaning of objects remains a highly contentious issue, although the debate around the question is still oddly under-developed. 

On one hand, it is an established intellectual orthodoxy that audiences always play an active role in making meaning; meaning is not determined by the author or producer. Furthermore, today’s museum users are not used to passively accepting advice and information from experts; they expect to have their opinions and experiences valued and taken seriously. They may also expect that services will be tailored to their individual needs and interests. Accordingly, some respondents to the consultation advocated a radical abdication of power by museums in this area. If collections are public, they argue, so should be their interpretation; museums need to stand back and stop being overly protective of their intellectual territory. 

Other respondents were keen to stress that museums are valued and trusted as authoritative sources of information, and that they should not risk compromising this by taking overtly post-modern approaches or ducking out of offering information and opinion altogether. Visitors may in fact increasingly value the kind of authoritative information that museums can provide, precisely because we live in a world where there is such a proliferation of information. Museums also need to be clear that they are not ideologically neutral spaces; visitors may value clear advocacy of points of view – a danger of ‘balanced’ interpretation is that museums shy away from criticism, challenge and provocation, which should be part of their role. 

Museums need to engage actively with this debate and work out its implications for the way that their collections are presented. They should find ways to be authoritative without being authoritarian. Perhaps one way to do this is to be more open about the role of museum professionals as mediators. It is still the case that the vast majority of their work is hidden behind the scenes, in spite of the fact that when museums open their own processes up to visitors, the results can be very rewarding. Conservators have offered a lead here, with many trying to find ways to let visitors see and understand their work. Museums could do more to open up the work of curators and researchers, so that visitors see where the information and opinions that museums present are coming from. 

Museums can also utilise new technologies that make it easier to offer more than one perspective on an object or collection. Electronic storage of information and images will help to make these multi-layered approaches possible, and indeed has the potential to transform all experiences of museum collections. Many museums have already begun to explore the potential of interpretation using handheld electronic devices. As the technology becomes cheaper and more accessible, all museums should be able to offer visitors a variety of pathways through ideas and information about their collections. 

Beyond the museum, the internet offers remote access to many collections and, crucially, to a wealth of information about them. However, the inquiry shows that some museum staff are sceptical about the benefits of investing in digitisation, believing that online access to collections offers a relatively poor-quality experience for a relatively high cost. But this is to underestimate its future potential. Digitisation is not an end in itself so much as a means to an end. It does not offer quick-wins but rather represents a long-term investment. Moreover, the potential of digitisation is not limited to collections themselves. In a digital environment, the ideas and research around collections are just as valuable a resource. 

Museums must continue to digitise their collections and the information that accompanies them, as building blocks. There will be uses of digitised collections that cannot be imagined yet. Museums of the future will use the digital resources created today for their own ends, just as museums today use the buildings and collections established in the past for their own purposes. Continued investment in digitisation is vital, and should not be held back by scepticism about the quality of some of the products that currently use digitised collections.

The Memory Network

The Memory Network is a multi-disciplinary enterprise that brings together researchers, authors and artists, and organisations to provoke and fuel original thinking about memory in the twenty-first century. It is led by the University of Roehampton and Durham University and is funded by the AHRC: http://www.thememorynetwork.net/

TEDx Eutropolois talk on Museums & Digital Libraries now on Collections Link

TEDx Eutropolis talk on Europeana,digital libraries and 'Stories worth Sharing', now up at http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/blog/2029-stories-worth-sharing

'The Responsive Museum', looking at how museums are designing user-centric services which blend technology and collections, at http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/blog/2012-responsivemuseum

Digi-meeting with Paul Wheatley - 29 Aug 2013

BL contacts (for interview): 

Neil Fitzgerald
Richard Davies
Adam Farquhar

4-Layer Model for thinking about Digital Preservation:

1. Intellectual content
2. Data
3. Software
4. Hardware

(Museums have a different object-based approach to thinking about preservation, largely influenced by the importance that's historically been placed material culture. If there's only one model of a computer in the science museum, curators won't risk switching it on to access potential intellectual content for fear that the physical object will be damaged).

Digital Preservation Resources - discussing the aims of digital preservation

James Newman - '(Not) Playing Games: Player-Produced Walkthroughs as Archival Documents of Digital Gameplay':
http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/186 

Doron Swade: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res01.htm#f

Analysis of Current Digital Preservation Policies: Archives, Libraries and Museums

New post on the Library of Congress blog by Madeline Sheldon highlighting the results of her research into Digital Preservation Policies in libraries and museums around the world.The research focuses on c. 30 institutions, including several in the UK, US and New Zealand:

http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2013/08/analysis-of-current-digital-preservation-policies-archives-libraries-and-museums/

The organisations under review are chiefly large national organisations with a mandate for large-scale preservation, but the research provides links to published policies which are a useful reference for smaller museums and libraries too.

The 1709 Blog: Life after Google Books (non)Settlement - a speculative post

The 1709 Blog: Life after Google Books (non)Settlement - a speculative post

AnthropoNet

Digitizing, preserving, and making accessible audiovisual archives, in particular ethnographic elements or filmed meetings, constitute the first mission of human and social sciences researchers and museums. 

AnthropoNet wants to go beyond this, allowing new forms of publishing that are open to public input and contributions.The basic goal of this project is to exploit digital tools and practices to organize, conserve and diffuse corpuses and digitized resources from human and social science research, in order to permit:

•  The validation of research results
•  An electronic version as well as exchanges between professionals and amateurs
•  The conception and realization of multimedia digital productions
•  Cultural mediation in exhibitions and museums.

More info available here: http://www.iri.centrepompidou.fr/projets/a-traduire-en-en_us-anthroponet/?lang=en_us

#AllezCulture: Nick Poole Speech - 21 June 2013

Collections Trust CEO Nick Poole was invited to address the @Europeanaeu event at Dublin Castle as part of the Irish Presidency of the EU. The full transcipt of his address is provided here:

http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/discover/new-perspectives/1946-allezc

Start the Week: Hari Kunzru and Dystopia - 17 June 2013

This episode focused on Hari Kunzru and his dystopian novella, Memory Palace, where books and the act of remembering have been banned. Jane Rogers explained how her apocalyptic tale may be set in the future but points to today's abuse of scientific knowledge and the heroism of youth. James Robertson spoke about his latest novel which explores grief, justice and the truth, and the photographer Adam Broomberg asked how far images of war capture the truth.

Google Cultural Institute: Steve Crossan - 18 June 2013

Google Cultural Institute (GCI) is based in Paris, and is a team largely made up of designers and software engineers (how does this feed into my study? As a form of institutional critique or as a study of the management of heritage resources?)

GCI ran the pilot Google Art Project two years ago. At this stage there were 17 art museums and galleries involved. The pilot threw up several questions, the foremost among them being, what can distinguish the digital object from the authentic object in a positive way? The project explored different lighting options in the museums (see Turning the Pages & 'Valery Proust Museum') and used street view technology to emulate the experience of walking around the building. A lot was learned from the project, although the GCI has subsequently gone in a different direction.

Moving away from the trend for taking very high quality images (the Louvre has a satellite imaging camera), Crossan suggested that the future of digitisation will be smartphone-based, where the sophistication lies in the software rather than the hardware.

GCI has now launched an exhibition facility, which represents the material of partner institutions in online exhibitions. This allows for the display and exploration of archive material. GCI operates the service on a hosting model, it doesn't make curatorial decisions and the rights to works remain with the partners (in cases where rights to contemporary artworks belong to artists it can still be problematic). The Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory site is an example of this format. In reference to a mosaic thumbnail image style page, Crossan suggested that the layout can be difficult to access unless you know exactly what you're looking for (see Europeana's online exhibitions). There is a further question about how to engage audiences who won't necessarily seek out culture. The search engine model entails that content can only be provided if you know what you're looking for.

Crossan focused on the case study of the Yad Vashem Centre to explain how the digitisation of images and their accompanying text shed new light on unknown photographs and provided context for the histories of individuals that were victims of the Holocaust.

He then gave details of the progress of GCI since Google Art Project. It partners with 250 museums and galleries from 42 countries (encompassing both art and historical content). Beyond the online exhibitions of partner institutions, there is now a user gallery feature that can be taken up by anyone (prosumer?) There are currently 300,000 user galleries and counting. Although not intentionally designed for that purpose, the feature has been utilised by a number of secondary school teachers.

A lot of GCI's current investment is going into solving the metadata problem. They have developed a system for tagging items with Freebase elements, and are also investigating image-based search solutions (beyond metadata). Long-term plans include linking projects on different platforms by making content available through APIs. All this work (and the priorities of GCI generally) are oriented more towards digitisation than digital preservation.

The rationale for GCI? Crossan called it part of Google's Corporate Social Responsibility Programme (although they wouldn't describe it as such) - see http://www.google.org/, e.g. Public Health initiative. However the production of high quality content (which is not primarily English-language material) is good for the longevity of the web and thus, long-term, for Google. Incidentally, this is also why GCI isn't based in an English-language speaking country.

Steve Crossan will shortly be leaving his post as head of GCI. His email address is: stevie@google.com

N.B. See Versailles 3D for an example of GCI's 3D scanning effort.

British Library adds billions of webpages and tweets to archive

In a project led by the BL (launched April 2013), material on 1bn webpages from nearly 5m UK websites, plus public tweets and Facebook entries, are being preserved for the historical record at six libraries in the UK and Ireland. 

The aim is to produce a digital record of events and cultural and intellectual works to match traditional print. See the full story here:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/british-library-archive-webpages-tweets

Show your support for #AllezCulture - The Campaign to Defend Europeana's EU Funding

Dear colleague,

I am writing to invite you to get involved in #AllezCulture, a new campaign to encourage the European Commission to commit to ongoing support for Europeana (www.europeana.eu) and its community of GLAMs across Europe under the current EU budget round.

Europeana is included under the 'CEF' funding programme, where it faces stiff competition from a range of agendas including e-Health, e-Justice and a Safer Internet. While these are all important causes, it is equally important that our community makes its voice heard to protect the past 5 years of investment in digital cultural programmes across Europe and to look ahead to new partnerships and opening up collections to new audiences.

Show your support for #AllezCulture by:

1.       Tweeting your networks with the hashtag #AllezCulture to let
them know how Europeana and European partnerships have added value for
you and your organisation;

2.       Downloading and sharing the #AllezCulture infographic with your
networks (can be downloaded/viewed here: http://researchkb.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/europeana-the-case-for-funding-tweet-allezculture/

3.       Read the blog post about the case for support
<http://researchkb.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/europeana-the-case-for-fundi
ng-tweet-allezculture/>  and blog/share with your own community your
views on how Europeana has impacted on your work, and why it is
important to continue to support collaboration between European GLAMs

4.       Sending a message to @NeelieKroesEU (Vice Commissioner of the
European Commission) to let her know why Europeana deserves her support

5.       Joining the Europeana Network and connecting with other people
involved in the #AllezCulture campaign across Europe - you can join
online at http://www.pro.europeana.eu/network/apply

6.       Joining the Europeana Network LinkedIn group and sharing your
thoughts about how to make the case for investment in Europeana -
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4143376&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

In the UK alone, Europeana-related initiatives have generated more than EUR 10m in new investment from Europe into the cultural industries over the past 3 years. Europeana has been a catalyst for new investment and new digital cultural programmes all over Europe. I hope you will join me in acting today to protect the value of what has been achieved so far, and to secure a sustainable future for Europeana and its work supporting Europe's GLAM sector.

With many thanks in advance for your support, and all best,
Nick Poole

Chief Executive Officer
Collections Trust

Europeana-related conferences

See: http://www.europeana-inside.eu/about/conferences_and_meetings/index.html

The Commons Letter - Nick Poole

Last week we surveyed the commons network in an effort to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and triumphs experienced by individuals advancing the commons and commons solutions. In response, we heard from Nick Poole, chief executive of Collections Trust.

Collections Trust is an independent UK-based organization working with museums, libraries, galleries, and archives worldwide to improve the management of their Collections, a commons shared by us all. The work of Collections Trust “ensures that millions of people worldwide can continue to discover, enjoy, and learn from their history and knowledge and stories which bring it to life.”

Poole’s response to our inquiry about his effort to protect Collections was clear and insightful, and we are delighted to share it with our wider community.
— Jessica Conrad

A letter to On the Commons from Nick Poole:

I lead Collections Trust, a UK-based nonprofit organization working with around 23,000 museums, galleries, libraries, and archives across Europe. It is my firm belief that the principles, ethics, and spirit of the Commons lie at the heart of the public mission of the culture sector.

I have been working to promote the idea of a Cultural Commons for Europe—not only in the digital realm, but also by asserting that the millions of books, artifacts, and records in Europe’s cultural institutions belong to a commons of the world’s memory.

Through this work, I try to demonstrate that the Commons is not just an abstract set of ideas, but a very real and tangible means of building a lasting, scalable, transparent, and relevant culture sector for the 21st century.

But it has been a struggle to ignite this idea in my community. My main challenges include the following:

• Everyone sees the word “Commons” and thinks of the Creative Commons. They go straight to technology and copyright rather than human rights and shared responsibilities.


• The word “Commons” does not travel well. Countries without a well-established concept of common land find it harder to engage with than others.


• When you say you are trying to develop a Commons, everyone wants to see it. Where is it? Is it online? Can I go there? The concept is just too abstract for western scientific rationalists to easily grasp.


• People assume the Commons is anti-money, as opposed to anti-enclosure, so they assume they can’t afford it—particularly in a time of austerity. I try to demonstrate that the Commons can be the basis of a profoundly scalable business model, but examples are few and far between.


• Commons ≠ Communism. People think the Commons is a political statement, not a human one. I find that a lot of people opt out of the conversation because they think they’re getting involved in a fringe lobby group.

Although I’ve faced challenges, I’ve also discovered some successful solutions, including your Commons Framework. I also use a thought exercise where I ask people to imagine the difference between a piece of land that they own in common and one that is owned by a landlord. If you build on a piece of land that someone owns, the results of your labour are never yours. But if you build on, and care for, a piece of land that is held in common, then it is yours and everyone’s forever. This ought to be the primary purpose of a museum, archive, or library.

For more information about Collections Trust, you can visit their website at www.collectionstrust.org.uk. Email us at info[at]onthecommons.org to share your own challenges and triumphs in advancing the commons and commons solutions.

Inside The Green Box

See below for an excerpt from the paper I gave at the 2013 AAH Conference (11-13 April), University of Reading. The paper was entitled: 'Curatorial ‘Translations’: The Case of Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box':

In his 1923 essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’, Walter Benjamin questions the rationale underlying one of the key principles of translation, asking: ‘What does a literary work 'say'? What does it communicate?’ He goes on to suggest that:

It 'tells' very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information. Yet any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information - hence something inessential.

The implication here is that translation should not be understood as a process of transmission. As such, it can only relay information; a good translation will communicate something that exceeds its representation as words on the page. This characterization of translation bears similarities to Benjamin’s concept of the aura which is described as ‘the unique phenomenon of distance’, a distance that is destroyed through the reproduction and subsequent distribution or transmission of the artwork. In the digital realm, the potential for artworks to be rendered literally as the sum of their parts, in binary code, is even more palpable. And it is a particularly relevant concern for literary and text-based objects, which can be manipulated and isolated according to particular search functions. While digitization and the application of text-reading software afford new opportunities to engage with textual materials, in a museum-gallery context, increasing interest in the book as an object of art, rather than a medium of art, leave us with questions about how these opportunities might be realized.

The focus of my PhD is on issues pertaining to the digitization of heritage collections and in this paper, I want to examine the display and representation of art texts digitally, and explore the extent to which the relationship between visual and textual art has been defined by a practice of ‘translation’. However, rather than expanding a theory of curatorial translation, my purpose is to introduce Benjamin’s notion of translation as a way of conceptualizing both the curatorial and the artistic process; I believe this approach offers a different way of thinking through ideas that are often linked with the aura, and the transformative potential implied by translation seems fitting for my case study, Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box. Working at the University of Leeds Library and the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery has informed my choice since I’ve studied a copy of the box held in the Library’s Special Collections. But this is not a straightforward or uncomplicated example of an artist’s book; in fact, as a box, it is debatable whether the term ‘book’ applies at all. Somewhere between archive, work of art and literary text, it is a commentary on Duchamp’s famous work, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even. The box and its contents, a collection of loose facsimile notes, are ostensibly good candidates for digitization but their random accumulation and method of production complicates the process of generating a digital reproduction. By challenging the well-established dichotomy between copy and original, Duchamp’s work provides an opening for thinking about a form of translation that goes beyond the transmission of information.

In undertaking the research for this paper, I’ve cross-referenced the Leeds box with the Tate’s copy, which is available through the Tate website. The results of this comparison have been very interesting, if not conclusive, and I’ll touch on these findings at in the second half of the paper, before reflecting on the practical considerations associated with digitizing The Green Box.

In 1934, Marcel Duchamp announced the publication of The Green Box - produced in an edition of 320 - as a literary counterpart to his seminal artwork, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor, Even, also known as The Large Glass. Comprised of 93 separate documents, plans, sketches and notes held in a green felt-covered box, reproduced from originals made by Duchamp, the box gave an insight into the artist’s creative process during the conception of his Large Glass. Even the box itself was representative of how he had compiled the notes, storing them away in a green cardboard box for future reference. Out of the edition of 320, Duchamp added to 20 of the boxes one original note, alongside the 93 reproductions. The edition I worked from contains 93 notes and, so far as I can tell, includes no original note.

As I’ve already indicated, the idea of artistic and curatorial translation seems particularly relevant to Duchamp’s box. The pretext for publishing it was what George Heard Hamilton called ‘Duchamp’s elegant invitation to the reader to thread his own way, with the aid of the notes, through the artist’s mind’. Yet, contrary to this apparent desire to explain The Large Glass, Robert Lebel has claimed of Duchamp that, ‘his work was meant for no one but himself, and he took every precaution to see that nothing of it should be intelligible to an outsider’. How, then, are these contradictory impulses to be reconciled? Keeping in mind the sort of process that attempts to capture the essence of the work beyond a mere likeness or literal communication of language, I want to think about ways in which The Green Box has both resisted and played into the notion translation.

Throughout his famously short artistic career, Duchamp was renowned for making difficult art, often more engaged with intellectual than aesthetic concerns. The words ‘insoluble’, ‘enigmatic’ and ‘ambiguous’ have frequently been used to describe his work, particularly the piece he laboured longest over, The Large Glass. To suggest, therefore, that he published The Green Box purely as a means of explaining his artistic rationale would appear somewhat out of character. Instead, it seems to be the case that the Glass was only one dimension of the larger work, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachlors, Even. Sometime after the publication of the box, Duchamp remarked that the Glass was not just an object to be looked at, but a ‘wedding of mental and visual elements’ in which ‘the ideas […] are more important than the actual visual realization’.

Of the relationship between the Glass and the box, Richard Hamilton sums up this juxtaposition of mental and visual elements very well, when he writes:

It was his (Duchamp’s) intention that the ‘Large Glass’ should embody the realization of a written text, which had assisted the generation of plastic ideas, and which also carried layers of meaning beyond the scope of pictorial expression. The text exists beside the glass as a commentary and within it as a literary component of its structure. Without the notes the painting loses some of its significance and without the monumental presence of the glass the notes have an air of random irrelevance.

The box and the Glass, then, are co-dependent entities. While neither reveals itself easily, a fluid dialogue between the visual and the textual components does unlock a greater understanding of the work. As such, the two are engaged in what could be described as a reciprocal process of translation; one is not a literal translation of the other but together they do give the viewer the key to begin deciphering its mysteries. Likewise, it was Duchamp’s belief that it is not the artist who creates the work but the viewer who completes the creative cycle. Both, again, are co-dependent entities.

As interesting as the relation of the box to the Glass, was Duchamp’s approach to reproducing the notes as a printed book. As Paul Thirkell suggests the box was, ‘produced in a medium carefully chosen by the artist to best convey the conceptual aims of the piece’; for Duchamp’s purposes, a print process that would give an accurate idea of the original notes was the chief aim, and he eventually chose a photomechanical technique. Various Duchamp quotes support the view that he meticulously and obsessively worked to recreate each note, piece by piece, and these have frequently been cited by critics. For example, he once stated in an interview:

I had all of these thoughts lithographed in the same ink which had been used for the originals. To find paper that was exactly the same, I had to ransack the most unlikely nooks and crannies of Paris.

However, as Roland Shearer and Stephen Jay Gould have since discovered through comparison with the originals, the ink and paper of the print boxes are deliberately and unashamedly different. It is possible that Duchamp was implicitly aware that if he created an exact copy, he could not avoid losing something of the spontaneity of the originals in the conversion, or translation, from one format to another. It seems certain, at least, that he was playing with all the theories of value the concept of the facsimile sets up. By introducing subtle variations into the reproductions, Duchamp was creating a likeness that was somehow unlike. Furthermore, by adding original notes to 20 of the printed editions, he was effectively destroying the template the copies were based on.

Part of the attraction of the The Green Box is its elusiveness; the disorder of the notes and their arbitrary sequence is integral to the artwork. While the digital medium does provide options for supporting that sort of representation, it could be argued that something is ‘lost in translation’ in the production of the digital surrogate. Digitization therefore complicates a notion of translation that explicitly works against the transmission of information. However, complete versions of the box are quite rare, partly because it was produced as a limited edition, partly because of its loose leaf format, and there are perhaps only two or three copies in the UK. Consequently, there are many practical reasons for creating a digital version of the box and putting it online. As well as increased potential for research, being able to directly compare multiple editions will reveal more about how they were produced and compiled.

My own experience of studying the Leeds box in relation to the Tate’s online version has been a difficult and sometimes frustrating process, which has confounded the method of cataloguing I initially planned to apply. The fact that some of the notes are double-sided is also potentially confusing, since it requires the production of multiple digital images per note. Far more confusing though, is the experience of trying to reconcile one version of the box with another. While both the Leeds and the Tate editions are complete, the Tate’s does have a 94th note. However, even taking account of this addition, comparison of the boxes has thrown up some questions. For example, there are at least two leaves in the Leeds edition of the box that don’t match any of the Tate’s counterpart images online. Equally, there are two or three Tate images that I have so far been unable to find the counterparts for in the Leeds edition. These omissions could partly be due to human error on my part and will require further checking but I’d feel confident enough to say there is some disparity between the two copies. Furthermore, in a few cases even where the notes are the same, the shape they’ve been torn into is different; here’s one of the more obvious examples (see below), which casts doubt on the received wisdom that Duchamp created a set of templates to replicate the shapes of the original scraps of paper. The torn edges introduce an element of contingency to the box since each tear is slightly different.

This is in keeping with the earlier suggestion that Duchamp deliberately misled critics and commentators about his painstaking efforts to replicate the notes and find the papers and inks from which the original ones were made. He seemed to enjoy upsetting the distinction between copy and original that privileges the authentic work of art. And it was a successful move on his part for the extent to which these pieces could be viewed as copies is challenged by the differences the comparison of two boxes has revealed.

The closeness of the comparison has been made possible through digitization. It could also be argued that it is precisely the capacity to render exact digital copies that highlights Duchamp’s deviation from the facsimile format, a model that usually implies exactitude and uniformity. The assumption of fidelity to an original that has become associated with the box diverts attention away from a more significant aspect of Duchamp’s work; the fact that his concern is not with a static likeness but with a moving and developing process. The art is constituted in the process, and any attempt to represent the material art, digital or otherwise, must be mindful this.

References

Benjamin, Walter, 'The Task of the Translator', in Illuminations. London: Pimlico, 1999, pp. 70-82

Duchamp, Marcel, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even: A Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp's Green Box, trans. by George Heard Hamilton. London: Lund, Humphries, 1960.

Lebel, Robert, Marcel Duchamp, trans. by George Heard Hamilton. London: Trianon Press, 1959.

Further Sources

(suggestions from panel members)

Fluxus Group works, Joseph Beuys etc. (see also Huyssen chapter)

Nigel Henderson, Win Henderson, Hans Ulrich Obrist (on Richard Hamilton).

Duchamp, Marcel, The Portable Museum: the Making of the Bôıte-en-Valise de ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Selavy. Inventory of an Edition by Ecke Bonk, trans. by David Britt. London: Thames & Hudson, 1989.

Sarat Maharaj, Sarat, 'Perfidious Fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other', in Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. by Jean Fisher. London: Kala Press in association with the Institute of International Visual Arts, 1994, pp. 28-35. URL = http://www.iniva.org/library/archive/people/m/maharaj_sarat/perfidious_fidelity

Forgetting to Remember: Jeannette Bastian - 13 March 2013

On the 13 March I attended the Jenkinson Lecture at UCL, organised by the Department of Information Studies, and given by Professor Jeannette Bastian of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, Boston.

Bastian is interested in how memory studies can inform the work of practising archivists. To begin with, she spoke of the so-called 'memory boom' in academia, dominant since the 1980s, and the reification of memory in memory studies. She describes memory as omnipresent and:

- Situated in social frameworks.
- Enabled by technologies.
- Confronted by cultural institutions.

So where do archivists fit into memory studies? Community memories are often not recorded in ways that are consistent with standard archival practice. However, the emergence of memory studies indicates a renewed interest in 'untold stories'. The emphasis has shifted from the 19th century practice of accumulating archives as part of the process of nation-building to the 20th/21st century exploration of marginalised narratives and discourses through recording oral histories and other non-traditional memorial forms. Jan Assman writes, 'the concept of cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images and rituals specific to each society in each epoch'.

Of the relationship between archives and memory, Brien Brothman makes a distinction between 'memory's archivist' and 'history's archivist'. Annette Wieviorka takes a 'historian of memory' approach in The Era of the Witness, in which she writes about the dynamic 'presentness' of memory.

Bastian referenced several examples of national libraries and archives that use memory as part of their rhetoric, including the American Memory project, Library Archives Canada on the 'continuing memory' of the nation, Archives UK, who state of archives, 'they are our collective memory' and the Australian Government Records, who invoke 'the memory of our nation'.

Archivists have had a tendency to view memory as a subject as opposed to memory as a framework but are now gradually moving into that realm.

Marita Sturken uses the term 'technologies of memory' in her study of traumatic world events, channelled through the mass media. She defines memory as a narrative as opposed to a replica or surrogate for the actual event, commenting that 'personal memory, cultural memory and history do not exist within neatly defined borders'.

Bastian then defined three methods for archiving memory, through:

- Memory texts as memory's embodiment in texts, talismans, imagery and performance.
- Community archives as self-documenting grassroots movements.
- Communities of records, whereby the community is both a record creating entity and a memory frame that contextualises the records it creates.

Bastian's take on technology is that it gives a practical agency to the task of archiving memory.

Example Archives

A Living Archive - John Cage - http://exhibitions.nypl.org/johncage/
A Becoming Archive - Project Save - http://www.projectsave.org/

Further References

Sturken, Marita, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

AERI 2010 - Collective Memory Research Methods - http://aeri2010.wetpaint.com/page/Collective+Memory+Research+Methods

Look out also for an article, published in Archival Science, involving Margaret Hedstrom, which is a survey of the use of memory in archival literature.

Research Professional Database

Research Professional is a comprehensive research funding opportunities database which offers users the opportunity to search for research funding in all disciplines from a wide range of sponsors in the UK and overseas. All funding information in the database is pre-screened for eligibility for UK researchers. 

The University of Leeds has a subscription to Research Professional and all University staff can view and use it. With a username and password you can search for opportunities and set up regular updates, sent via email, in your areas of interest – it is also possible to also use the system from outside the University.

Parables for the Virtual - Brian Massumi

From Intro

'Attention to the literality of movement was deflected by fears of falling into 'naïve realism', a reductive empiricism that would dissolve the specificity of the cultural domain in the plain, seemingly unproblematic 'presence' of dumb matter' (p. 1).

'Culture occupied the gap between matter and systematic change, in the operation of mechanisms of 'mediation'. These were ideological apparatuses that structured the dumb material interactions of things and rendered them legible according to a dominant signifying scheme into which human subjects in the making were ‘interpellated' (pp. 1-2).

'The grid was conceived as an oppositional framework of culturally constructed significations: male versus female, black versus white, gay versus straight, and so on. A body corresponded to a 'site' on the grid defined by an overlapping of one term from each pair. The body came to be defined by its pinning on the grid. Proponents of this model often cited its ability to link body-sites into a 'geography' of culture that tempered the universalizing tendencies of ideology' (pp. 2-3).

'Movement is entirely subordinated to the positions it connects. These are predefined […] Since the positional model’s definitional framework is punctual, it simply can’t attribute a reality to the interval, whose crossing is continuity (or nothing) […] The space of the crossing, the gaps between positions on the grid, falls into a theoretical no-body’s land' (pp. 3-4).

'The charge of indeterminacy carried by a body is inseparable from it. It strictly coincides with it, to the extent that the body is in passage or in process (to the extent that it is dynamic and alive) […] To think the body in movement thus means accepting the paradox that there is an incorporeal dimension of the body. Of it, but not it. Real, material, but incorporeal' (p. 5).

Foucault – incorporeal materialism (see 'The Discourse on Language' in The Archaeology of Knowledge), p. 5.

Of the moving bow example and Bergson’s analysis, 'A path is not composed of positions. It is nondecomposable: a dynamic unity. That continuity of movement is of an order of reality other than the measurable, divisible space it can be confirmed as having crossed' (p. 6).

'Cultural laws of positioning and ideology are accurate in a certain sphere (where the tendency to arrest dominates) […] This 'limitation' does not belittle the approaches in question. In fact, it brings wonder back into them […] The Bergsonian revolution turns the world on its head. Position no longer comes first, with movement a problematic second. It is secondary to movement and derived from it' (p. 7).

'The problem is to explain the wonder that there can be stasis given the primacy of process. This is akin to the late-twentieth-century problem of ‘order out of chaos'' (p. 8).

'Another way of putting it is that positionality is an emergent quality of movement' (p. 8).

Simondon’s approach 'does not accept any categorical separation between the social and the presocial, between culture and some kind of 'raw' nature or experience. The idea is that there is an ontogenesis or becoming of culture and the social (bracketing for present purposes the difference between them), of which determinate forms of culture and sociability are the result. The challenge is to think that process of formation, and for that you need the notion of a taking-form […] A sociality without determinate borders: 'pure' sociality' (p. 9).

'Nature and culture are in intimate movement, into and through each other. Their continuum is a dynamic unity of reciprocal variation. Things we are accustomed to placing on one side or another of the nature-culture divide must be redistributed along the whole length of the continuum […] On the list of distinctions it becomes difficult to sustain in any categorical way are those between artifact and thing, body and object – and even thought and matter. Not only do these relay in reciprocal becomings; together they ally in process. They are tinged with event’ (p. 11).

'The kinds of codings, griddings and positioning with which cultural theory has been preoccupied are no exception to the dynamic unity of feedback and feed-forward, or double becoming. Gender, race and orientation are what Ian Hacking calls 'interactive kinds': logical categories that feed back into and transform the reality they describe' (pp. 11-12).

'What is a memory without content? One answer might be that it is just pastness, a pure pastness that would be the condition of emergence for determinate memory. But that would make the past contemporary to the present of sensation and perception. Leibniz goes on to say that although the perception of perception is without characters, it does carry a 'distinguishing sense of bodily direction'. Distinguishing bodily direction without a determinate form? In other words, without distance? That could only be tendency, pure tendency. Tendency is futureness: pure futurity. So there is a futurity that is contemporary with the past’s contemporaneousness with the present' (p. 15).

'For Spinoza, the body was one with its transitions. Each transition is accompanied by a variation in capacity: a change in which powers to affect and be affected are addressable by a next event and how readily addressable they are – or to what degree they are present as futurities' (p. 15).

'The first rule of thumb if you want to invent or reinvent concepts is simple: don’t apply them. If you apply a concept or system of connection between concepts, it is the material that you apply it to that undergoes change, much more markedly than do the concepts […] One device for avoiding application is to adopt an 'exemplary' method […] An example is neither general (as is a system of concepts) nor particular (as the material to which a system is applied). It is 'singular' […] As a writing practice, exemplification activates detail. The success of the example hinges on the details' (pp. 17-18) – the 'parables' of the title refers to the genre of writing most closely allied with the logical form of the example.

Digi-meeting with Paul Wheatley - 13 Dec 2012

Outline of Digitisation/Digital Preservation Initiatives

Europeana harvests collections from the UK's national aggregator, Culture Grid, maintained by Collections Trust.

UNESCO (left in 1985, rejoined in 1997). Memory of the World Initiative - programme began in 1992, with the aim of preserving and digitizing humanity's documentary heritage. See also: http://whmnet.org/. UNESCO's influence in the UK?

What (if any) is the relationship between JISC and the 6th Framework programme? Both claim to have funded projects like CASPAR.

EC stuff - see Digital Libraries Initiative doc.

British Library - PLANETS etc. PLANETS is not a repository project; PLANETS software components have been designed to work with a wide range of repository or archive systems.

Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) - see Museums Association press release.

NOTES

Conflation between digitisation and digital preservation (myth that to digitise is to preserve, it's not. Digital preservation is a separate process).

OPF and British Library, digital preservation. BL (largely) equally committed to digitisation and digital preservation.

Collections Trust - access to digitised collections, digital preservation the responsibility of contributing institutions (preservation vs. access). Sometimes the money needed to preserve digitised collections isn't taken into account at the funding stage. If there's money for digitisation, but not digital preservation, there is an increased risk a of digital degradation.

Digital Register (a reigister of what's been digitised) - http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archon/

UNESCO - what do they fund? Sources of income include the World Heritage Fund, which receives most of its income from compulsory contributions from countries (States Parties) and from voluntary contributions.

JISC - HEFCE funded (cuts mean they're now applying for EU money).

Copyright - legal deposit libraries have a responsibility for safeguarding digital information.

New EU model for digitisation under framework programmes. Organisations (in different countries) collaborate and put together a proposal, proposal then goes out to tender for commercial companies to carry out the work. Latter part the new model.

Partnerships between big MLAs and commercial companies. Issues: commercial embargoes, companies are selective (they can choose what they want to digitise) - see BL and Brightsolid: http://www.brightsolid.com/online-publishing/

Google not digitising any more newspapers (recent announcement) - http://www.news24.com/SciTech/News/Google-stops-digitising-old-newspapers-20110521

http://librarian.newjackalmanac.ca/2012/11/the-future-of-libraries-is.html - slideshow about the future of libraries.

Potential Contacts

Alistair Dunning @alistairdunning (Twitter).

Peter van Huisstede vanhuisstede@ubib.eur.nl 

Interesting Digi-bits from Email Folder

ENUMERATE Survey

The ENUMERATE Survey Report on Digitisation in European Cultural Heritage was carried out in early 2012 by the ENUMERATE Thematic Network. It attracted almost 2,000 responses and was conducted with the assistance of national coordinators in 29 European countries. This report is the first in a series of three to be published in the lifetime of the ENUMERATE project. Later this year there will be an in-depth “thematic” survey followed by a further update next year. It is intended ENUMERATE will continue its work beyond 2014. The report can be downloaded from: www.enumerate.eu/en/statistics. Funding for the project is from the European Commission under the ICT Policy Support Programme part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme.

The 2013 FP7 ICT Work Programme has been published. Follow the link for details of open calls: http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/page/call_FP7#wlp_call_FP7

Digital R&D Fund

The 7 million pound Digital R&D Fund for the Arts has been launched as a partnership between the Arts Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Nesta.The fund is intended to support research and development projects that use digital technology to enhance audience reach and/or explore new business models for organisations with arts projects.Organisations with arts projects, Technology providers and Researchers or research teams are invited to form collaborative relationships and make joint funding applications. You can find out about the fund, eligibility criteria and deadlines for expressions of interest for the fund here: http://www.artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/

Google Cultural Institute

Google has announced the launch of its new Google Cultural Institute platform, designed to provide cultural institutions with tools to open up collections online to new audiences. The platform launches with online exhibits from 17 cultural heritage institutions around the world. I had the opportunity of doing an email I

Interview with Google Institute Director Steve Crossan at http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/googleinstitute/. The Collections Trust is going to be working with Steve and the team at the Google Cultural Institute to look at how to ensure that the process of participating is as smooth and risk-free as possible.

The first fully-syndicated site based on the platform is live at http://archives.nelsonmandela.org/#!home. The idea is that the platform can enable partners to set up their own web-based offer, using the same content and functionality from the core GCI platform, but under their own URL. This opens up the possibility of developing standalone thematic exhibitions from your digital content,with Google doing the heavy lifting in terms of data hosting.

Cultural venues and Mobile App Development Links

David Hopes, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust - https://vimeo.com/49898316
Ben Templeton talking about TATE Magic Ball - https://vimeo.com/44525319
Hein Wils + Ferry Piekart talking about Augmented Reality - https://vimeo.com/48732926
Nancy Proctor, Smithsonian - https://vimeo.com/44404225
Allegra Burnette on MoMA mobile strategy - https://vimeo.com/44523457

Comparison of Online Collections Databases

http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/softwaresurvey

• Europeana & Culture Grid: aggregate data about items from other organisations (the items have to already have to be on the web somewhere else).
• Modes Users Association: sell and support collections management systems which can output content for use on a web site.
• Orangeleaf: website developers who will build you whatever you want.
• Historypin is a social media site.
• E-Hive: a "cloud" collections management system for museums and others which will, if you want, allow public web access to object records.

Digital Engagement Framework

This offers a framework for cultural organisations to use as a basis for the development of digital strategies, and is based on experience running workshops and developing strategies for museums, galleries, theatres and festivals over the past few years. The workbook can be downloaded here: http://www.digitalengagementframework.com/framework.html

How to Manage Knowledge and Info Not Directly Related to Objects

London's Information Policy Toolkit - see: http://www.museuminforecords.org.uk/toolkits/InformationPolicy.pdf

Produced in the late stages of the MLA, there were plans to take it forward as the companion to SPECTRUM for broader knowledge and information management (lack of resources prevented this).

Archival Encounters III

Presentations from the evening are now available online at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/heritage/index.html

Futurelearn

As was announced in December 2012, the University of Leeds is a launch partner in FutureLearn, the OU-led Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform. For background information about FutureLearn, see the following links:

University Press Release (December 2012): http://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/3345/leeds_joins_partners_in_offering_free_online_access_to_education

University of Leeds For Staff update (February 2013): http://www.leeds.ac.uk/forstaff/news/article/3753/six_new_partners_join_futurelearn

FutureLearn website: http://futurelearn.com/

Resources

Books

Benkler, Y. 2006. The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press.

Brabazon, T. 2008. The Revolution Will Not be Downloaded. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Ltd.

Shirky, C. 2010. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. London: Allen Lane.

Tredinnick, L. 2008. Digital Information Culture: The individual and society in the digital age. Oxford: Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Ltd.

Weinberger, D. 2012. Too Big to Know. Basic Books.

Journal Articles

Anderson, I.G. 2008. Necessary but Not Sufficient. D-Lib Magazine, 14(1/2). Available at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january08/anderson/01anderson.html

Anderson, S.R. & Allen, R.B. 2009. Envisioning the Archival Commons. American Archivist, 72(2), pp.383–400.

Evans, M.J. 2007. Archives of the People, by the People, for the People. American Archivist, 70(2), pp.387–400.

Flinn, A. 2010. “An attack on professionalism and scholarship”?: Democratising Archives and the Production of Knowledge.Ariadne, 62. Available at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/flinn/

Hinton, A. ‘The Machineries of Context.’ Journal of Information Architecture, 1(1), pp.37–47. Available at: http://journalofia.org/volume1/issue1/04-hinton/jofia-0101-04-hinton.pdf

Huvila, I. 2008. Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management. Archival Science, 8(1), pp.15–36.

Kennedy, M. 2009. Cautionary Tales: Archives 2.0 and the Diplomatic Historian. Ariadne, 61. Available at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/kennedy/

Oomen, J. & Aroyo, L. 2011. Crowdsourcing in the Cultural Heritage Domain: Opportunities and Challenges - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities & Technologies (C&T 2011), Brisbane, Australia, p. 138. Available at: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~marieke/OomenAroyoCT2011.pdf

Rosenzweig, R. 2006. Can history be open source? Wikipedia and the future of the past. Journal of American History, 93(1), pp.117–146.

Theimer, K. 2011. What Is the Meaning of Archives 2.0? American Archivist, 74(1), pp.58–68.

Blogs

Chan, S. Fresh and New(er) http://www.freshandnew.org/

Hitchcock, T. Historyonics http://historyonics.blogspot.co.uk/

Prescott, A. Digital Riffs http://digitalriffs.blogspot.co.uk/

Sherratt, T. discontents http://discontents.com.au/

Theimer, K. ArchivesNext http://www.archivesnext.com/

Changes to Copyright Law in 2013

(From a note by Tim Padfield on the Archives Listserv)

Copyright law is set to change significantly over the next year. This note sets out some expected changes that are likely to have an impact on archivists.

The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill is currently before Parliament. It contains copyright elements that will need to be supplemented by regulations, if they are passed, but the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) is already working on drafting. Commencement might be as early as October 2013. Important points for archives are:

• Removal of the 2039 terminal dates and their replacement by (probably) standard terms, notably life plus 70 years. There might be a short transition period (5 years, as in the USA?). This will remove all works created before about 1870 or a bit earlier from copyright at a stroke.
• Introduction of a licensing scheme for the use of orphan works, so long as a diligent search has been carried out. Licensing is likely to be by a government body. This will not assist mass digitisation. We shall know more about the impact of these changes once the Act has received Royal Assent and in particular once we can see the regulations.

• On 20 December the Government published its long-awaited white paper (http://www.ipo.gov.uk/response-2011-copyright-final.pdf) on reform of the copyright exceptions. The changes outlined will have huge implications for the general public, for archivists and librarians, for museums professionals and for public sector organisations. Implementing regulations are intended to come into force in October 2013. There will be no further consultation on the policy, but the draft regulations will be published for comment on the technical details

General points

The motivation of the Government has been set out (p 8 para 6): 'Economic growth is a principal motivator but fairness, the reputation of the copyright system, the consequences of increasingly widespread digital technologies and a range of wider social goods such as education and culture are also important considerations.'

Contracts will be prevented from overriding exceptions where this is permitted and desirable. There will be no general provision on this because some exceptions must be able to be replaced by contract.

Private copying

People who own a copy of any kind of copyright work (e.g. music recording, ebook) will be able to copy it to any medium for their own personal use. No copy may be supplied to anyone else (e.g . family, friend). Contract override will be prevented.

Quotation

Fair dealing for criticism and review to be extended to all forms of quotation, for instance to allow citation and bibliographies of books (titles are capable now of being copyright works in themselves) and in articles. Contract override will be prevented.

Research and private study

Fair dealing and the library and archive copying exceptions for users are to be extended to all types of work (though the IPO appears to think, mistakenly, that library and archive copying already applies to artistic works (p 32 para 3, p 35 para 1)). Contract override will be prevented. The IPO is to consider removing or simplifying the requirement for a declaration form when copies are made by libraries and archives. A new exception will permit access to digitally-preserved material on dedicated terminals on the premises of libraries and archives. This exception does not currently exist in UK law but I fear that some archives are infringing by already providing this service. If so they should consider whether they should use dedicated terminals for online access to the records so that they are at least compliant when the law changes.

 Archives get special mention in relation to this subject in the introductory sections (p 8 para 3): 'Archives stand to save money from being able to copy works and share them by computer terminals on their premises rather than shifting fragile documents back and forth from storage, and both users and society will benefit from improved access to those works.'

Education

The non-reprographic copying exceptions and examination exception will be widened and replaced by a new fair dealing exception for non-commercial educational use. This will apply for instance to use of material on whiteboards and the publication on intranets of past exam papers. It remains to be seen how use for examination (which currently includes research for an examined thesis) will be covered. The exception will apply to all organisations and individuals, not just educational establishments, and so would potentially apply to all archives.

Licensing of reprographic copying for educational use will continue, but the exception permitting copying where a licence is not available will be extended and all kinds of work will be covered. The definition of an educational establishment will be widened to cover institutions with an educational purpose, such as museums. Archives are not mentioned, but maybe they will be included. An educational copying licence would be required. Distance learning will be covered.

Disabled

Exceptions for the visually impaired to be extended to all disabled where the disability prevents access, and to all kinds of work unless the work is available commercially. Contract override will be prevented.

Preservation

Preservation copying is to be extended to museums and galleries, is to apply to all kinds of work in the permanent collection of a library, archive, museum or gallery so long as a replacement is not commercially available, and is to be permitted as often as necessary for the preservation purpose. Contract override will be prevented. The procedure for identifying institutions that may preserve folk materials is to be simplified.

 Public administration

The public administration exceptions are to be extended to permit works that are publicly available (even if unpublished) to be made available online (and so reduce the number of FoI applications). Contract override will be possible for unpublished works. This might be important for archives, but that depends on the details.

Copyright Notices

The IPO will issue copyright notices for non-experts on general interest issues where there appears to be confusion about copyright law. This may be on its own initiative or as result of a request. Notices would be authoritative and would be taken into account by the courts but would be non-statutory. They will inform any future review of the CDPA.