There were over 2,1 million unique searches performed on Europeana.eu in 2014. Below the full list of the 20 most popular search queries:
1. Vincent van Gogh (new entry)
2. Mucha (new entry)
3. Hieronymus Bosch (new entry)
4. Edvard Munch (new entry)
5. Photography (new entry)
6. Београд (Belgrade) (new entry)
7. Rembrandt (new entry)
8. Mode Longchamp (new entry)
9. Picasso (#11 in 2013)
10. Map (new entry)
11. Park (new entry)
12. Paris (#9 in 2013)
13. Mona Lisa (#16 in 2013)
14. 1868 boltz (new entry)
15. Spain (#12 in 2013)
16. Druck (new entry)
17. Édouard Charton (new entry)
18. Tretyakov Gallery (new entry)
19. Volendam (new entry)
20. Japan (#4 in 2013)
See the Europeana blog for the full post here: http://blog.europeana.eu/2014/12/2014-top-20-searches-on-europeana/
Thursday, 8 January 2015
Wednesday, 10 December 2014
Personalized Access to Cultural Heritage (PATCH 2015)
8th International Workshop on Personalized Access to Cultural Heritage (PATCH 2015) is co-located with the ACM Intelligent User Interfaces 2015 Conference in Atlanta, GA, USA (29 March – 1 April 2015).
http://patch2015.wordpress.com/
The primary goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers & practitioners who are working on various aspects of cultural heritage and are interested in exploring the potential of state of the art technology (onsite as well as online) to enhance the CH visit experience. The expected result of the workshop is a multidisciplinary research agenda that will inform future research directions and hopefully, forge some research collaborations. PATCH workshop series are the meeting point between state of the artcultural heritage research and personalization using technology to enhance the personal experience in cultural heritage sites.
We aim at building a research agenda for personalization in CH in order to make the individual CH experience a link in a chain of a lifelong CH experience which builds on past experience, is linked to daily life and provides the foundation for future experiences. The workshop aims to be multi-disciplinary. It is intended for researchers, practitioners, and students of information and communication technologies (ICT), cultural heritage domains (museums,archives, libraries, and more), and personalization.
http://patch2015.wordpress.com/
The primary goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers & practitioners who are working on various aspects of cultural heritage and are interested in exploring the potential of state of the art technology (onsite as well as online) to enhance the CH visit experience. The expected result of the workshop is a multidisciplinary research agenda that will inform future research directions and hopefully, forge some research collaborations. PATCH workshop series are the meeting point between state of the artcultural heritage research and personalization using technology to enhance the personal experience in cultural heritage sites.
We aim at building a research agenda for personalization in CH in order to make the individual CH experience a link in a chain of a lifelong CH experience which builds on past experience, is linked to daily life and provides the foundation for future experiences. The workshop aims to be multi-disciplinary. It is intended for researchers, practitioners, and students of information and communication technologies (ICT), cultural heritage domains (museums,archives, libraries, and more), and personalization.
Saturday, 6 December 2014
Mindcraft: A New Digital Story from the Wellcome Collection
Wellcome Collection has recently launched the first in a series of 'digital stories' exploring their collections. It's called 'Mindcraft' and tells a six-part history of mesmerism and mind control in the nineteenth century history:
http://digitalstories.wellcomecollection.org/
Wellcome wanted to find new ways of telling stories online, using their digitised collections as sources, rather than creating something that explained an existing digitised collection.
They are designed to expose people to original and new digitised content (some of which was digitised specially for this project) without dropping them into researcher-oriented catalogues, so Wellcome Library's player has been embedded into the experience - you can access the digitised resources (and download hi-res Creative Commons images, natch) from within the story.
http://digitalstories.wellcomecollection.org/
Wellcome wanted to find new ways of telling stories online, using their digitised collections as sources, rather than creating something that explained an existing digitised collection.
They are designed to expose people to original and new digitised content (some of which was digitised specially for this project) without dropping them into researcher-oriented catalogues, so Wellcome Library's player has been embedded into the experience - you can access the digitised resources (and download hi-res Creative Commons images, natch) from within the story.
Wednesday, 26 November 2014
ISKO-UK BIENNIAL CONFERENCE 2015
This will be the fourth biennial conference of the UK Chapter of ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization).
The venue (as for our previous conferences) is University College London (UCL), 13/14 July 2015.
The systematic and structured organization of knowledge and information has far-reaching applications, best known in the search, browsing, navigation and exploration of collections and networks. But despite this capability, "what use is classification nowadays?" some people ask. "The era of the physical library is fading, and Google will find whatever we want." This widely held view threatens our budgets as well as the reputation of our profession and our ability to attract thought leaders into the field. As well as forgetting the way organized collections of scientific and cultural literature have underpinned study and development throughout the last 2-3 millennia, it neglects our current and future reliance on knowledge organization (KO).
For example, KO techniques are used behind the scenes in Google and other search engines, and much more explicitly in intranets, records management systems and other in-house applications where Google simply fails.This conference is an opportunity for our speakers to show what impact KO has had, is having and could have on economic and social development(at macro and/or micro levels). If academic courses are to attract students, if research bids are to attract funding, if KO techniques are to be applied on the internet and in corporate environments, and if trained KO professionals are to find plenty of good jobs, the subject should be widely respected as contributing to the general good.This conference aims to explore, justify and proclaim the continuing demand for KO. It will be a showcase for R & D that offers benefits for cultural activities and economic development. Practitioners as well as theoreticians are invited to contribute, along with consultants,researchers, teachers and students. Knowledge Organization can be useful to systems designers as well as information managers, with applications in areas as diverse as web design, records management, digital asset management, network management, etc.
The venue (as for our previous conferences) is University College London (UCL), 13/14 July 2015.
The systematic and structured organization of knowledge and information has far-reaching applications, best known in the search, browsing, navigation and exploration of collections and networks. But despite this capability, "what use is classification nowadays?" some people ask. "The era of the physical library is fading, and Google will find whatever we want." This widely held view threatens our budgets as well as the reputation of our profession and our ability to attract thought leaders into the field. As well as forgetting the way organized collections of scientific and cultural literature have underpinned study and development throughout the last 2-3 millennia, it neglects our current and future reliance on knowledge organization (KO).
For example, KO techniques are used behind the scenes in Google and other search engines, and much more explicitly in intranets, records management systems and other in-house applications where Google simply fails.This conference is an opportunity for our speakers to show what impact KO has had, is having and could have on economic and social development(at macro and/or micro levels). If academic courses are to attract students, if research bids are to attract funding, if KO techniques are to be applied on the internet and in corporate environments, and if trained KO professionals are to find plenty of good jobs, the subject should be widely respected as contributing to the general good.This conference aims to explore, justify and proclaim the continuing demand for KO. It will be a showcase for R & D that offers benefits for cultural activities and economic development. Practitioners as well as theoreticians are invited to contribute, along with consultants,researchers, teachers and students. Knowledge Organization can be useful to systems designers as well as information managers, with applications in areas as diverse as web design, records management, digital asset management, network management, etc.
Wednesday, 5 November 2014
Culture Grid Consultation
Collections Trust have launched a consultation about the future development of the Culture Grid (www.culturegrid.org.uk), the aggregator which currently provides access to 3m+ records from UK museums, archives and libraries. Here's a blog post about why with some useful thoughts on what aggregation means for cultural heritage:
http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/blog/culturegrid
Nick Poole (Head of Collections Trust) commented on the Culture Grid issue as follows:
My vision for the Culture Grid has always been as a service not a destination. It's a cornerstone of the COPE ('Create Once, Publish Everywhere') strategy that there needs to be middleware that extracts the collections data, stores it and makes it available to 3rd party platforms like Europeana, Google Cultural Institute, Digital Public Space (potentially) and anything else that might come along.
So the 'why' is that a museum would decide to promote themselves to online audiences by putting their data into these platforms, but instead of doing it several times for each separate destination, they put it into the Culture Grid and then tell us who we can share it with. In the process, we wanted to take some of the cost and some of the risk out of collections data-sharing so that it is an easier decision for a museum to make.
I always assumed that once everyone had an API, the need for this kind of middleware service would evaporate. In practice, one of the key outcomes of this consultation so far is that this is far from being the case - people want the Culture Grid to build out the use case, demonstrate value and actively broker cultural data into things like hacks and new platforms. Which brings me to one of the big challenges with the Culture Grid. The Culture Grid is a free-to-use service, but to get funding for it, we had to build a search front-end (the website at http://www.culturegrid.org.uk). Because this was a secondary aim for us, it's never been promoted as a public-facing destination. However, as soon as you put up a front-end, everyone wants you to make it something the public would really want to use. This is one of the challenges that's faced Europeana all along, and one of the reasons why they're now focusing on improving the end-user experience of their main website.
It's a critical question in terms of our future strategy - do we:
a) Stick to the vision that the Culture Grid is an enabling service, not a destination in its own right (which makes it hard to pay for),
b) Focus on developing it as an end-user destination (which would involve us getting a lot more involved in quality, standards, rights and metadata enrichment),
c) Both,
d) Neither.
http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/blog/culturegrid
Nick Poole (Head of Collections Trust) commented on the Culture Grid issue as follows:
My vision for the Culture Grid has always been as a service not a destination. It's a cornerstone of the COPE ('Create Once, Publish Everywhere') strategy that there needs to be middleware that extracts the collections data, stores it and makes it available to 3rd party platforms like Europeana, Google Cultural Institute, Digital Public Space (potentially) and anything else that might come along.
So the 'why' is that a museum would decide to promote themselves to online audiences by putting their data into these platforms, but instead of doing it several times for each separate destination, they put it into the Culture Grid and then tell us who we can share it with. In the process, we wanted to take some of the cost and some of the risk out of collections data-sharing so that it is an easier decision for a museum to make.
I always assumed that once everyone had an API, the need for this kind of middleware service would evaporate. In practice, one of the key outcomes of this consultation so far is that this is far from being the case - people want the Culture Grid to build out the use case, demonstrate value and actively broker cultural data into things like hacks and new platforms. Which brings me to one of the big challenges with the Culture Grid. The Culture Grid is a free-to-use service, but to get funding for it, we had to build a search front-end (the website at http://www.culturegrid.org.uk). Because this was a secondary aim for us, it's never been promoted as a public-facing destination. However, as soon as you put up a front-end, everyone wants you to make it something the public would really want to use. This is one of the challenges that's faced Europeana all along, and one of the reasons why they're now focusing on improving the end-user experience of their main website.
It's a critical question in terms of our future strategy - do we:
a) Stick to the vision that the Culture Grid is an enabling service, not a destination in its own right (which makes it hard to pay for),
b) Focus on developing it as an end-user destination (which would involve us getting a lot more involved in quality, standards, rights and metadata enrichment),
c) Both,
d) Neither.
Saturday, 1 November 2014
LoCloud workshop - ICOMOS General Assembly 2014
The LoCloud Project are hosting a workshop on the 11th November 2014 during ICOMOS General Assembly 2014. The workshop, whose theme is 'Sharing Local Culture through Europeana' will present LoCloud, its on-going activities and results achieved so far, including demonstrations of the services that the project is developing to help make collections held by local museums more widely available.
The full agenda here is available here: http://www.locloud.eu/N…/LoCloud-workshop-at-ICOMOS-Florence
The full agenda here is available here: http://www.locloud.eu/N…/LoCloud-workshop-at-ICOMOS-Florence
Monday, 20 October 2014
Digital Collections for Heritage Tourist Audiences
Creative re-use of cultural heritage content and data is one of Europeana's top priorities.
• Monday 17 Nov 2014 – Art Nouveau collections
• Wednesday 19 Nov 2014 – Battle of Waterloo-related collections
• Thursday 20 Nov 2014 – First World War collections
These workshops will be exploring how each of these themed digitised collections can be utilised to reach out to tourism audiences. This is important as tourist audiences represent a key audience segment for museums in Europe and are increasingly looking for new ways to engage with cultural content, especially online. Digital collections content represent a vital, yet underused asset, for museums to respond to these changing tourist audience needs. Each of these themes have been identified as key opportunities to explore tourism demand for digitised collections.
The workshops are free and are ideally for directors, curators and other relevant (collection related) managerial staff of European museums that have collections that include those related to the prescribed themes, but places are available if you represent an alternative collection holder/hold a different position but are interested in attending.
Please also note that whilst we have stated that attendees need to cover the cost of any expenses related to attendance to the workshop, if cost is a barrier to the attendance for any particular collection holders, we can in certain circumstances look to cover these expenses if possible. For more information about each workshop as well as being able to book please click on the respective eventbrite links for each workshop below.
Art Nouveau themed workshop:
http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reaching-and-engaging-tourist-audiences-with-digital-collections-art-nouveau-17th-november-2014-tickets-13326083675
Battle of Waterloo themed workshop:
http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reaching-and-engaging-tourist-audiences-with-digital-collections-battle-of-waterloo-19th-november-tickets-13432965361
First World War themed workshop:
http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reaching-and-engaging-tourist-audiences-with-digital-collections-world-war-one-20th-november-2014-tickets-13432913205
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