German Cultural Heritage on the Road to Europe - Conference on 4 and 5 October at the Berlin State Library
Press release from 09/30/2010
Europe's cultural and scientific heritage is preserved in numerous national cultural institutions. The EU has launched the "Europeana" project to facilitate access to this heritage. The internet portal www.europeana.eu links to around 12 million digital objects to date and is set to be significantly expanded over the next few years. The digitised material comes from European archives, libraries and museums, such as the British Library, the Louvre and the institutions of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.
"The cross-disciplinary nature of the SPK places it under a special obligation to make cultural assets accessible on a digital level," says Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. "This is why the Foundation is involved in projects such as Europeana, why it will be home to the office of the German Digital Library, and why it is currently setting up SPK-digital, a portal that will make the Foundation's own content accessible online."
Content for Europeana is usually provided by the individual cultural heritage institutions via so-called aggregators. These collect the content, feed it into Europeana and in some cases also make it available on their own online portals. They also contribute to the development of content standards and technical means for preparing the digitised material in formats that are as uniform as possible.
The focus of the conference on 4 and 5 October 2010 will be on presenting the activities of the aggregators and building a sustainable network between them. In addition, content providers will report on their experiences to date. Technical and content standards and questions of best practice on the way to the "semantic web" are another focus. The conference is organised by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and the aggregators Athena, europeana local, Biodiversity Heritage Library and European Film Gateway.
The thematic breadth of Europeana's content is reflected in the diversity of the aggregators: Europeana local provides digital content from local and regional museums, libraries and archives. EFG - The European Film Gateway is developing an online portal that provides access to the holdings of film archives and libraries. With BHL-Europe, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, digital objects from the natural sciences are being offered in Europeana on a large scale for the first time. The ATHENA project (Access to cultural heritage networks across Europe) is a network that primarily develops tools, standards and guidelines for museums and other cultural institutions to support their internal digitisation projects and make it easier for them to integrate their digital content into Europeana. Other aggregators include the APEnet project, which is setting up a European archive portal, the CARARE project, which links together a wide range of organisations from the fields of archaeology and heritage conservation, Europeana regia, a joint digital library of royal manuscripts, and thinkMOTION, a project to develop knowledge about motion technology.
What Europeana is achieving at European level is also to be realised at national level: The German Digital Library (DDB) will provide centralised access to digital knowledge and culture in Germany. The DDB office, which will be located at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, will start work in January 2011. Norbert Zimmermann, Vice President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, will report on the project at the Europeana conference on 4 October.
Registration (for press and interested members of the public) for the conference "Digital cultural heritage on the way to Europeana" at: www.armubi.de/tagung2010
Time:
4. 10. 2010, 9.30 - ca.18.00
5. 10. 2010, 9.00 - ca.18.00 h
Location:
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Haus Potsdamer Straße
Otto-Braun-Saal
Potsdamer Straße 33-35
10785 Berlin-Tiergarten