Tutorial 2

Lifting the Fog: How distributed cloud-based collaboration can unlock regional cultural heritage to build a robust shared information space

This tutorial will describe how regional institutions can take part in the development of moving their content to the cloud and collaborate in distributed environments. One focus will be the accessibility of content across languages and domains to enable even remote institutions to offer their cultural treasures. Collaborative tooling will be presented to enable distributed collaboration among content providers. In addition, the tutorial will offer a special emphasis on the conditions for collaboration, user engagement and loyalty building. An outline of new interaction approaches for cultural heritage and their impact on user engagement will be discussed. Discovery interfaces and pivot browsing on any given data point are some aspects which will be presented in this context. Users should be enabled to interact with the content and interlink the objects to create new contexts and meaning.

During the hands-on section of this tutorial, we will show how collaborative work-flow tooling can take care of much of the heavy lifting and allow the GLAM institutions to focus on improvement and publishing without worrying about difficult or expensive technology. In an interactive session there will be the possibility to experiment with the all work-flow tools used in regional projects in Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands. Using a sample data set, we will be able to perform analyses, create mappings, upload and manage datasets online. After uploading, the same tools can be used to start data-cleaning, linking objects together and linking actors/places to external authorities. In addition, tutorial participants will experience first-hand how curation work can be distributed. This tutorial will bridge the gap between research and practice in the cultural heritage domain and joins the conversation around the challenge of making Europe's cultural heritage accessible and offer solutions for small institutions to take part in these developments. Or in other words, we show how to have all the benefits of having your head in the clouds without getting lost in the fog.

The tutorial is divided into several sections:

• Regional GLAM institutions & Best Practices

This part will focus on introducing the cultural heritage domain and its key players, namely libraries, museums, archives and galleries (GLAM). The characteristics of these institutions and the core obstacles in mechanics that restrain their data to be accessible will be outlined and an overview about European projects and their main focus points such as semantic web, cross-lingual access and development of metadata standards will be delivered.

• Data interoperability: why less is more.

The key requirement to become part of a distributed information space is the data interoperability. This does not only involve challenges of ingestion, mapping and indexing of content but also touches on problems of how to access this data. Multilingual information access, Linked Open Data and the obstacles of handling heterogeneous metadata will be some of the points covered in this part.

• Distributed collaborative interaction paradigms

Based on the previous part, this session will provide solutions and will introduce interaction paradigms which enable community building around digital cultural heritage objects. Methods of distributed metadata enrichment and the creation of contextual coherence will be outlined here. Providing the user with collaborative tooling to enable contextualizing of cultural heritage content will be a key point of this session.

• Hands-on session

In this part, participants are invited to use the tools presented during the tutorial and there will be room for discussion and best practice sharing. The main focus will be on the interaction among the participants to create a collaborative experience of running through a sample workflow using existing datasets.

Presenters

Sjoerd Siebinga (Delving B.V., Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) has a computer linguistics background and specializes in multilingual information retrieval and user interaction design. In the recent past, he has worked for the Europeana as the technical lead from 2007 to 2010. He is co-founder of Delving B.V. where he is working on extending the Europeana Open Source code-base that aims to foster intra-european collaborations to create regional aggregators for Europeana.

Gerald de Jong (Delving B.V.) has a mathematics background, specializing in Computer Science and Combinatorics/Optimization at University of Waterloo, Canada, and has been operating as a freelance software engineer and trainer under the name Beautiful Code BV for more than a decade in the Netherlands. He spent three years recently building software for multiagent research systems, and his hobby centers around artificial life-like systems evolving by natural selection.

Thomas Wikman (Delving B.V.) has a background as developer, consultant and project manager. He has initiated and been involved in several Swedish projects concerning museums and IT since 1995. Clients have been a number of local, regional and national museums in Sweden. He has also worked as lecturer in Archival Science at the Department of ALM at Uppsala University and as a Programmer and Systems Designer at the Department of Government at Uppsala University.

Juliane Stiller (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) is a researcher at Berlin School of Library and Information Science. After having researched strategies for digitizing library material, she was employed at Google Ltd. ensuring search quality in web search. Currently, she is working on multilingual information retrieval within the EU-funded projects EuropeanaConnect, GALATEAS and Promise. She also has been leading innovation projects at Delving B.V into new paradigms for User Generated Content and collaborative alignment of multilingual vocabularies.