Europeana Newspapers recently travelled to Lithuania, where we joined forces with the Europeana Regia project to host a networking session at ICT2013.
Our session Improving access to Cultural Heritage was attended by a highly interested group of cultural heritage professionals and policy makers from the European Commission. Through a combined presentation (from Hans-Jörg Lieder and Ulrike Kölsch of Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and Elisabeth Freyre of Bibliothèque Nationale de France), the audience learned about the common ground shared by both projects.
The session also addressed how both projects have added value to the original content (for example by using techniques such as Optical Character Recognition to enhance the original digital file). Finally, Karina Bandere from the National Library of Latvia explained why participating in a project such as Europeana Newspapers is important for her library.
An open discussion at the end of the session brought up the following points:
- The necessity of giving access to entire digital collections and the rights issues related to that
- Services that could be built on top of digital content
- How to ensure a sustainable business model after the end of the project
The full presentation:
More pictures of the networking session are available below, and on our Flickr account.
