photo: Arbejdermuseet.
PHOTOCONSORTIUM is partner of the Europeana DSI2 project: the aim of the project is to ensure the continued operation of the Europeana Digital Service Infrastructure (DSI) and to facilitate the transition of the Europeana website from a portal to a multi-sided platform, offering a variety of services to data providers, end users and re-users. Key objectives are to innovate the aggregation infrastructure to make it easier for providers to add their content to the Europeana site; improve the quality of metadata and the quantity of digital objects available; increase the amount of objects with open licencing conditions; develop more thematic channels; and to create a series of ‘Expert Hubs’ across the Europeana network.
PHOTOCONSORTIUM will cooperate with Europeana and other partners in the DSI2 in order to – on the one hand – ameliorate content distribution and showcasing, and – on the other – to improve search services and user engagement, with a special focus on the characteristics of photographic heritage. The improvement and enrichment of metadata currently in Europeana is a priority, particularly to further enrich and ameliorate the photographic collections already present in the Europeana portal, adding more keywords, translations, and refined metadata where possible. Moreover, newly acquired material/collections will be aggregated and enriched by use of the EP-MINT aggregation tool version that was developed specifically for the past Europeana Photography project and is now a legacy from the project to PHOTOCONSORTIUM, boasting a much broader mandatory data framework than EDM. It also includes a multilingual mapping tool, based on a vocabulary customized for photographic heritage content, enabling the automatic translation of keywords in the metadata and as such allowing search actions in 16 languages. Next to metadata improvement and enrichment, PHOTOCONSORTIUM will support Europeana’s policy concerning the quality of previews – high standards, no watermarks, representative dimensions etc.
PHOTOCONSORTIUM will also curate a new photography thematic collection in Europeana, the Photography Channel. By offering thematic selections of images, presented in a narrative framework and a clear focus, the channel will heighten the presence of photographic content on the web, also fostering reuse of material by showing new angles and presentation possibilities, through a regular presentation of mini online-exhibits of historic photographs, proposing curated content with high searchability, low threshold, safe provenance, universal appeal and gripping features.
The launch of the DSI project is foreseen in July 2016.
