From Digitization to Preservation, Creative Re-Use of Cultural Content, and Citizen Participation is the title and theme of this workshop presented within the conference DCDC2015 Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities, in Manchester on 14 October 2015. Following the good results of the similar panel presented at DH15 in Granada, the workshop presented an overview of initiatives and EU projects such as Europeana Space, RICHES, Civic Epistemologies, Photoconsortium.

DCDC2015: Exploring new digital destinations for heritage and academia brought together over 70 speakers from across the UK, Europe and further afield exploring key questions facing the future of digital engagement.

PHOTOCONSORTIUM was presented by our UK member Topfoto.co.uk, an independent picture library containing 10 million images from medieval documents to today’s digital files. Topfoto’s International/Marketing Manager Mr. John Balean, also committee member at CEPIC and member of the Executive Committee at BAPLA, talked about PHOTOCONSORTIUM as a successuful follow up of EuropeanaPhotography EU project promoting (digitized) photographic heritage.

Together with Neil Forbes and Sarah Whatley from Coventry University, John discussed the different projects and invited the audience to a question and answer session. This was probably one of the few sessions of the conference that had a confident European focus, most other presentations were focused on UK activities and projects (even though the delegates were international). There was interesting discussion about crowdsourcing, the citizen participation to research and the role researcher possibly being threatened by the apparently popular expectation that all knowledge should be made available for free.

Download the presentation (PDF, 2,8 Mb)

Website of the event: http://www.rluk.ac.uk/dcdc15/. Videos of the sessions will be available in the website.