Austria
Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesellschaft mbH
Website: http://www.ait.co.at
AIT is an Austrian software and research company founded in 1979. Research work is done primarily in the field of information management (e.g. distributed databases, collection management and knowledge engineering). It is carried out within the EC (e.g. IST, Ten-Telecom etc.) action lines or on national and regional level. Research projects that AIT cooperated with or co-ordinated include: MOSAIC, COVAX, REGNET, Media. Alp, DISMARC, EuropeanaLocal and more. For the project OpenUp! AIT established the OAI-PMH interface and ingestion platform and is currently working on a concept for semantic enrichment and EDM data modelling of botanical and zoological research data. Further research work focuses on the provision of Web services for the cultural heritage domain, which are based on SKOS vocabulary representation. Implementations encompass the provision of vocabulary Web services as support process to the primary procedure ‘Cataloguing’ (implemented standards: ANSI/NISO Z39.19, ISO 2788:1986, and ISO-5964). In the area of semantic web technology AIT developed applications for the creation of Topic Maps (ISO/IEC 13250:2003). Another branch of research is concerned with the automated cultural heritage workflow implementation based on international standards (BPMN).
Tasks in LoCloud: contributing to the definition and development of the overall aggregation and the local data management system, including input to the system analysis with an analysis of user needs; testing and demonstration of the final system via a prototype installation; as content aggregator for Austria AIT, coordinating the testing of the LoCloud services by Austrian local heritage institutions; providing expertise in developing data aggregation platforms and establishing vocabulary web services based on international standards.
Belgium
provincie Limburg
Website: http://www.erfgoedplus.be
Erfgoedplus.be is an activity of the Provincial Centre for Cultural Heritage (PCCE) of the Province of Limburg, Belgium. Since 2007 Erfgoedplus.be collects information about the province’s cultural heritage from available inventories and databases and publishes it collectively as a searchable database on the internet, using the technology for the semantic web. As a result of another province having joined the initiative, the database currently holds over 86.000 objects from about 245 mainly local collections. Since 2009 Erfgoedplus.be acts as an aggregator for Europeana. Provincie Limburg was a partner in EuropeanaLocal and is involved in the Europeana Awareness project.
Tasks in LoCloud: providing expertise in semantic technology, organizational and content related issues (e.g. enrichment, thesauri and reference lists, carrying out dissemination (WP6) at the local level, providing support to small and medium sized institutions, leading work on the development of practice-oriented recommendations on the future development of cloud services for small and medium sized institutions (WP5).
Bulgaria
Pencho Slaveykov Regional Library
Website: http://www.libvar.bg
The Pencho Slaveykov Regional Library (PSRL) in Varna, founded in 1883, is a public institution supported by the municipality and the government. The library has been depository of the Bulgarian national literature since 1945 and its collections include over 850 000 books, serials and other materials. The Library is one of the leading institutions in Bulgaria in the field of digitisation. It started to digitize its rare and unique collections of serials, post-cards, photos, maps etc. In 2008 the Pencho Slaveykov Regional Library set up the Varna Digital Library – a virtual service providing access to the library’s and its partner-museums’ digitised materials.PSRL was the Bulgarian content provider in the EuropeanaLocal project, where an OAI-PMH repository was set up for aggregating content from Bulgarian libraries and museums and it is currently a partner in the Europeana Awareness project. The Library is the biggest Bulgarian content provider for Europeana and is operating as an aggregator since 2011.
Tasks in LoCloud: Coordination of content supply from Bulgaria, testing of tools developed in WP3, national dissemination (WP6) and engagement of small and medium sized institutions.
Croatia
Gradska knjiznica Rijeka
Website: http://www.gkr.hr
The Rijeka City Library (GKR) is organised as a library network of departments, branches and bookmobiles. It is the central public library of Rijeka and the Primorsko-goranska county, whose population is about 300,000 inhabitants. The Rijeka City Library was founded in 1962 as a successor of two older institutions: the Rijeka Public Reading Room (established in 1849) and the Sušak Public Library (founded in 1930). The Rijeka City Library offers a wide range of public services and activities: core library services, Internet and PC access and education, reading groups, story-telling for preschool children, workshops for children and teenagers, presentations of books and authors, exhibitions, professional meetings, etc.GKR participated in International and EU-funded projects such as PHARE PLDP and Pulman-XT. The library participated in AccessIT Plus, which resulted in the development of the SVeVID digital library (http://svevid.gkr.hr/). GKR is a part of Europeana Awareness public libraries network.
Tasks in LoCloud: coordination of content supply from Croatia; testing of tools developed in WP3; responsible for dissemination at a national level (WP 6); encouraging small and medium-sized heritage institutions to cooperate with LoCloud.
Cyprus
Cyprus University of Technology
Website: http://www.cut.ac.cy
The Cyprus University of Technology (CUT) was established by law in December 2003 and it enrolled its first students in September 2007. It is a public and independent University which has set high values concerning its academic, research character, legal status, organisational and administrative structure. The Digital Heritage Lab at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Informatics is the leading laboratory in the area of e-Documentation and e-Preservation on the whole island and is responsible for all the national aggregators.
Tasks in LoCloud: provision of a substantial number of 3D objects of significant historical value for Cyprus to Europeana; responsible for national dissemination activities and engagement of local institutions (WP6).
Czech Republic
Národní památkový ústav (National Heritage Institute)
Website: http://www.npu.cz/
Narodni pamatkovy ustav (NPU) is the statutory national organisation funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.NPU maintains a Central Register of Cultural Monuments of the Czech Republic, draws up expert opinions and background materials for designation of objects as cultural monuments and for regional authorities, provides free professional assistance to the owners of cultural monuments and carries out analyses of the conditions and development of the state care of monuments. NPU looks after more than 100 important historic properties accessible to the public.Since 2003 NPU has been building the Integrated Information System of the Care of Monuments (IISCM), which is based on the principle of interdependency of all information sources in the NPU. The IISCM contains basic applications – GIS (Geographical Information System with an essential geo-database of objects in the Czech Republic and specialized thematic layers), MIS (Metainformation System for storing, describing and making available digital or digitised documents relating to the objects of interest, or the preservation of heritage in general professional activities NPU), SAR (the State Archaeological Register of the Czech Republic- an Archaeological map with information on Archaeological sites), ISAD (Information System on Archaeological Data ensures the systematic updating of the SAR and its additional databases and access to the data via internet) and other.
Tasks in LoCloud: aggregating content from Czech Republic, carrying out dissemination activities (WP6) at the national level, engaging with small and medium sized institutions, testing of tools developed by WP3.
Denmark
Kulturstyrelsen
Website: http://www.kulturstyrelsen.dk/
The Danish Agency for Culture (KUAS) is an agency under the aegis of the Danish Ministry of Culture, established on 1 January 2012. The agency is a merger of three former agencies: The Danish Arts Agency, the Heritage Agency of Denmark, and the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media. The vision of the new agency is:• To bolster the interplay among art, cultural heritage, libraries and media• To improve the coordination of national and municipal efforts in cultural fields• To promote the development and exploitation of an increasingly digitalized culture and media landscape• To develop new proposals and forms of communication for citizens• To strengthen international cultural collaboration within all professional fields• To increase cooperation among, inter alia, education, teaching, research, the environment and nature, and business development, including architecture and tourism.
Tasks in LoCloud: national aggregator on museum information: providing content from two national databases: The Museums Collections and Art Index Denmark. The databases hold information on cultural historic objects and works of art from all the Danish state-recognised (local) museums as well as from the State museums.
France
Conseil Général de la Gironde – Archives Départementales de la Gironde
Website: http://archives.gironde.fr/
The ‘Archives Départementales de la Gironde’ contain 60 km of shelving. They represent the second archival centre in France in terms of covered surface after the Paris archives and the fourth one in terms of stored data volume and importance of collections.The public web site offers access mainly to civil and marriage registers. The archives contribute to the development of several documentary and patrimonial networks in the Aquitaine region in cooperation with various public and associative partners.Since 2004, the Conseil général de la Gironde has financed a large digitisation programme (Archinum) to create the department’s virtual documentation database to be made accessible by the largest possible public. Since 2002, the Conseil général has been a partner of the Regional Bank of the Knowledge of Aquitaine. It is also involved in the development of a documentary network shared with various regional partners on the topic of the Estuary of the Gironde and its patrimony. The Archives Départementales de la Gironde were partner in the EuropeanaLocal project.
Tasks in LoCloud: contributing to increase and enhance the local presence of its collections in Europeana, aggregating content from small local institutions, gathering resources from different types of partners (associations, museums, territorial libraries), carrying out dissemination at a national level (WP6). Germany
Germany
University of Duisburg-Essen
Website: http://www.wip.uni-due.de
The University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) is one of the largest German universities (over 40,000 enrolled students; 4,400 academic and non-academic staff) with excellent research reputation and an important employer in the region (more info: http://www.uni-due.de).Its Research Institute TELIT initiated by the Department “Information Systems for Productions and Operations Management”(WIP) is the leading German research cluster in the fields of learning innovations and quality development, evaluation, and standardisation for learning, education and training (LET) and online environments with a special focus on technology-enhanced learning (TEL). It has gained an outstanding expertise as the leading German institution for learning innovations and quality and their evaluation due to the unique engagement in European (CEN/TC 353) and international (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36) standardisation bodies by its team leader for Learning innovations, QM, evaluation and standardisation, Prof. (KR) Christian M. Stracke: Many research projects were coordinated and supervised by TELIT including Q.E.D. (budget: 4.0 Mio Euros) and ODS (15.3 Mio Euros) as one of the biggest projects on quality and evaluation in e-Learning next to many other European research and development projects funded by the EC (see the list of selected projects: http://www.wip.wiwi.uni-due.de/en/research/research-projects). He is also initiator and Conference Chair of the annual LINQ conference, the leading European conference for Learning Innovation and Learning Quality (http://www.learning-innovations.eu).The interdisciplinary research team of TELIT from educational sciences, pedagogy, psychology, economics and informatics covers all aspects of formal, non-formal and informal learning, education and training and E-Learning and is headed by Christian M. Stracke. In addition, TELIT and its team have participated in a huge amount of international research and development projects, leading to the annual average budget of 2-3 Mio Euros.
Tasks in LoCloud: responsible for evaluating the operational outcome of the infrastructure and services introduced by the project and its potential for sustainability (WP5); carrying out national dissemination activities (WP6) and engaging small and medium-sized institutions in Germany for testing tools developed in WP3.
Greece
Future Library
Website: http://www.FUTURELIBRARY.gr
Future Library is a non-profit organisation founded in February 2011 with the support and the funding of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Future Library is a spin-off initiative of the Veria Central Public Library aimed at multiplying its impact at the national level (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 2010 Access to Learning Award Recipient). The “Stavros Niarchos” Foundation funds the Future Library Implementation Plan (2011 -2015) with the aim of developing a sustainable network of public and municipal libraries and of introducing innovation and creativity into the agenda of cultural institutions. Future Library has already established collaboration with 68 public and municipal libraries. Since 2011 it coordinates the implementation of 5 actions: the promotion of creativity, reading and innovation, the training of future librarians, the development of a network of services for children, digital services and awareness raising.
Tasks in LoCloud: coordinating the supply of content from Greece, carrying out national dissemination (WP6) and testing of tools developed in WP3.
National Technical University of Athens
Website: http://www.image.ntua.gr
The National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) is one of the technical partners of LoCloud playing a major role in the development and provision of the LoCloud infrastructure through the further customisation of the MINT tool. It will also contribute to requirements specification in WP1 and the provision of support to small and medium sized institutions in WP4.The Image, Video and Intelligent Multimedia Systems Lab (IVML), at the School of Computer and Electrical Engineering of NTUA, was established in 1988. The members of the Lab (which are about 35, including research scientists, researchers, Ph.D students, programmers, and supporting staff) are actively involved in research having so far published more than 100 journal and 200 international conference contributions. IVML has been involved in about a hundred European R&D projects.
IVML participates in the design and implementation of intelligent semantic analysis and retrieval of multimedia content, following the MPEG (4, 7, 21) and Semantic Web standards. IVML has participated in the FP6 IP ACEMEDIA, NoE MUSCLE, NoE Knowledge-Web, NoE K-Space, IP Mesh, IP X-Media, STREP Boemie, IP We-Know-It IP. IVML has been a key technological member in Digital Libraries and particularly in Europeana developments. S. Kollias has been a member of the EC ‘Interoperability Group’ on Digital Libraries in 2007, and a member of the Member States Expert Group on Digital Libraries (2007-). He has organised the Workshop on ‘Semantic Interoperability in the European Digital Library’ in the European Semantic Web Conference, 2008.
Athena Research and Innovation Centre in Information Communication & Knowledge Technologies
Website: http://www.dcu.gr
Athena Research and Innovation Centre in Information, Communication and Knowledge Technologies (Athena RC) is a public research organisation, operating under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Education and consisting of three research institutes: the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP), the Industrial Systems Institute (ISI), and the Institute for the Management of Information Systems (IMIS).
The Digital Curation Unit (DCU), now part of the Institute for the Management of Information Systems, was launched in 2007 as part of Athena Research Centre. Its mission is to conduct research, develop technologies and applications, provide services and training, and act as a national centre in the field of digital curation. DCU takes an interdisciplinary approach, taking into account the full lifecycle of digital assets and the combined use of methods, techniques and tools from the fields of informatics, management and decision sciences, library science and archives management, material culture studies, museology and communications, epistemology, and law. DCU focuses on developing and supporting standards and methodologies, environments for digital archiving and long-term preservation, semantically enhanced information, and ‘incubating’ good practices. Research areas include: domain knowledge representation, natural language processing techniques, approaches to database preservation, metadata interoperability, user models and communities, work flow models for the ingestion and preservation of data. DCU collaborates with digital curation centres in the UK, US and Canada. DCU has participated in the FP7 project DARIAH, EHRI and the CIP-ICT PSP project CARARE. On a national level DCU is involved in the construction of the Greek Research Infrastructure Network for the Humanities.
Tasks in LoCloud: requirements definition (WP1), specification and delivery of the LoCloud infrastructure including the development of the MoRe aggregator for LoCloud and the joint specification of the Lightweight Digital Library component of the infrastructure (WP2), development of two SaaS applications (WP3).
Iceland
Minjastofnun Íslands /The Cultural Heritage Agency of Iceland
Website: http://www.minjastofnun.is
The Cultural Heritage Agency of Iceland is the central authority for protection and management of archaeological and architectural heritage in Iceland. The mission of the Agency, in accordance with the Cultural Heritage Act (no. 80/2012), is to safeguard the Icelandic cultural heritage and pass it on intact to future generations. To achieve this mission the main focus of the Agency is on in-situ preservation, on the increasing of public awareness and access to the cultural heritage, and on promoting research. CHAI (former AHAI and AHBI) is a content provider in the CARARE project.
Tasks in LoCloud: aggregating content from local cultural institutions, advising and contributing to the project help desk, testing of tools developed in WP3. Carrying out national dissemination in Iceland , engaging small and medium-sized cultural institutions.
Ireland
The Discovery Programme
Website: http://www.discoveryprogramme.ie
The Discovery Programme (DP) is a public institution set up to pursue advanced research in Irish Archaeology. The organisation has two additional associated functions:• to communicate the results of its work to the general public as well as to the academic community• to promote the introduction of new technologies and new techniques into the operation of the wider Irish Archaeological community.The Discovery Programme is also required to communicate the results of its projects to the scientific community and to the general public. This task is achieved mainly through the publication of its scientific books and papers but also through a variety of outreach publications and lectures, and also by organising community events. DP was set up originally in 1991 on the personal initiative of the then Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Charles J. Haughey, and was funded in its initial phases directly by the government. Now, as an independent body, it is mainly funded by an annual core grant from the Heritage Council (a statutory body that receives it funding directly from the Irish government).DP sets up long term investigative research projects designed to answer relevant and changing questions that arise from time to time in Irish archaeology. Those questions are identified and agreed by the Irish governing bodies – the Council and Directorate (Board of Directors). The membership of those bodies is made up of leading Irish archaeologists from the whole of Ireland (north and south). They are from the principal museums, the universities that teach archaeology, the monuments and Archaeology sections of government departments, various learned and representative bodies, the private Archaeological sector and international experts.
Over the past 20 years the Discovery Programme has developed a wide range of experience and knowledge in the application of new technology in the digital recording, analysis and collection of Archaeological data. Techniques employed by the Discovery Programme as part of their integrated research projects includes: 3D documentation of Archaeological objects and monuments using laser scanning and photogrammetry; photogrammetric recording of monuments and archaeological landscapes and provision of orthoimagry; archaeological database development; digitisation of archaeological content including imagery and documentation; research and development of online applications for the standardised recording of scientific archaeological data including palaeoenvironemental and human remains; research and construction of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) for the sharing and reuse of cultural heritage geodata, including web-services, INSPIRE and geoportal software; website design and development, including the integration of open source software for research project tools; archaeological and geophysical survey and the efficient Archiving of generated data sets; development of services for the archiving, sharing and reuse of cultural heritage data including the development of trusted digital repositories (TDR).
Tasks in LoCloud: providing local content including metadata creation/harmonization, assisting and aggregating content for smaller institutions and organisations with the aim of making content available via Europeana, dissemination and awareness raising activities within cultural heritage sector in Ireland (WP6), testing applications developed in WP3, jointly carrying out a study of the benefits and costs to small and medium sized institutions, supporting development of spatial component of LoCloud their aggregators and Europeana itself of providing services through the cloud (WP5).
Italy
Fondazione Ranieri di Sorbello
Website: http://www.fondazioneranieri.org/en/foundation/
Founded in 2011, the Fondazione Ranieri di Sorbello is a non-profit organisation aimed to promote and develop the cultural heritage of the Ranieri di Sorbello family through historical and cultural projects and exhibitions. It holds, among other things, an important family library, an archive and art collections, including prints, drawings, family portraits, embroideries, fabrics and porcelains.The Foundation is named in memory of Uguccione Ranieri di Sorbello (1906-1969), journalist, writer and diplomat.
Tasks in LoCloud: provision of content for inclusion in Europeana, testing of applications developed in WP3, dissemination and awareness raising activities within the cultural heritage sector in Italy (WP6).
Lithuania
Vilniaus universiteto Komunikacijos fakultetas
Website: http://www.kf.vu.lt
Vilnius University Faculty of Communication (VUKF) is the leading higher education establishment working in the broad field of information and communication professions in Lithuania. Established in 1991, VUKF has an integrated approach towards information and communication, looking at libraries, museums, archives, media, publishing enterprises, information agencies and information businesses as parts of the information infrastructure of a society. Main purpose of VUKF is to strengthen interdisciplinary studies and research in order to promote competitive and high quality education in the field. Its mission is realised through communication and information study programmes, basic and applied research, continuing professional development opportunities, and particularly through interdisciplinary and international cooperation. The Faculty of Communication has contributed to several international and European Union funded projects including CALIMERA, PubliCA, Pulman and Cultivate-CEE, DPE, NORSLIS and CARARE. It is also an associated partner in V-Must project, ARIADNE (Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe), a member of DARIAH (Digital Research Infrustructure for the Arts and Humanities) and a member of EUROPEANA network.
Tasks in LoCloud: preparing and aggregating local content with metada from smaller and medium sized institutions for its integration in Europeana; collaboratively working on content requirements relevant to the needs of the project and to local institutions (WP1); assisting in the development of micro services for small and medium institutions (WP3); testing of tools developed in WP3; contributing to the expertise of historic place names, as well as vocabularies and languages; preparing local Thesaurus of present and historical Geo-data and Achaeology for integration into the European context; analysing and testing regional content existing in Europeana and offering guidance on its enrichment.
The Netherlands
The Ministerie van onderwijs, cultuur en wetenschap – Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed
Website: http://www.cultureelerfgoed.nl
The Ministerie van onderwijs, cultuur en wetenschap – Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (Cultural Heritage Agency – RCE) is part of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science the Cultural Heritage. The Agency is a research institute and centre of excellence on monuments, historic buildings, Archaeology, landscape, and fine and applied arts.The government incorporates the Agency’s specialist knowledge into legislation and rules designed to protect and develop the heritage. RCE is also in charge of the implementation and enforcement of the Monuments and Historic Buildings Act, taking action where necessary when the heritage is threatened. The Agency disseminates knowledge on the management, conservation and accessibility of heritage collections and it manages an art collection comprising some 100,000 items. In its role as a government agency, RCE maintains an overview of the cultural heritage throughout the country, including its governing legislation.RCE has played an important role in several EU initiatives such as EAC, the European Heritage Heads Forum and advises on EU-directives regarding cultural heritage. The Agency has been involved in several projects financed by the European Union through the Culture 2000 programme, Interreg and different Framework programmes.
Tasks in LoCloud: supporting smaller heritage organisations to aggregate their content and metadata to make them available via Europeana; providing expertise in geo information and web mapping services (INSPIRE), crowdsourcing, cultural heritage semantics and the use of cloud services; testing tools developed in WP3; hosting a regional training workshop in WP4, leading a working group to study the impact of the work of LoCloud on end-users (WP5), disseminating information on LoCloud (WP6) at the national level.
Norway
The National Archives of Norway
Website: http://www.arkivverket.no/
The National Archives of Norway (NRA) is the Scientific Coordinator of LoCloud.
NRA is responsible for the records created by the government’s central administration, i.e. ministries and directorates, etc., as well as the archives of the Supreme Court. These institutions are required to hand over to the National Archives their archives once these reach 25 years of age and are no longer in administrative use. The National Archives also preserve important archives left by individuals and private enterprises, such as companies and organisations. The Director General serves as head of both the Central Office of the National Archive and the National Archive of Norway.
The holdings include material dating back to the 12th century and records from the Danish era. The National Archive can truthfully be designated as the country’s collective memory.Currently, 29 archival institutions, including the National Archive of Norway, have published their finding aids on the Archives Portal of Norway. In total about 3 million descriptive units are available on the portal.
Tasks in LoCloud: Project coordinator
Asplan Viak Internet AS
Website: http://www.avinet.no/
AVINET specialises in the area of interoperable geospatial web applications, catalogue services and metadata. Its main areas of technical expertise are: (1) specification, development, testing, running and maintaining of Internet based map and database solutions; (2) development of metadata integration and interoperability services and service oriented distributed service infrastructures.
Since its start-up, the company has been actively involved in national and European Research & Development initiatives and it has offered a range of map-based applications to public sector, cultural heritage tourism and e-learning institutions and bodies.
Poland
Instytut Chemii Bioorganicznej PAN – Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Centre
Website: http://www.psnc.pl/
Affiliated to the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, PSNC was founded in 1993 to build and develop a computer infrastructure for science and education in Poznań and in Poland. This infrastructure includes the metropolitan network POZMAN, the High Performance Computing (HPC) Centre, as well as the national broadband network PIONIER. PSNC has been managing research and development within the field of new generation computer networks, high performance – parallel and distributed – computations and archive systems, cloud computing, grid technologies, with a particular focus on projects, products & tools for the management of grid resources.In the field of digital libraries PSNC is focused on building a national digital libraries infrastructure through developing a digital libraries software, data sharing and aggregation services, e-learning resources, knowledge management systems, as well as digitisation process management and long term preservation services. These R&D activities are complemented by extensive practical experience with deployments of the tools supporting many elements of the digitisation workflow.
Tasks in LoCloud: developing and providing cloud-based services to local cultural heritage institutions (content and metadata management) and for metadata aggregators (e.g. metadata enrichment and processing). PSNC is also leading WP 4, aimed to support small and medium institutions in adopting the results of LoCloud. Portugal
Portugal
Fundação Museu Nacional Ferroviário
Website: http://www.fmnf.pt
The National Railway Museum Foundation (FMNF) is the heir to the railway museum traditions in Portugal, which dates back to the 1940s. The Foundation was founded by a Decree – Law of February 2005.The objectives of the Foundation are the study, conservation and evaluation of the Portuguese historical, cultural and technological railway heritage and the creation and management of the National Railway Museum. To fulfil these objectives, the Foundation carries out scientific, historical and anthropological investigation, publishes books and magazines. The National Railway Museum Foundation also works on a digital archive and documentation centre, a technology and science experimentation centre and several technology-based innovative methods of collection display. The Foundation cooperates with the local municipality and the Regional Urban Authority and with the Portuguese Institute for Tourism as well as with schools, universities and higher education institutes. FMNF was a partner in EuropeanaLocal where it developed and managed a national network of archives, museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions.
Tasks in LoCloud: content provider for Portugal, testing new tools (WP3), disseminating information and raising awareness amongst local heritage stakeholders.
Romania
Biblioteca Judeţeană O.Goga Cluj
Website: http://www.bjc.ro
The Biblioteca Judeţeană ‘O.Goga’ Cluj (BJC) is one of the biggest public libraries in Romania. Thanks to its dynamic and pro-active attitude and to its openness to new challenges, the library plays a distinct role in the cultural life of the Cluj city.Currently, the library includes a main building and three branches located in the main neighbourhoods of the town, offering to more than 300,000 inhabitants modern services and facilities. Within EuropeanaLocal, BJC developed what is currently the only aggregator for local and regional cultural content in Romania.
Tasks in LoCloud: providing new content from its regional collections, aggregating other Romanian libraries, museums and archives.
Serbia
Biblioteka grada Beograda (Belgrade City Library)
Website: http://www.bgb.rs/
The Belgrade City Library (BGB), is the biggest public library in Serbia. It comprises a central library, 13 municipal libraries and 70 branches. In 1987 BGB was the first public library in the country to automate some of its operations. Three major changes (and challenges) have been lately experienced by the city’s libraries: new technologies and the consequent potential for new services, the evolving demand of libraries’ users and librarians’ new expectations in terms of education and training. The web environment (the library’s website, an audioarchive and the OPAC – bisis.bgb.rs) and Web 2.0 for Library 2.0 (Blogs – blogchebgb.blogspot.com, infobgb.blogspot.com, Libguides – bgb.libguides.com, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter) are BGB’s main powerful tools. BGB participated in AccessIT, AccessIT Plus and Europeana Awareness as well as in earlier projects such as PULMAN-XT and CALIMERA, ensuring support and participation from other local institutions in Serbia.
Tasks in LoCloud: supply of content from Serbia, national dissemination (WP6), engaging small and medium-sized institutions and testing of tools developed in WP3.
Slovakia
Univerzita Komenského Prírodovedecká fakulta Katedra aplikovanej a environmentálnej geofyziky
Website: http://www.fns.uniba.sk/index.php?id=2629
The Comenius University in Bratislava is the oldest university in the Slovak Republic. Founded in 1919, it follows the university tradition of the Academia ‘Istropolitana’, which was established in Bratislava by Matthias Corvinus, the Hungarian King, in 1465.The Department of Applied and Environmental Geophysics is the only faculty of applied geophysics in Slovakia. The department performs geophysical surveys at the local and regional levels, recognizing the increasing importance that the use of applied geophysics in archaeology has acquired in recent years.
Tasks in LoCloud: definition and development of local data collection, national dissemination (WP6), engagement of small and medium-sized institutions, testing of applications developed in WP3.
Slovenia
Javni Zavod Republike Slovenije za Varstvo Kulturne Dediscine
Website: http://www.zvkds.si
The Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Slovenia (IPCHS) is a national public institution established by the Slovenian State to carry out the public service pursuant to the Heritage Protection Act. It is responsible for the implementation of administrative and technical tasks relating to the protection of cultural heritage. Among other tasks, defined in the Heritage Protection Act, IPCHS: identifies, documents, studies and evaluates immovable heritage, as well as movable and intangible heritage in the context of immovable heritage; it implements conservation measures, takes care of the prevention of damage, interprets heritage for the general public to develop awareness of its value, carries out research projects in the field of heritage protection.
IPCHS has participated in a number of European Programmes including the ICT Policy Support Programme CARARE (Connecting Archaeology and Architecture in Europeana, Linked Heritage – Coordination of Standards and Technologies for the enrichment of Eropeana- funded under) Culture 2007 – 2013 (CEC – Cradles of European Culture, a European Network for Interpreting and Presenting Early Medieval Cultural Heritage), 7th Framework Programme (SYDDARTASYstem for Digitisation and Diagnosis in ART Applications, HEROMAT – Protection of Cultural Heritage Objects with Multifunctional Advanced Materials), Cross Border Programmes (PArSJAd – Archaeological Parks of Northern Adriatic, Shared Heritage – Strategic Project for Identification and Accessibility of Shared Cultural Heritage, Interarch Steiermark – Interactive Archaeological Heritage of Austrian and Slovenian Styria).
Tasks in LoCloud: developing specifications, development and testing of the geo-location enrichment tools (WP3), coordinating the contribution of Archaeological and Architectural heritage digital content (and related metadata) from Slovenia to Europeana.
Jara. Zavod za razvoj knjižnic
Website: http://www.jara.si
Zavod Jara is a non-governmental and non-profit organisation established in January 2010, which cooperates with public libraries and other learning and cultural organisations. Its services include research, consultancy, training, project management and implementation and service development.Zavod Jara is engaged with Slovenian portal of local cultural heritage KAMRA, being responsible for its development. KAMRA is a portal providing access to local cultural heritage content from public libraries and other local cultural and educational institutions. The content is presented as stories which provide the context to digital objects. The content is harvested by Europeana on a monthly basis. Zavod Jara is involved in the Europeana Awareness project.
Tasks in LoCloud: regional aggregator for testing of tools developed by WP3, carrying out dissemination activities (WP6), providing support to small and medium sized institutions.
Spain
Ministerio de Educacion, Cultura y Deporte
Website: http://www.mcu.es/
The Directorate General for Fine Arts and Cultural Assets and Archives and Libraries is the administrative unit of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, under the Secretariat of State for Culture. Its mission is to manage the state archives and museums, the preservation and promotion of cultural heritage and the development and coordination of Spanish libraries, with a special emphasis on public libraries and bibliographic assets.The Directorate General has been carrying out large-scale digitisation projects in cooperation with public and private libraries and institutions from all over Spain and is in charge of Hispana the Spanish national aggregator for Europeana, which had made a major contribution to EuropeanaLocal.
Tasks in LoCloud: national aggregator for Spain, being responsible for the aggregation of content to contribute to Europeana; carrying out dissemination aimed at engaging small and medium sized institutions, hosting a content provider workshops (WP1), testing tools developed in WP3.
Universidad del País Vasco (University of the Basque Country)
Website: http://ixa.si.ehu.es
The IXA Research Group from the University of the Basque Country (UPV in Spanish and EHU in Basque) was created in 1988, with the aim of promoting the modernization of the Basque Country by means of developing advanced computational resources and systems. IXA has been involved in several European projects including MEANING and KYOTO. UPV EHU was the scientific coordinator of MEANING (IST-2001-34460). Currently, the group is involved in the PATHS project: Personalised Access To cultural Heritage Spaces (ICT-2010-270082). UPV/EHU is also coordinating a number of national projects: KNOW2: Developing large-scale multilingual technologies for Natural Language Understanding (TIN2009-14715-C04-01), OpenMT2: Open Source Machine Translation using hybrid methods: RBMT-EBMT methods (TIN2009-14675-C03-01). The IXA Group also promotes the Official Master programme entitled ‘Linguistic processing and analysis’.
Tasks in LoCloud: contributing expertise to the Natural Language Engineering area, particularly, on tasks related to the automatic linguistic enrichment of metadata; having a key role in the development of the SaaS tool for metadata enrichment within WP3.
Sweden
ABM Resurs Västernorrland
Website: http://www.abmresurs.se
Established in 2003, ABM Resurs Västernorrland is owned and run by the Regional State Archive in Härnösand, the County Library of Västernorrland and the County Museum of Västernorrland. The organisation serves as a regional competence centre for archives, libraries and museums in the region of Västernorrland. The goal of ABM Västernorrland is to improve access to the collections of the affiliated organisations, as well as to integrate and strengthen the position of the archive, library and museum sectors in the region and vis-a-vis national authorities. Its main area of expertise is information technologies for cultural heritage’s dissemination. Key objectives of ABM Resurs are the digitalisation of cultural content and their making accessible on-line.ABM Resurs participated in EuropeanaLocal where they begin acting as national aggregator for Sweden.
Tasks in LoCloud: acting as regional aggregator, providing content to Europeana and carrying out dissemination at a national level.
Turkey
Hacettepe Universitesi
Website: http://www.hacettepe.edu.tr
Founded in 1967, the Hacettepe University is one of the leading universities in Turkey. The mission of the university is to train highly qualified individuals able to make a positive contribution to the country, and to supply research, education and other services for the benefit of the society. The vision of the Hacettepe University is to become a leading university whose students are proud to represent it in the national and international arenas and able to contribute to the lifting of the country above the level of contemporary civilization, thanks to the high stardard of education and knowledge it offers, and the technology and art it generates.
Tasks in LoCloud: coordination of content provision and dissemination for Turkey and engagement of small and medium-sized institutions.
United Kingdom
University of York – Archaeology Data Service
Website: http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk
The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is situated in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York in the UK. The core objective of the ADS is to support research, learning and teaching with high quality and dependable digital resources. It does this by preserving digital data in the long term, and by promoting and disseminating a broad range of data in Archaeology. The ADS promotes good practice in the use of digital data in Archaeology, it provides technical advice to the research community, and supports the deployment of digital technologies.The ADS has been involved in a number of European-funded research and development projects since 2001. These have included a co-ordinating role in ARENA (Archaeological Records of Europe Networked Access) to develop a cross-search European portal, completed in 2004, and subsequently taken forward as ARENA2 within the ESFRI DARIAH infrastructure project.The ADS was also a partner in the Culture2007 programme ACE (Archaeology in Contemporary Europe) project: and was the UK aggregator within CARARE (Connecting ARchaeology and ARchitecture in Europeana). Currently, ADS is deputy coordinator for the ARIADNE (Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking) project.
Tasks in LoCloud: playing a major role in the requirements phase (WP1) as well as in European, international and national dissemination work in the UK (WP6), hosting a content provider’s workshop.
2Culture Associates
Website: http://2cultureassociates.com/
2Culture Associates specializes in working with museums, libraries, archives, archaeological heritage bodies and other organisations in the cultural heritage and education sectors in both the UK and on a European level. Services include research, training, project management and proposal writing, editorial and dissemination support. The company was formed in 2008 by Kate Fernie and became a limited company in 2013; the company changed its name to 2Culture Associates Ltd in 2014.
Tasks in LoCloud: Project management and communications.
LoCloud 