Brussels x 2017

Sharing is Caring – Brussels Extension

Opening up with Wikimedia

Sharing is Caring is a conference platform focused on collaboration and sharing in the cultural heritage sector, bringing together practitioners, researchers, and users of culture.

In analogy to the TED conferences and local TEDx extensions, the format is spreading from the core-event in Denmark to other countries, where local extensions address the topics that are close to their heart and their community.

After the first extension in Hamburg, Wikimedia Belgium and PACKED vzw Centre of Expertise in Digital Heritage are proud to announce ‘Sharing is Caring – Brussels Extension: Opening up with Wikimedia’ on 20 June at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage Brussels.

The’ Sharing is Caring – Brussels extension’ conference introduces the Belgian heritage sector to the possible applications of the various Wikimedia platforms for opening up digital collections. The conference will showcase examples from museums, libraries and archives from Belgium and abroad.

Besides showcasing Wiki-GLAM cooperations, the goal of the conference is to find motivated individuals and institutions with whom to organise content donations, promote reuse and remix.

Speakers

Trilce Navarrete

Trilce Navarrete is a specialist in historic and economic aspects of digital heritage and co-funder and editor of the EconomistsTalkArt.org blog.

Her research is driven by an interest to support evidence based policy to increase the use of digital heritage in our lives. She has studied the adoption of computers in museums, archives and libraries and is currently researching the effects of mediated heritage consumption, including the case of user preference to view and edit Wikipedia (read here).

Saskia Scheltjens

Saskia Scheltjens (BE/NL, 1970) studied literature & linguistics and information & library science at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). She is an experienced information manager who has worked in the university and museum world in Belgium and the Netherlands. In 2016 she became the head of a new department called Research Services in which the Rijksmuseum Research Library, the collection information department, collection IT and the reading and study rooms will work more closely together. The aim is to develop new tools and services for researchers on top of very hybrid, rich and open collection data.

 

Bert Lemmens

Bert Lemmens is project manager at PACKED vzw, Center of Expertise for Digital Heritage. He is mainly involved in the projects CEST (www.projectcest.be), MEDEA (https://medea.weopendata.com/) and PREFORMA (http://www.preforma-project.eu/). Bert has worked a.o. for Amsab (Institute for Social History, Ghent) as researcher in the European project HOPE, for MovE (cultural heritage aggregator of the province of East-Flanders) and for the NAI – Netherlands Architecture Institute as a collection registrar. Bert holds a master’s degree in art history and a master’s degree in conservation. Currently Bert is the WPlead on requirements and assessment in the PREFORMA project.

Dieter Suls

Dieter Suls works as a science librarian at ModeMuseum (MoMu) in Antwerp. Over the years, he coordinated many heritage projects such as Europeana Fashion, Contemporary Fashion Archive, the Visual Thesaurus Fashion and Costume and set up a study collection for MoMu.

Gwenny Vlaemynck

Gwenny Vlaemynck is project leader at the bibliographical center at Cultuurconnect, the centre for digitization for public libraries and cultural centres. Together with the Open Vlacc catalogers she keeps the library classification systems up-to-date and looks for the most relevant keywords, themes and genres to make the content of the public libraries available. The catalogues of the Flemish public libraries are enriched by information about authors from Wikipedia.

Sandra Fauconnier

Sandra Fauconnier (BE/NL, 1973) is an art historian with a particular interest in new technologies. She wrote her master’s dissertation about internet art (1997) and has been active as projectmanager and producer of internet- and videoprojects in the cultural sector for over 15 years. Since 2003 she is an active contributor to Wikimedia projects and often collaborates with cultural heritage institutions to help them share their images and data through Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.

Hilde De Clercq

Hilde De Clercq is a chemist and obtained a PhD in science, polymer chemistry at the University of Ghent (1993). Since October 1994 she works as researcher in the department Laboratories of the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK IRPA), Brussels. From December 2006 she is the Head of this Department as well as the head of the section Monuments.

Tim de Haan

Tim de Haan is Open Data advisor at the National Archive of the Netherlands. He has been involved with making available the collection data of the National Archive as open data. In 2013 in a collaboration between the National Archive and the Royal Library of the Netherlands, he accompanied the Wikimedian in Residence-project. He is also an active Wikimedian as [[User:Timmietovenaar] by uploading visual material on Wikipedia’s image database Wikimedia Commons for the purpose of illustrating lemma’s on Wikipedia.

Olaf Janssen

O.D. (Olaf) Janssen (Dongen, 1973) studied astronomy in Leiden and has been active in the library and heritage field since 2001. He is co-founder of The European Library and a pioneer at Europeana, the European Union cultural heritage platform. He is currently working on  Open Data & Wikimedia-coordination at the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) in The Hague. He stimulates and facilitates activities that open collections, knowledge, data and bring the staff at the KB and the projects of the Wikimedia movement, such as Wikipedia, together. He is also active in the movement as a volunteer.

 

Organised by:

Supported by:

OPEN CALL for ignites

What’s the impact of digitisation?

The digitisation of cultural heritage collections has been going on for several decades now, promising unprecedented potentials for the GLAM sector to fulfil its public mission of opening up knowledge and culture to the participation and enjoyment of all citizens. The big question is, how do we demonstrate that we actually achieve this ambition through our digitally powered work?

Are YOU one of our ignite speakers?

We a looking for engaging and entertaining ignite talks that present best practices or new approaches to this years theme Digitisation and Social Impact. Each ignite speaker has 5 minutes to present 20 slides. Each slide is displayed for 15 seconds before the presentation automatically advances. All ignite talks must be given in English, and they must ignite the audience. So be brave, be bold, be awesome!

Don’t know the format? Be inspired here!

How to enter

Send a short presentation of your project or topic, and your motivation for speaking at Sharing is Caring, to louise@mmex.dk by 23 August 2017. We will get back to you in the last week of August to tell you if you made the cut.

When, where, what

Sharing is Caring: Digitisation and Social Impact? takes place 19-21 November in Aarhus, the Cultural Capital of Europe 2017. The conference focuses on collaboration and sharing in the cultural heritage sector by bringing together practitioners, researchers, and users of culture. The team behind it is MMEx, SMK, and Visit Aarhus.

Sharing is Caring has been held since 2011, featuring keynote speakers such as Melissa Terras, Cédric Manara, Michael Edson, Shelley Bernstein, Nick Poole, Jill Cousins, Simon Tanner, and Jasper Visser, as well as a brilliant range of practitioners and researchers within digital culture. Around 200 attendants join the conference every time.

Hamburg x 2017

Sharing is Caring – Hamburg Extension

Opening up! Building Connectivity through Cultural Heritage

Read the Closing Statement from Sharing is Caring – Hamburg Extension

Watch videos from Sharing is Caring – Hamburg Extension and the Nefertiti Project

See photos from Sharing is Caring – Hamburg Extension

Find presentations and workshop summaries from Sharing is Caring – Hamburg Extension

Sharing is Caring is spreading to other countries and the first edition outside Denmark was held in Hamburg, Germany on 20/21 April 2017 at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and at the University of Hamburg, Institute for Cultural Anthropology.

As digitization has become a major task for the cultural heritage sector, more and more cultural institutions are providing access to their digitized collections. But sharing is not only about creating online access, it is about sharing the authority to interpret the digitized assets and to create value by opening them up for reuse. How can opening up result in a mutual benefit for institutions as well as for their audiences and society? And what are the challenges on the way like copyright, institutional policies and not to forget the expectation of the users? The first edition of the Sharing is Caring conference outside Denmark, the Hamburg extension, will aim to answer these questions. We will hear from international experts, practitioners and artists about their research and experiences taking open access to a new level of participatory engagement.

Speakers

CARSTEN BROSDA

Journalism and political science studies at the University of Dortmund; PhD on “discursive journalism” in Dortmund University’s faculty of cultural studies

2000 – 2005: press officer and editor, later speechwriter and policy officer for the SPD party executive

2005 – 2009: head of the speeches, text and analysis unit at the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs

2008 – 2009: deputy head of the management and planning staff at the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs

2010 – 2011: head of the SPD party executive’s communication department

June 2011 – February 2016: head of the media office in Hamburg’s Senate Chancellery, from 2013 additionally the Senate’s authorised media representative

March 2016 – January 2017: State Secretary in the Ministry of Culture; State Secretary in the Senate Chancellery for the media and digitisation sectors

Minister of Culture and Head of the Ministry since February 2017

 

ANTJE SCHMIDT

Antje Schmidt is Head of Digital Cataloguing at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. Trained as an art historian and with a research background in museum history she is involved in digital cultural heritage projects for 10 years. With the launch of MKG Collection Online she has established a Public Domain Policy as part of the museums evolving digital strategy. She is elected Councillor of the Europeana Network Association, part of the workings group “Museum” in the Association for Digital Humanities in the German speaking Countries and serves on the Advisory Board for the Europeana Art Collections.

 

GERTRAUD KOCH

Gertraud Koch is Professor of European Ethnology/Cultural Anthropology at Universität Hamburg. She is Vice Chair of the Expert Committee of Immaterial Cultural Heritage of the German Commission for UNESCO. Her publications address questions of cultural production in digital times and currently together with Samantha Lutz conceptual reflections on sustainability in culture.

 

SABINE SCHULZE

Prof. Dr. Sabine Schulze is the director of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg since 2008. Under her management the museum started a large-scale transformation process. It resulted not only in the modernization and remodelling of the permanent collections or the realization of a very diversified exhibition programme, but also in innovative digital projects like an iBeaon Tour or the MKG Collection Online. Realizing – as the first art museum in Germany – an open licensing policy had a great impact on the internal development of the institution and helps to perceive the museums’ audiences as collaborators instead of visitors.

 

KARIN GLASEMANN

Karin originally joined Nationalmuseum to ameliorate digital documentation and to streamline digitization routines. A major goal of documentation and digitization was soon to make the astonishing collection more accessible to the public. Karin is responsible for Nationalmuseum’s cooperation with Europeana and initiated several collaborations with Open Data initiatives such as Wikidata. Through pilot projects and collaborative initiatives, she minimized internal doubts and moved the institution towards a more open understanding of digital access to cultural heritage. Nationalmuseum effectuated an OpenGlam policy in October 2016 and provides large parts of the digitized collections through collaboration with Wikimedia Sweden.

Karin has a background as historian and is an elected member of the Europeana Members Council.

 

ANTJE THEISE

Antje holds a M.A. of Latin Philology and Classical Archeology (1999) and a M.A. of Library and Informations Science (2004). Before joining the the Hamburg State and University Library in 2005 as a Rare Book Librarian Antje has worked at the University of Greifswald, the Regional Library of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Schwerin, the Research Library of Gotha and at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. She is interested in all about special collections and Open Access to these, in addition she works about Latin poetry of the 16th/17th century, emblems, book history and possibilities to cataloging graphic prints, pictures, and art books.

 

NICOLE GRAF

Born 1970 raised in the Eastern part of Switzerland. Training as a librarian at the Swiss National Library, Studies in sociology, constitutional law and Swiss history at the University of Berne. Scientific assistant, scientific editorial assistant at the University of Berne und freelance film journalist for the “Berner Zeitung”. Since 2008 Head of the Image Archive of the ETH Library in Zürich. Co-editor of the Series “Pictorial Worlds. Images from the Image Archive of the ETH-Library” (Scheidegger & Spuess, Zürich, since 2011). Post graduate master studies in Image Science at the University of Krems (A).

 

MAREIKE SCHUMACHER

Mareike Schumacher is a research assistant and PhD candidate at the Humanities Department of the University of Hamburg. She works for the efoto-Hamburg project, where she is involved in the development of a mobile application which provides access to historical images of the city of Hamburg. During her Master Studies she assisted the foundation of the Association for Digital Humanities in the German speaking Countries in 2012. She is an active member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narratology (ICN) and the Northern Narratology Network (triple*N). She studied Cultural Theory at the University of Lüneburg and Literature at the University of Hamburg and graduates in the fields of Digital Humanities and Narratology. Her PhD project focusses on the specification of the narratological categories of space and place in novels.

 

GEORG HOHMANN

Georg Hohmann is an information scientists, art historian, digital humanist and cultural computer scientists. He is the head of digitization at the Deutsches Museum in Munich and responsible for the digital transformation of the museum, its library and archive. As part of a comprehensive future initiative he leads a long-term project to document and digitize the collections of the Deutsches Museum.

After his master’s degree he was involved in various projects in the field of digital cultural heritage and was one of the founders of prometheus – the digital image archive for research and teaching. At the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg he worked at the department for museum informatics and was responsible for metadata, media management and web services. Georg is involved in several working groups and organisations like the german chapter of the European Association for Digital Humanities or the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model Special Interest Group.

The focus of his research is on the methods of knowledge representation and reasoning in the humanities. The application of Semantic Web technologies and ontologies play an important role. Furthermore he is interested in the digital transformation of memory institutions and its operational, social and methodological impact. And he loves well-structured metadata.

 

MAR DIXON

Mar is an international project manager, digital and social media specialist and is responsible for world trending social media campaigns like #AskACurator or #MuseumWeek on Twitter and #52Museums on Instagram.  She describes herself as an advocate or troublemaker “depending on what you need”.

Workshops

Session 1

CC Change Your Mind

Ellen Euler, Deputy Manager of Finances, Law, and Communication, German Digital Library/Barbara Fischer, Curator for Cultural Partnerships, Wikimedia Germany 

Reuse of Cultural Heritage: A Challenging Topic

Nora Al-Badri, Jan Nikolai Nelles, Artists, Berlin/Sarah Powell, Rights specialist at Auckland War Memorial Museum

Building Bridges between Cultural Institutions and Tech Communities: A Collaborative Handbook

Helene Hahn, Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland e.V. /Philipp Geisler, Project Manager Coding da Vinci Nord 2016

How to Make the Most Out of It: Reuse and Content Production for Learning

Douglas McCarthy, Art & Photography Collections Manager, Europeana/Friederike Fankhänel, Education of Art and Design, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Session 2

Step by Step: Ways Towards Open Access

Karin Glasemann, Digital Coordinator, Nationalmuseum Sweden/Antje Theise, Rare Book Librarian, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg

Economies of Sharing Digitized Cultural Heritage

Georg Hohmann, Head of Digitization, Deutsches Museum, Munich/Gertraud Koch, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, University of Hamburg/Mareike Schumacher, eFoto project, University of Hamburg

Sharing through Interaction. Socializing Media for Cultural Heritage Work

Mar Dixon, Cultural and Social Entrepreneur, United Kingdom

Sharing and Creating Knowledge: Crowdsourcing at the ETH Library in Zurich

Nicole Graf, Head of the Image Archive of the ETH library in Zurich

Atelier J. Hamann, Übungen an der Sprossenwand, around 1909, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (CC0 1.0 Publich Domain Dedication)

Organised by:

Supported by:

 

Keynote: Elizabeth Merritt

GLAMS in a Digital Future

Times of rapid change challenge organizations to revisit the assumptions underlying their existing practices. Some companies thrive by reinventing their business models while others fail to understand how their strengths align with new opportunities. GLAMs (Galeries, Libraries, Archives, Museums)—as individual organizations and as a sector—need to examine how the rise of open, digital culture may transform the core value they offer to society.

About Elizabeth Merritt
Vice President, Strategic Foresight and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums, at the American Alliance of Museums

Believing that museums can change the world, Elizabeth Merritt is devoted to helping museums create a brighter future for their communities. As founding director of the American Alliance of Museums’ Center for the Future of Museums, she applies the tools of strategic foresight to the nonprofit realm. Ms. Merritt conducts trends forecasting and scenario development for museums, sharing her work through publications, social media and presentations. She is the author of CFM’s annual TrendsWatch report and produces the weekly e-newsletter Dispatches from the Future of Museums. She frequently keynotes at conferences in the US and abroad. In recent years, her work has expanded to encompass libraries, orchestras and opera as well. Elizabeth earned has her B.S. from Yale and an M.A. in cell and molecular biology from Duke University, as well as training in futures studies at the University of Houston.

Sharing is Caring 2015: Right to Remix?

Sharing is Caring: Right to Remix? was held 2 October 2015 in the DR Concert Hall in Copenhagen.

The DR Concert Hall. Photo by Lars Lundqvist, CC BY-NC-SA
The DR Concert Hall. Photo by Lars Lundqvist, CC BY-NC-SA

#sharecare15
#righttoremix

Sharing is Caring: Right to Remix? addressed the topic of remix culture and rights, and how the cultural heritage sector can deal with these in constructive and proactive ways.

Watch videos from the seminar

See photos from the seminar

Through a versatile programme of international keynote speakers, keynotes in conversation and ignite sessions, the seminar focused on the amazing stuff the cultural sector can achieve when rethinking the logic of copyright in a digital age perspective. But we also discussed the hurdles to overcome and the fights to take, when we want to challenge the traditional notion of copyright.

The speakers delivered talks to open up fresh perspectives on how to work more flexibly with rights in the digital age, and what awesome potentials the cultural sector can tap into if we dare to change our existing mindsets and ways of working.

As a special feature this year, Sharing is Caring led directly up to the annual cultural heritage hackathon Hack4DK from Friday evening 2 October through Sunday 4 October.

SPEAKERS

Keynote speaker Melissa Terras

Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Humanities UCL
Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Humanities UCL 

Read the blogposts that Melissa based her keynote on.

Taking, Making and Law-Breaking: copyright, digitised content, and the digital maker movement.

In this talk, Melissa Terras will talk about her experiences in trying to reuse digitized heritage content to make something she likes, wants, and will use – and the frustrating barriers she encountered along the way.  Covering issues of technical digitization standards, search and retrieval issues, and licensing issues, it is demonstrated how difficult it is to reuse cultural heritage content in this context, given the implicit and explicit barriers raised, institutionally, technically, and legally, along the way.

Melissa Terras is Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, Professor of Digital Humanities in UCL’s Department of Information Studies, and Vice Dean of Research (Projects) in UCL’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities. With a background in Classical Art History, English Literature, and Computing Science, her doctorate (Engineering, University of Oxford) examined how to use advanced information engineering technologies to interpret and read Roman texts. Publications include “Image to Interpretation: Intelligent Systems to Aid Historians in the Reading of the Vindolanda Texts” (2006, Oxford University Press) and “Digital Images for the Information Professional” (2008, Ashgate) and she has co-edited various volumes such as “Digital Humanities in Practice” (Facet 2012) and “Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader” (Ashgate 2013). She is currently serving on the Board of Curators of the University of Oxford Libraries, and the Board of the National Library of Scotland. Her research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the arts and humanities that would otherwise be impossible. You can generally find her on twitter @melissaterras.

Keynote speaker Maarten Zeinstra

Maarten Zeinstra, advisor at Kennisland
Maarten Zeinstra, advisor at Kennisland

Caring for the limits of sharing

If the cultural heritage sector wants to support a thriving Remix Culture, we need to debate the legal and technical mechanisms that are holding artists and institutions back from sharing. We need a frank discussion on the merits of sharing vs. the monopoly of intellectual property rights.

Maarten Zeinstra works at Kennisland (KL). KL is an independent think tank with a public mission. KL aspires to strengthen our knowledge society by designing innovative programmes and realising interventions to address the grand challenges of today’s society. A strong knowledge-driven society subsists because of access to information. By making digital heritage collections available in an open and innovative way, knowledge can thrive.
Maarten is advisor on copyright law and open technology in the cultural sector. His focus is to guide cultural institutions in making data available online. In practice, this means writing policy, giving workshops and masterclasses, and guiding technological development. Maarten is project lead of Creative Commons Nederland and has extensive experience as a requirements engineer and architect for projects like Open Images, Europeana and OutOfCopyright.eu.

Keynote speaker Eva Van Passel

Eva van Passel, researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Eva van Passel, researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel

How open is open enough? A philosophy of cultural commons for the cultural heritage sector.

Cultural (heritage) institutions are redefining their roles in a context of digital access to culture. This talk will address how the cultural heritage sector can adopt a layered approach, with different degrees of openness. An overall goal of cultural heritage institutions in the digital age can be to provide as much access as possible and to be as open as possible towards reuse and remix practices. How open this is, however, might change depending on specific user communities, and it can also be different depending on the content being shared.

Eva Van Passel has been a researcher at iMinds – SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, since 2007. Her research interests include the many challenges and opportunities for arts and heritage in a networked society, but her research mainly focuses on the changing roles of cultural (heritage) institutions in the context of digitisation, digital preservation, and distribution and sustainable digital access. Topics under scrutiny over the years have included strategic challenges for cultural institutions, digital cultural policy, audience strategies, business models, the European digital library Europeana, open cultural data and open GLAM initiatives, and financing models for digital cultural heritage. Eva holds Masters degrees in Communication and Media Studies, and in Film Studies and Visual Culture.

Keynote speaker: Cédric Manara

Cédric Manara, copyright counsel, Google
Cédric Manara, copyright counsel, Google

Copyright and the 99%

Historically, copyright has been concerned with encouraging commercial cultural production. Today, most of the creative expression comes from amateurs who do not understand copyright, or have no clue what it’s about. What about tomorrow? The Internet, with its 2.8 billion users and counting, is just beginning to change the legal landscape. How to reform copyright – in Denmark or in Europe – to reconcile the interests of those who want to make money, when others just want to share knowledge or information?

Cédric Manara, PhD, has lost his hair teaching, writing or consulting. He has been a full time law professor at EDHEC Business School (France) and held visitorships in Finland, Italy, Japan and the USA, published a lot on intellectual property and internet legal issues, and also was a consultant for e-commerce companies or law firms. He joined Google’s wonderful legal team as copyright counsel in 2013.

PANEL DEBATE: CREATIVE COMMONS FOR CONTEMPORARY ART?

A terrific panel of artists, copyright experts, and museum people in a debate about contemporary art, digital media, and rights issues.

In this debate, we discussed perspectives and challenges in using Creative Commons licenses on contemporary art, as opposed to traditional copyright. Does it entail increased visibility for artists if they share reproductions of their work more liberally than copyright allows for? Is it even possible for artists to opt out of social media today, if they want their work to known more widely? Are there new ways for artists to make revenues in connection with more openly licensed images of their work? Or is it a slippery slope to start relaxing the restrictions on how images of artworks are shown, shared and circulated online?

The aim was to have a constructive and solution-oriented debate that will help artists and cultural institutions alike to better understand how to navigate and benefit from the participatory culture on the Internet, while respecting rights.
The panel

IT lawyer Martin von Haller Grønbæk, Bird & Bird, will moderate the debate.

Speaker: Harry Verwayen

Deputy Director, Europeana

A GLAM toolbox for assessing impact

Harry Verwayen will give an overview of the state-of the art of ‘impact’ thinking in our sector ranging from the theoretical to the very practical day to day application of it. You will get an insight in impact as a useful concept, the tools and methodologies that have been developed to design, assess and narrate impact, and practical examples of institutions that have used this methodology to their advantage, like Europeana and SMK Open.

Learn more about the impact toolbox

About Harry Verwayen
Harry Verwayen is the Deputy Director of Europeana. He is responsible for making sure that the organisation meets its objectives, and do it well. What he likes to do more than anything else though is to design and implement new business models that will change our way of thinking about heritage as an enabler of societal and economic growth. Lately, much of his attention and effort is directed towards the developments of the sharing economy. A visual thinker, he needs a white board as much as a strong coffee.

Speaker: Tim Sherratt

Access is never simply ‘open’

It’s a struggle for meaning, power, and value. I’m interested in using digital tools to see collections differently, to create opportunities for reflection and resistance. From Australia’s racist immigration policies, to the encroachments of state surveillance, I’ll be exploring how digital access changes the types of questions we can ask of the past.

About Tim Sherratt
Tim Sherratt is a historian and hacker who researches the possibilities and politics of digital cultural collections. Tim has worked across the cultural heritage sector and has been developing online resources relating to libraries, archives, museums and history since 1993. He’s currently Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra. Tim’s tools and experiments include important things like The Real Face of White Australia, useful things like QueryPic, and strange things like The Vintage Face Depot. You can find him at timsherratt.org or as @wragge on Twitter.

Picture © Christopher Brothers 2012 

Speaker: Rob Stein

Chief Program Officer, American Alliance of Museums

Can the cultural sector really change lives?

For those of us working in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, we believe that answer to be a resounding yes. However, demonstrating this impact – beyond anecdotal evidence – has proven to be devilishly hard. Why is that the case?

While the cultural sector has progressed significantly to adopt technology that can exhibit collections, engage audiences, and document histories – have we missed the chance to prove why those things are important in the first place? As support for culture seems to be under continual threat, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums must leverage these technical skills to deliver measurable social impact lest we risk being sidelined as recreational, superficial, and optional.

Let’s explore together the ways that cultural organizations can advance our work in this area and document the proof of change we see every day.

About Rob Stein
Robert Stein is a museum leader, technology expert, and strategist with deep experience in the museum field heading up innovative projects and diverse teams. In April 2016, Rob joined the American Alliance of Museums as the Executive Vice President and Chief Program Officer to lead the organization’s programming efforts in service to both national and global audiences. In that role, Stein is responsible for key strategic initiatives including the expansion of the Alliance’s role as a thought leader, content provider, and global catalyst for excellence in the field of museums.

Rob is a sought after author, speaker, and consultant, focusing on the impact museums can have in their community, how technology efforts can change the dynamic of museum innovation, and how metrics and measurement can drive continuous improvement for the practice of museums.

Stein is active in service to the museum field having served as a board member of the Museum Computer Network, an active member of the International Program Committee of Museums and the Web, and as a National Advisor to the Education Committee of AAM. He is currently a Senior Advisor to the National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University.

Speaker: Marie Østergaard

Dokk1 – Building on a Burning Platform

Dokk1 – Aarhus’ new main library – opened in June 2015. The talk will focus on Dokk1 as a result of many years of prototyping, design thinking, testing, researching and a highly inclusive process as well as discuss how Dokk1 has become an example of what can come from the emergent necessity of rethinking spaces, services and community engagement. Working intensely with involvement of a massive amount of new and non-traditional partnerships on all levels of the organization in order to develop new service designs and events, space praxis has been redefined. Through user involvement the identity and spaces in Dokk1 have changed our library identity forever. It has turned the library into a city square, with all the transparency, diversity and mutual ownership that follows such a change.

About Marie Østergaard
Marie is Library Director at Aarhus Public Libraries. Since 2001, she has been part of Aarhus Public Libraries’ development of the physical library of the future. Focusing on interactions, user-involvement, network-development, prototyping and communication in the physical library space, Aarhus has investigated new technologies, involvement processes and learning. In a wide range of projects and processes with users, network and partners she has focused on the development of the “next library” – the library of the future. From 2005, Marie was the project leader of the building of Dokk1, implementing and developing these ideas as well as introducing new forms of user- and citizen involvement in the planning and building of Dokk1. Marie is also part of Ineli – International Network of Emerging Library Innovators.

Ignite sessions Aarhus

What’s the impact of digitisation?

The digitisation of cultural heritage collections has been going on for several decades now, promising unprecedented potentials for the GLAM sector to fulfil its public mission of opening up knowledge and culture to the participation and enjoyment of all citizens. The big question is, how do we demonstrate that we actually achieve this ambition through our digitally powered work?

Ignite session kickoff at Sharing is Caring 2015. Photo CCBY-NC 2.0 Thomas Christensen

A range of amazing ignite speakers responded to the challenge and gave us an insight in the tangible impact of their work.

1. Dialogue that makes an impact
Helle Bech Madsen, Manager
DR Archives, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation

2. MIXOSCOPE – remix old photos from the Danish colony in the West Indies
Mette Toxwærd, Project Leader
Ditte Laursen, Head of Department
Royal Danish Library

3. What happened to Giovanna Tornabuoni? Tracking a masterpiece on the Internet
Helena Barranha, Assistant Professor
Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa

4. How to use gigapixel digitizations to create impacting experiences for your users
Koldo Garcia, Co-Founder
Madpixel

5. Art Jewels: Sparking engagement with museum collections through digital design
Victoria Martinez, European Community Manager
Shapeways

6. Making Access to Art Easy: Kunstportalen.louisiana.dk
Helle Søndergaard, Art Educator
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

7. ECHY studio: Cross-Generational Research at the University of Hamburg
Ragna Quellmann, Bachelor of Arts
Olivia Stracke, Student of Cultural Anthropology
University of Hamburg

8. Caring about what you are sharing: rightsstatements.org
Harry Verwayen, Deputy Director
Europeana