Erik is a photographer at the National Historical Museums. He has worked in the fields of fashion and commercial photography since 2000, and came to heritage imaging in 2010. For the last 4 years, Erik has focused on developing 3D photography for cultural heritage organsations.
For the National Historiacal Museums, being a publicly funded institution with digital collections open for free use and re-use comes with a great responsibility. The challenge is to deliver content that people actually want to use. Erik will show how using photogrammetry and established web platforms can result in outreach far beyond our expectations.
Merete Sanderhoff holds an MA in Art History and works at SMK – Statens Museum for Kunst as curator and senior advisor of digital
museum practice. She is responsible for the museum’s open access policy and
works to foster active re-use of the museum’s digitised collections for
research, learning, knowledge sharing, and creativity.
Merete has published substantial research in the area of digital museum practice and has set the agenda for openness in the global museum community with the Sharing is Caring conferences. In 2017-18, she served as chair of the Europeana Network Association and is now an advisor to the EU Commission’s Expert Group on Digital Cultural Heritage & Europeana. She won the Danish Open Data award in 2018.
Merete will sum up the Stockholm conference by asking How can we transform the world with open culture?
Europe’s cultural heritage institutions have been digitising their collections for decades. In recent years, more and more museums, libraries and archives are opening up all of this data to the people. One of the driving forces behind this move is Europeana. With the Public Domain Charter from 2010, Europeana made open data a standard for the entire sector.
Europeana aspires to ‘Transform the world with culture’ – a bold ambition I have always wanted to contribute to. Having served in the Europeana Members Council and chaired the Europeana Network Association, I’m now part of an EU Commission expert group advising the European member states about strategies for our shared, digital cultural heritage. A main task in 2019 is to co-create the new Europeana strategy 2020+. This entails understanding why we have digitised Europe’s cultural heritage, what we thereby hope to achieve as a sector, who we aim to transform with culture, and how we demonstrate that aspirations turn into reality?
Jill Cousins is
the Director and CEO of the Hunt Museum, Ireland, where she is working on
digitization and opening up of the collection to new audiences at the same time
as positioning the Hunt Museum as the pivot in the cultural revival and
regeneration of the city of Limerick.
Jill was formerly the Executive Director of Europeana Foundation, building up Europeana from a project idea to an operational service, attracting €8 million of funds per annum and developing world markets in education, research and creative industry for the contributing cultural heritage institutions. Europeana is seen as the example for other largescale continental cultural heritage platforms. Jill is on the Boards of CLIR and the Digital Libraries Forum, the University of Limerick Glucksman Advisory Board, the Visiting Committee for Getty Digital and the Advisory Board of IMPACT.
Thomas is Cultural Heritage Lead at sketchfab.com. He began working with 3D for cultural heritage at the British Museum, creating the museum’s first online collection of downloadable 3D scans. He went on to co-found Museum in a Box (museuminabox.org) in 2015 and joined Sketchfab in 2017.
At Sketchfab, he helps individuals and institutions make the most of sharing their collections online in 3D, connects the creative 3D community with the cultural, and encourages both open and commercial licensing of 3D data.
Thomas’s work focuses on exploring the possibilities of accessible 3D digitisation and online 3D & XR and encouraging institutions large and small to share their knowledge, workflows and experiments in this rapidly evolving field.
Sofia Dahlquist is a Web Editor, Coordinator and Educator at Stockholmskällan, the City of Stockholm Administration of Education, Sweden. Sofia Dahlquist has a background in the Museum Sector where she has been working as a Museum Educator and Curator specialized on digital pedagogics. Sofia studied Ethnology and has a Bachelor of Arts from Lund University, Sweden.
Sofia will show how Stockholmskällan tells the history of the City and its citizens through texts, sound clips and pictures. The Website Stockholmskällan is a cooperation between the Stockholm City Museum, the Stockholm City Archive, the Stockholm City Library and the City of Stockholm Administration of Education. The aim is to enable digitised historical artefacts to the public in general, and especially to schools in order to make it easier to use prime sources when teaching history.
Andrea joined the University of Exeter as a Lecturer in Law in August 2017. She completed her PhD in Cultural Heritage Law with the CREATe RC UK Centre Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy at the University of Glasgow in partnership with the National Library of Scotland. Andrea’s research explores legal issues surrounding copyright, cultural institutions, and the public domain. She frequently writes and presents on open culture and the impact that a claim to copyright in reproductions has on meaningful access to and reuse of our common cultural heritage in the public domain.
In Stockholm, Andrea will talk about Finding the Nuance in Open Access and discuss legal, ethical, and operational questions related to IP that arise during attempts to truly decolonize institutions.
In 2018, the Sarr-Savoy Report on “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage” was submitted to the French government. The Report goes into great detail about the issues surrounding restitution, but includes little about digitization, intellectual property rights, and open access. This is so despite the fact it recommends “a radical practice of sharing, including how one rethinks the politics of image rights use,” and sets a firm objective for “free access” and “free use of the images and documents.” Yet, this blanket recommendation risks positioning institutions to return material cultural heritage while retaining control over the generation, presentation, and stewardship of digital cultural heritage for decades to come.
As institutions and governments increasingly explore restitution initiatives, IP issues are at the forefront of decolonisation. This presentation explores how the same attention paid to material cultural heritage and their histories must be paid to the digital surrogates, documentation, and associated archival materials. It considers how organisations might better consider such issues arising during the desire to open collections. It explores who benefits from open access, and it challenges how we might encourage greater nuance in the digitisation process. In doing so, the presentation highlights potential barriers to openness and makes recommendations for how to better manage them. It explores how institutions have a key role to play in decolonizing not only cultural collections, their representation and historic management, but also in decolonizing the Internet by encouraging community-based solutions around digitization, access, and education as part of reparations.
Andrei is an entrepreneur on a mission to fill social media with art. Since 2014 Andrei has shared millions of pieces of art through a network of automated Social Media accounts, also known as Bots. This talk is an exploration of what it takes to share large art collections on Social Media as well as the discussion of successful strategies and spectacular failures. In addition, Andrei will share ways museums can harness the power of automation and AI to bring art into user’s daily feeds.
Loic Tallon is the former Chief Digital Officer at The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, where he led the digital
transformation and the Digital department until March 2019.
Loic’s work focuses on the potential of technology to
transform how audiences connect with knowledge and culture on a global
scale. In his five years at The Met, he led the museum’s decision to
release all high-resolution photos of public-domain artworks under CC0, free
for users around the world to use, remix, and share as they wish. He also
expanded The Met’s reach by building partnerships with Wikipedia, Google,
Microsoft and MIT through which over 100 million users a year can now connect
to knowledge, creativity and ideas through The Met’s encyclopedic art
collection.
Sandra Fauconnier is Program Officer for GLAM and Structured Data at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization supporting Wikipedia, Wikidata, and nearly a dozen other open knowledge projects. She works on projects related to structured and linked data, and on technologies that support content partnerships by global heritage organizations within the Wikimedia ecosystem.
Sandra is a trained art historian with a strong interest in the internet and digital technologies. She has more than 15 years of experience in digital, online and video projects for cultural heritage. Additionally, she is a long-time volunteer on Wikimedia projects and an advocate for open access, commons-based and sustainable digital resources in the cultural sector.
Bodil Axelsson is a researcher at Linköpings university. Her interdisciplinary research examines heritagization, that is processes in which cultural institutions, associations and individuals produce meaningful pasts.
Moreover she does fieldwork on cultural institution’s digital practices. Previous research projects have focused on historical theater plays, popular history magazines, cultural history museum’s contemporary collecting, and artistic work.
At Sharing is Caring, Bodil will examine what happens when curatorial operations such as selection, organization, synthesis and exhibition of meaningful pasts are distributed between people and technology. What effects do human and computational processes have on selection and viewing? Does digitization always lead to a more democratic heritage? Viewed through the lens of political economy, sharing and participation becomes a gift, not only for the public good, but also for the social media businesses when data traces are turned into private goods of value in the informational capitalism.