Europeana at South by Southwest, Texas

Europeana's scientific coordinator Antoine Isaac is today participating in a panel on 'Culture Hack: Libraries & Museums Open for Making' at this year's South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. The event offers the 'unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Fostering creative and professional growth alike, SXSW® is the premier destination for discovery.'

The programme describes Antoine's session as follows:

'Around the world, libraries, archives and museums are opening their doors to hackers, makers, enthusiasts and creatives of all kinds. By publishing Open Data, cultural heritage institutions are finding new ways to open access to their collections for remix and re-use, and promote new uses and interpretations of the works they hold. These international panelists will explore the many ways in which cultural heritage institutions are sharing content, what people are doing with this content, as well as exploring some of the thornier issues of open access across borders and institutions.'

As such, the panel reflects our continuous efforts to raise awareness on Open Data issues in the cultural domain and to reach a wider audience, as SXSW is one of the major conferences for emerging technology and (digital) culture. It is also an opportunity to re-enforce strategic partnerships and technology cross-fertilisation on both sides of the Atlantic, ahead of the coming Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums (LOD-LAM) summit, which will focus on Linked Open Data issues. Today's panel features prominent figures like: Rachel Frick, Program Director at CLIR Digital Library Federation; Emily Gore, Director for Content Digital Public Library Of America; and Sam Leon, OpenGLAM Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

This year's SXSW is witnessing a strong presence from the library, archive and museum community, who are more and more aware of the importance of technical innovation in cultural heritage and digital information management. There is an awesome line-up of sessions on digital maps, visualisation of large heritage collections, citizen archivists or libraries as a playground. Other community-engagement actions include things like 'library boxes' (digital file distribution tools which demonstrate the importance of libraries in a networked, social media-driven world) sponsored by the DPLA, which have been distributed at the event. Another initiative is the Er&L (Electronic Resources and Libraries) #ideadrop house at SXSW, which will 'serve as a seriously fun place to drop ideas and a seriously great opportunity to dialogue about topics affecting libraries when the creative juices are flowing and where the big ideas are percolating.'

More information

Watch a live video stream of what's going on in the #ideadrop house.

Follow #sxswLAM on Twitter.

Watch live streaming of the SXSW event sessions.