EuropeanaTech Community Work Plan 2022

In 2022, the EuropeanaTech Community's aspiration is to grow its role as a facilitator of knowledge exchange within the Europeana Network Association, and support and accelerate the identification and adoption of new and innovative technologies for the cultural heritage sector. 

Read and download the full EuropeanaTech Community work plan below. You can also join the EuropeanaTech Community. 

Steering Group composition

• Gregory Markus, Community Manager 
• Antoine Isaac, Community Manager 
• Marloes Bontje, Community Manager 
• Clemens Neudecker, Chair 
• Georgia Angelaki, Vice-chair 
• Henk Alkemade, Vice-chair 
• Ina Blümel 
• Johan Oomen 
• David Haskiya 
• Makx Dekkers 
• Larissa Borck 
• Andrija Sagic 
• Cosmina Berta 
• Martin Weiss 
• Glen Robson 

An open call will be made during the first quarter of 2022 for those wishing to join the EuropeanaTech Steering Group.

Community aspiration for 2022 

Grow EuropeanaTech’s role as a facilitator of knowledge exchange within the Europeana Network Association. 

Support and accelerate the identification and adoption of new and innovative technologies for the cultural heritage sector. 

To make these aspirations more concrete, the EuropeanaTech community recognises three main, overarching goals, that are aligned with the intentions of the European Digital Public Space and cover a timespan of several years to come. 

1) Further operationalise, at European level, Europeana’s technical achievements so far.

This means developing a strand of activities aimed at upskilling members in areas such as the Europeana Publishing Framework, the Europeana Data Model, data quality, IIIF and multilinguality, with a set of appropriate activities including developing more resources, localising resources and running webinars. This should be done in close collaboration with the Europeana Foundation as well as involving the Network.

2) Continue to explore cutting-edge advancements in our sector. 

Similar to our approach to the AI in relation to GLAMs Task Force, we will issue open calls for new Task Forces and explore other cutting-edge advancements that can be used by the cultural heritage sector. Europeana’s Innovation Agenda should also be updated to reflect such advancements. 

3) Explore what the new recommendation on the European Digital Public Space means for the EuropeanaTech community, in particular regarding support for smaller cultural heritage organisations. 

We intend to run a series of dedicated discussions and actions in this area of activity, including initiatives that are not currently directly related to Europeana’s remit of operation including digitisation and digital preservation. There is a definitive need, especially from small and medium institutions, for support in terms of skills, awareness, availability of costs and resources and services in the Cloud, which would cover all aspects from shelf to Europeana. This would help scale up digitisation efforts in Europe, in a way compliant with shared practices and standards.

In 2022 we will focus - within the above mentioned main goals - on the following priority areas.

Community priority areas 

Our priority areas of focus directly align with the Europeana 2021-2025 strategy: 

“Tech is changing all the time. Reflecting its public service role, Europeana will develop and use cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, e-translation and machine learning in line with the European Commission’s Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI.” 

1) From shelf to Europeana: supporting the workflow 

In order to reach the goals specified in the European Digital Public Space proposals, organisations will need to increase their digital output and look at each step of the workflow between shelf and Europeana. We aim to encourage and support cultural heritage institutions - especially small and medium sized ones - at each step by sharing available best practices and Open Source tools. As each institution is different, the particular steps will have to be thoroughly adapted to local circumstances, including materials present, budget, the workforce, applicable laws etc. Next to the addition of new datasets to Europeana and opening them up for re- use, this will greatly contribute to the digital skills of the cultural heritage professionals. 

2) AI in relation to Cultural Heritage

The Steering Group will continue to support the community with AI related efforts following the conclusion of AI in Relation to GLAMs task force (future work on this topic will be done under a different name). These will include:

• Forming a EuropeanaTech AI Working Group. This Working Group will provide a space for discussion and expertise to continue the focused growth of AI within digital cultural heritage. 

• Coordinating and sharing knowledge from other AI related groups for instance, AI4Media, AI4LAMs, AI+Museums Network. 

• Starting an inventory on national AI investments across EU27 and exploring the investments made in the Cultural and Creative Industries to highlight its significance. 

3) Multilingual discovery and access 

The Steering Group will investigate actions to enhance the multilingual coverage of vocabularies and to improve cross-vocabulary alignment. We will look at furthering Europeana’s work with relation to full-text, collaborating and sharing knowledge with the EuropeanaTech community and related centres of competence such as Impact. 

4) 3D Content 

The Steering Group will follow up on the efforts from the 3D Task Force in relation to 3D standards, accessibility and interoperability of digital representations through:

• Dialogue with IIIF 3D community, identifying use cases 

• Dialogue with 4CH - centre of competence on 3D in cultural heritage to identify common use cases 

Task forces and working groups 

• The EuropeanaTech Steering Group will organise another open call for task forces from the EuropeanaTech community. However, due to travel uncertainties and to discourage non-essential travel we will require all task forces to coordinate digitally. 
• The Audiovisual Task Force which was tabled for 2020 will resume activities in 2022. It will have a focus on the workflow from shelf to Europeana, including the restoration of material before digitisation. 
• The AI in Relation to GLAMs Task Force finished its activities in 2021. The steering group intends to follow up on the results by: publishing the datasets and other results of the winners of the open call for AI datasets; establishing a formal AI in Cultural Heritage Working Group. 
• The EuropeanaTech IIIF working group will continue to support the uptake of IIIF in the EuropeanaTech and Aggregator communities by exploring one off webinars and look to produce documents and other outputs that will help the community implement IIIF 
• The Data Quality Committee will continue its work among others on normalisation of metadata and detection of problem patterns 
• The Steering Group is considering starting a Task Force or Working Group on the use of Linked Open Data, especially Wikidata, in cultural heritage 
• The Steering Group is considering starting a Task Force or Working Group on updating the FLOSS-service directory 

Community outreach and communications

• EuropeanaTech will continue contributing new posts to Europeana Pro. 
• More issues of EuropeanaTech Insight will be published in 2022. 
• EuropeanaTech will further pursue the task of coordinating Twitter Takeovers to grow engagement on the @EuropeanaTech Twitter account 
• We will organise a series of small webinars in replacement of EuropeanaTech main event/conference in 2022 and will actively contribute to the development of the Europeana Capacity Building Framework 

Other activities

• Collaborating on updating the Europeana Research and Innovation agenda (first published in 2018) with the network in such a way that it could inform the funding calls within Horizon Europe. 
• Discussing with the Climate Action Community how we can work together on, for example, minimizing the carbon footprint of digitisation, processing and dissemination, and making sure climate is always one of our concerns in all projects. 
• Discussing with the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force how we can work together (for example, around access for the visually impaired) and making sure diversity and inclusion aspects are always taken into consideration in all projects. 
• Contributing to the shaping of the Common Data Space for Cultural Heritage. 

Budget break-down*

including reserve list of activities in case there is extra budget by July 2022

*Budget pending final approval