Technical, cultural and creative sectors unite

These experts come together as the EuropeanaTech community which comprises operators from the cultural sector, developer and IT architecture communities, and the creative industries. Bringing together these sectors offers a unique opportunity for collaboration on key issues from data modelling, multilingualism, discovery, content re-use and open source development, to Cloud and workable funding models.

The community, which has grown steadily since the first EuropeanaTech conference in 2011 in Austria, and EuropeanaTech 2015 will showcase the developments that have taken place and open up more collaboration and advancement as experts try to predict the future relationship between technology and cultural heritage.

Bill Thompson, Head of Partnerships for BBC Archive Development, said: ‘While museums, galleries and archives will remain important as places to visit and repositories of cultural heritage, online access to digital resources is becoming more and more central to people's engagement with the past, and institutions need to learn how to thrive in this world. Europeana has forged a path towards understanding online cultural heritage, and EuropeanaTech is the place for experts, developers and researchers to meet and share their insights, projects and dreams'.

Key advances, challenges and opportunities in opening up digital cultural heritage will be presented and investigated. These include fueling content re-use by improving data quality, and developing new models of interaction to aid its discovery. The broadcast media, the digital humanities and the museum sectors will all showcase international cooperation on interoperability, exchange and digital library developments, while funding models from the creative industries will be examined, and the potential of Cloud for cultural heritage explored.

The ambition of the conference and the EuropeanaTech community is reflected in the event's keynote speakers, with European and international figures from across the sectors including: Emma Mulqueeny, Founder and CEO of Rewired State & Young Rewired State; Chris Welty, Google Research; Andy Neale, Director of Digital NZ; Dan Cohen, the founding Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA); Seb Chan, Cooper Hewitt and Smithsonian Design Museum; and George Oates, Good, Form & Spectacle.

Emma Mulqueeny, Founder and CEO of Rewired State & Young Rewired State, said: ‘Data, culture and heritage has long been the subject of debate and what intrigues me is how all this real and sacred "stuff" will find its place in the digital renaissance. I wonder how will people want to experience it, and whether it can be re-energised, new discoveries made, voices found, secrets unlocked. At the Europeana conference in Paris I will be introducing the concept of 97ers, those born in 1997 or after, the social digital consumers, with their very different attitudes to learning, experiencing and sharing; and how the cultural sector could surprise and delight this generation'.

Members of the community, many heavily supported by EU programmes, will present their work and the inaugural EuropeanaTech award will recognise the best technological innovations from the community.

Antoine Isaac, Research &Development Manager at Europeana, said: 'EuropeanaTech is the place where all our community meets. We're going to share our experience as innovators and practitioners, and marvel at the most promising stuff we're working on. We're also going to look hard at our collective challenges - thinking together about where our priorities must be and how we should address them. The programme is packed with inspirational talks that represent the richness of what's happening in the field and offers opportunities for some great alchemy at people level too'.

ENDS

Europeana
Europeana is Europe's digital platform for cultural heritage, which collects and provides online access to tens of millions of digitised items from libraries, archives, audio-visual collections and museums across Europe. We are a network, representing more than 2,500 cultural heritage organisations and a thousand individuals from these and other walks of life including the creative and technical sectors, passionate about bringing Europe's vast wealth of cultural heritage to the world. http://www.europeana.eu/

Notes for editors

EuropeanTech 2015
EuropeanaTech 2015 is aimed at Europe's community of creative innovators in the heritage domain, ranging from staff contributing to institutional strategy, R&D software developers, academic researchers, and managers of future oriented projects. The conference brings the international network of technical specialists from memory organisations, research institutions and creative industries together to network and share progress. EuropeanaTech 2015 will showcase the most recent technological developments and innovations in the context of cultural heritage, and explore current technical challenges around digitisation and re-use of cultural content, highlight new developments and provide a space to establish future collaborations. http://www.europeanatech2015.eu/

Contact: Eleanor.kenny@europeana.eu; Imogen.greenhalgh@europeana.eu