c50 attended the conference at an excellent venue, with lovely home made refreshments. Attendees came from a range of organisations including:  the national, local authority, university and small, volunteer-run, local museums. All parts of Scotland were represented. A great achivement given the weather!

Part of the funding for the conference came from the Europeana Local Project, one of the Europeana Group projects providing content to Europeana. Europeana Local is funded under the eContentplus programme, a multiannual European Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable.

Museums Galleries Scotland provided the logistical support and expertly handled the organisation for the day.

After a warm welcome to the attendees and speakers by Jane Robinson, Head of Museum Development at MGS, the day began with Nick Poole, CEO of Collections Trust giving a Keynote.

Nick’s theme was to highlight Europeana as a network, a cultural heritage research office, and as an away to represent Scottish identity in the wider European environment. He also encouraged participants to take the first step of engaging with Europeana by becoming members of its Council of Content Providers and Aggregators.

After that participants looked at a video (recently shown at a European Commision event). This featured a virtual trip through Europeana highlighting what you can discover there by following the connections between people and events, e.g. Darwin to Wedgwood to Abolition of Slavery. The video can also be viewed on the:

• Europeana website

Next came a couple of presentations on Europeana. The first from Jon Purday, Senior Communications Advisor, Europeana Foundation, on:

• Europeana Strategies

This looked at the: basic facts about Europeana; political vision, Scottish information in the portal (from non-Scottish providers), benefits of providing access to your content, and ended with a focus on users.

The second presentation was from Robina Clayphan, Interoperability Manager, Europeana Foundation, on:

• Metadata and Data Quality

This included a look at the lastest version of the metadata schema, Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE), was explored. This is Dublin Core based ‘application profile’. Next how Europeana is intending to improve the quality of it’s information was looked. Finally the new, RDF based, Europeana Data Model was unveiled.  

Just before lunch there were a series of short presentations from representatives from some Europeana Group projects, each supplying information to Europeana from a diffent area of cultural heritage area:

• Judaica Europeana (Jewish contribution to Europe’s urban history)
• CARARE (Built heritage and the historic environment)
• MIMO (Musical instruments)
• ATHENA (Content from museums)

Each of presentation gave an overview of the project and highlighted the key aspects its work.

After a highly praised ’home made’ lunch Mary Rowlatt, MDR Partners. gave a presentation on:

• Europeana Local

Mary gave an overview of the project which aims to get content into Europeana from local and regional sources. This is not done directly but by ‘sensible’ aggregation, either national or regional.

The last presentation was from Phill Purdy, Collections Trust, who introduced:

• Culture Grid

Phill looked at the why, what and how of using this Collections Trust developed system to ‘connect UK collections’.

The last part of the day was a panel session with some of the speakers and covered questions that arose from the earlier presentations. One theme that emerged was the need for a Scots Gaelic interface for Europeana. Europeana offered to facilitate this with the offer supplying the needed text that would need to be translated by Gaelic speakers. Also a number of participants from volunteer-run museums speculated if they had a role in Europeana. Their engagement was actively sort and encouraged, with the work of the Europeana Local project and the support of Collections Trust, through Culture Grid, being given as the first step.

I think everyone who attended enjoyed a stimulating day with much thought for future work in Scotland.