The ADS is currently a partner in three major European projects, and all are well on their way. We have passed the midpoints for the three-year Local Content in a Europeana Cloud (LoCloud) project and the four-year Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking (ARIADNE) project. We are also now in year two of our five-year New Scenarios for a Community Involved Archaeology (NEARCH) project. It’s been a lot of hard work for us and for our wonderful partners, but we are starting to see results!
LoCloud is a best practice network which has developed a variety of new and updated metadata mapping and enrichment tools and micro-services, to help small and medium sized heritage organisations make their resources available within Europeana, alongside some of the largest in Europe. Now in its final year, most of the new tools are now complete and in use. Partners and the organisations with which they are working are now using the tools, and some of have already had their collections publishedb in Europeana! Some of the new tools include a metadata mapping interface, and enrichment tools for geolocation, historic place names, controlled vocabularies, and Wikimedia.
One of the services ADS has helped to promote is LoCloud Collections: a lightweight digital
library that allows even the smallest groups to make their resources available online, and be made discoverable within Europeana. LoCloud Collections was developed by our partners the Digital Libraries Team at the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Centre. ADS staff presented workshops on using LoCloud Collections at the ICOMOS 18th General
Assembly in Florence, and most recently at Digital Past 2015 in Swansea. ADS continues to
work to make more of the resources in our own archives discoverable within Europeana, as well as planning upcoming dissemination activities.
To check out the new tools and services here! While some services are still in development, all are free to try, so any thoughts or comments are very welcome! You can also keep in touch with the progress of LoCloud via Twitter @LoCloudProject
ARIADNE is an e-infrastructures project, working to bring together and integrate existing research data infrastructures, so researchers can use the distributed datasets with new technologies, as an integral component of their research. ARIADNE is now at its half-way point, and the partners have been working hard to help realise the ambitiouscourse we set ourselves. As Deputy Coordinators, ADS is involved in all aspects of this work, but
particularly in good practices and dissemination, transnational access, linking archaeological data, and natural language processing.
One of the early outcomes has been the recently launched Visual Media Service. The service was developed by the Visual Computing Lab at ISTICNR in Pisa, to make it easy to publish advanced multimedia content on the web. It is based on the 3D Heritage Online Presenter (3DHOP) also developed by ISTI-CNR, which is a collection of tools and templates for creating multimedia interactive web presentations for cultural heritage objects. The Visual Media Service allows the publication of 3D models, RTI images and high resolution images. Fabrizio Galeazzi, who joined us last year as a Marie Curie post-doctoral fellow, has been working with ADS and ISTI-CNR on the implementation of the 3DHOP as a way of presenting 3D data within ADS archives.
More services, including the ARIADNE portal, which is the main project outcome, will begin to appear over the next year or so. You can keep in touch with the project via Twitter @Ariadne_Network.
NEARCH is an EU Culture project, which will explore different dimensions of public participation and the significance of
archaeological heritage in today’s Europe. It’s still early days for NEARCH, but ADS has already begun its preparatory work for our
involvement in expanding European participation in the digital Day of Archaeology, in developing a mobile app, creating archaeological publications adapted to various audiences, and hosting researchers through mobility grants.
In December, ADS organised the first of three scientific sessions, to be held in conjunction with our plenary meetings. A full account of the York plenary and scientific session is
available here! ADS is also participating in Thinking and creating together: artists in residence. Artists have now been chosen for residencies by Le CentQuatre in Paris and the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, and ADS/Department of Archaeology at York and the Department of Archaeology at Oxford have been paired with an artist from each arts centre to be their ‘archaeological partners’. We are delighted to be working with Nathalie Joffre who will be resident at Le CentQuatre (http://www.nathaliejoffre.com) and Leyla Cárdenas who will be resident at Jan Van Eyck Academie (http://lehila.net). We hope to
host both artists in York soon, and look forward to our collaboration. More information about NEARCH activities can be found here or on Twitter @NearchProject.
