Testing testing… 1, 2, 3…

-EB

Mail-Art Artist David Wilson

Oakland-based artist David Wilson uses Northern California’s terrain as both his subject and his medium. The entire nation, in fact, becomes his medium for his foray into mail art, passing works among different artists who collaborate with an unwitting United States Postal Service to create pieces.

 

Persona: Museum Conceptual Map

ConceptualMap

Individual Artist Proposal for heirarchical structure

Here is the revised B Team hierarchy map.

Historypin

Screenshot of http://www.historypin.com/

We briefly mentioned Historypin in class a few weeks ago, and I just noticed that they have a collaboration going on with Europeana!

Europeana 1989: We Made History
“The way history is recorded isn’t just about what museums and institutions think is important, it’s about what real people lived through and experienced. Do you have stories, pictures, films or other items relating to the events of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe? Add them to our online collection and share them with the world! Or let us take you on a journey through the Fall of the Iron Curtain, see it from all sides and draw your own conclusions.” — from http://www.europeana1989.eu/en/

Here’s a few images of the various ways to browse the collection:

Map browse view: http://www.europeana1989.eu/en/explore/#!photos/index/#!/geo:50.762829,13.759035/zoom:4/

Gallery of images http://www.europeana1989.eu/en/explore/#!photos/gallery/

“Stories” collection: http://www.europeana1989.eu/en/explore/#!tours/all/

This is definitely one engaging method of encouraging the public to contribute and aggregating the user-created content into a cohesive collection. The Historypin & Europeana collaboration seems to really work here as well — I’ve never contributed any content to Europeana, but I can attest to the ease of contributing content to Historypin. Anything which helps to lower the barrier of entry for the average user, as well as create more access points for people, can only be a good thing for the future of initiatives like Europeana and DPLA.

NYC visual histories (a quick link round-up)

Two blogs worth checking out if you’re at all interested the visual (and cultural) history of New York:

Ephemeral New York: Chronicling an ever-changing city through faded and forgotten artifacts — http://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/

The New York Then and Now feature (https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/new-york-then-and-now/) is particularly interesting to browse.

Vanishing New York: a bitterly nostalgic look at a city in the process of going extinct —
http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/

Wiki Loves Monuments (and cultural heritage in general!)

I think I mentioned this project briefly in class during the grant writing session, but after our discussion on moving forward with DPLA/Europeana and getting the public more involved, I wanted to share more about Wiki Loves Monuments (http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/). This is from the September 2013 photo contest:

In 2012, Wikipedia volunteer communities in 35 countries have joined this initiative, and also in 2013 volunteers are enthusiastically paving the way to make participation easy for others. In nearly 40 countries all over the world, a national contest will be organized with their national monuments, partners, rules, events and winners.

Every national contest will be able to nominate some of their winning pictures for the international contest. These nominated pictures will be judged by the international jury, which will then award extra prizes to the best images from all participating countries.

The contest is inspired by the successful 2010 pilot in the Netherlands, which resulted in 12,500 freely licensed images of monuments that can now be used in Wikipedia and by anybody for any purpose. The 2012 contest in 35 countries resulted in more than 350,000 images submitted by over 15,000 participants, adding to the sum of all human knowledge gathered on Wikipedia. (from http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/contest/)

To help participants contribute, the Wikimedia Foundation created an Android app and another company (MairDumont — I think a German travel/publishing company?) created an app for iPhone. The apps help people new to contributing to Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons by attaching the necessary unique identifier to the photograph when the photos are uploaded, so the new users don’t have to worry about all the little details and are free to simply contribute their photos.

This definitely seems like a potentially useful direction for DPLA and Europeana, if they want to get into user-contributed or -created content. (Of course, I think Wikipedia’s outreach model is particularly good most of the time.)

Do you want to see the winning photo? Of course you do!

The first prize: “a locomotive with a push-pull train crossing the monumental Wiesener Viaduct over the Landwasser river in Graubünden, Switzerland. It represents a nice harmony between monument, human and nature, while the red train draws attention to the middle of the picture. The picture was submitted by David Gubler, who is also active on a Swiss website dedicated to photos of trains” (http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/and-the-winner-is-2/)

And then, the third prize is of a library, so of course I have to share it as well:

3rd prize: University library of Eötvös Loránd University. Photo: Thaler Tamás, CC BY-SA

(Do check out the rest of them if you’re interested. There are so many beautiful images on the winner’s page: http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/and-the-winner-is-2/)

Google Art Project

I wanted to pass along a link to the Google Art Project and Google Cultural Institute, both of which I’ve never heard of before, and they sounds quite familiar (i.e. like Europeana).  They say:

Google has partnered with hundreds of museums, cultural institutions, and archives to host the world’s cultural treasures online.  With a team of dedicated Googlers, we are building tools that allow the cultural sector to display more of its diverse heritage online, making it accessible to all.  Here you can find artworks, landmarks and world heritage sites, as well as digital exhibitions that tell the stories behind the archives of cultural institutions across the globe. 

Has anyone heard more about this?  The Google Art Project looks like both a portal to different art objects, artists, and museums, as well as a social media-esque site where users can create their own collections and galleries and share them.  Can’t seem to find any information on their metadata or back-end at all (which is not surprising, I guess).  I don’t have an opinion on the whole thing yet, but does make it clear just how far reaching Google’s hand is.

Hi All, here are a few articles that might be of use to our project:

Europeana press release: http://e2.ma/message/jvvld/v8prwb

“Chapter 3: Three case studies in linked, open data.” Library Technology Reports 49.5 (2013): 26+. Academic OneFile. Web. 13 Feb. 2014 http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA342676507&v=2.1&u=nysl_me_pml&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&asid=d4c127158a6d6ce38a06ceec7464eff3
Compares Europeana, DPLA and BibFrame

Chern Li Liew, (2014) “Towards dynamic and evolving digital libraries”, Electronic Library, The, Vol. 32 Iss: 1, pp.2 – 16 (via Emerald)
The conceptual framework contains some interesting ways to compare digital libraries.

Eichenlaub, N. (2013). CHECKING IN WITH GOOGLE BOOKS, HATHITRUST, AND THE DPLA. Computers In Libraries, 33(9), 4-9. http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.pratt.edu:2048/login.aspx?direct=true&db=llf&AN=91955494&site=ehost-live

I have PDFs of articles 2, 3 and 4 but couldn’t upload them to this post.