boosting cultural heritage online

Digital Agenda: Reflection Group on digitisation seeks views
on boosting cultural heritage online.

Excerpt from website...

The European Commission's Reflection Group ("Comité des Sages")
on digitisation launched today a consultation on how best to foster
the online presence of cultural heritage. As Europe's creative and
cultural sectors undergo a revolutionary transition, innovative
solutions are needed to keep up with technological advances and
reap their full benefits. The Commission has asked the
Reflection Group to look at how best to speed up the digitisation,
online accessibility and preservation of cultural works across Europe.
Contributions to this consultation will feed into the recommendations
the Group will make before the end of the year (see IP/10/456).
The consultation will run until 30 September 2010. ...

preserving Europe's digital data for future generations

ICT research: preserving Europe's digital data for future generations

Excerpt from the website...

Tools developed using EU funds to ensure that digitally stored data
can be preserved, accessed and understood for the indefinite future
are now available in the form of open source software.
The EU's CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for
Preservation, Access and Retrieval) research programme involved
researchers from the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Israel, Italy
and the UK. This work complements initiatives such as Europeana,
the European digital library (see MEMO/10/166). The EU has
contributed € 8.8 million of the €15 million total cost of the project
under the European Commission's research funding programme
(Sixth Framework Programme 2001-2006). Until now large
volumes of electronic data such as official records, museum archives
and scientific results have been unreadable or at risk of loss because
newer technologies could not read it or allow current users to
understand it. Application of ICT research to benefit Europe's citizens
and businesses is a key element of the Digital Agenda for Europe adopted
by the Commission in May 2010
(see IP/10/581, MEMO/10/199 and MEMO/10/200)....

Web Initiatives Librarian

Interesting job in Canada, Web Initiatives Librarian at
Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada)

UCLA Symposium: Reimagining the Archive

International Symposium at UCLA on November 12-14, 2010
Reimagining the Archive: Remapping and Remixing Traditional Models
in the Digital Era. Bringing together top media and information industry
professionals,archivists, and media/archival scholars, the event will
explore what it means to archive in the digital future. Broadly organized
around the themes of *transition*,*navigation*, and *curation*, the
event will consider the consequences of digital technologies for all
aspects of media and archival scholarship, cultural production,
and cultural heritage.

Please find further information on the website:

Audiovisual Archives in the 21st Century

This conference will take place in Ghent, on Wednesday 13 and Thursday 14 October 2010 in the frame of the International Film Festival of Ghent.
The detailed description of the event can be found here, together with all information regarding registration, meeting venue and background information.
The registration will close on 20 September. As room is limited, please register early to avoid disappointment.

Europeana Open Culture Conference

From the conference website...

14-15 Oct 2010 | Amsterdam

Europeana Open Culture 2010 conference will focus
on how museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual
collections can create public value by making digital,
cultural and scientific information openly available.

Europeana invites cultural institutions, information
professionals, application developers and technology
researchers to explore the risks and rewards of
openness - of code, data and content - and work together
towards Open Culture.

The Europeana conference is a free annual event which
highlights current challenges for our sector and looks for
practical solutions for the future. It connects the main actors
in cultural and scientific heritage in order to build networks
and establish future collaborations.

Film, History and WWII

Going to war, 1939-45: Film, history and the Second World War

22-23 October 2010

From the IHR website...
"The Second World War remains the most filmed historical
phenomenon of modern times. Neither cinemagoers nor film
producers seem to tire of epic battles at sea, on land and in the
air, heroic POW adventures, and dramas set on the Home Front.
The world at war at mid-century is a defining moment in our
modernity, and film has become one of the main media through
which we locate ourselves in relation to the recent past.
But the Second World War was also the heyday of cinemagoing in
societies throughout Europe and North America, and the war itself
brought about major changes in the technologies and uses of film,
from the amateur camera to the official government newsreel and short.
So the role of film in war needs to sit alongside our understanding of the
representation of war in film. With this aim in mind the latest
IHR Winter Conference has assembled a distinguished cast of film directors
and film historians to discuss, debate and view the war on screen."

The full conference programme is available here.