Project Workplan
Year 1
During Year 1, the partners attended a kick-off meeting in London to ensure that a common vision, a clear overall view of objectives, an understanding of general and individual needs and constraints was established and a well-defined implementation plan are established and shared.
This was followed by the compilation of an agreed checklist of skills and competences needed by staff of local institutions (or of competence centres used by other institutions) in order to create digital libraries of cultural content in areas such as:
- Good practice in digitisation and content creation
- Management of metadata and vocabularies (using Europeana standards)
- Collection development, description and management
- Selection and prioritization of digital content
- Infrastructures for enabling metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH)
- Management and expression of content rights
- Developing new services
- Handling user generated content
The checklist was then used as a basis for a skills audit of local cultural institutions in Greece, Serbia and Turkey, also drawing on existing information.
The results of the skills audit were then be used as a basis for prioritising and developing a suite of training knowledge-transfer and support resources designed to address the needs and deficiencies in current skills identified drawing upon existing resources created for use in Europeana-related projects and elsewhere.
These resources were developed initially for the purpose of a trainer workshop to be held in Greece during February 2010. Trainers from Greece, Serbia and Turkey participated in this workshop, led by the PSNC, the Polish partner. The training workshops themselves are designed to establish a corpus of expertise for at least one centre of competence in each country and participants have been selected by the co-organising partner in each country with that end in view, taking into account any relevant emerging digitization strategies and initiatives and ensuring representation of expertise from different kinds of cultural institutions (e.g. museums).
The enhanced group created by this training will then, working in co-operation with the whole group of partners, develop, translate and test an adapted version of the training and support resources which can be used at local level in institutions seeking to create and share digital cultural content. These resources will mainly be in electronic format and suitable to support a distance learning programme. They will be made available in a variety and combination of formats as necessary: e.g. as e-Learning and FAQ via a national language website, utilising Web 2.0 modalities such as podcasting and forums or in distributable media such as DVD or print.
The experts trained at the training workshop will act as an ongoing resource and online reference point for colleagues in the cultural sector. The availability of the service and resources and the goals of AccessIT will form the basis of Induction conferences in Greece, Serbia and Turkey, to which national and regional policy makers, managers of cultural institutions and senior technical practitioners from the cultural sector will be invited. The conferences will be used as an additional mechanism to ensure that the centres of competence are embodied in national thinking and planning and to establish a basis for sustainability planning. A study tour to observe developments in Poland will be organised for a representative group as a means to support this end.
Year 2
During the Year 2 of the project, trainees will be invited to register for a certificated online training course requiring approximately 40 learning hours to complete over a period of up to 6 months. As a result of this course participants will be enabled to identify and create digitised content and its associated metadata sufficient to comply with the standards required to contribute content to Europeana.
During the final six months of the project, co-organisers and centre of competence in Greece, Serbia and Turkey, supported and advised by the Polish and UK partners, will establish a firm basis for the creation of a digital library of locally-sourced digital cultural content in Greece, Serbia and Turkey. The co-organiser in each country will take responsibility for ensuring that the aggregation of content metadata created remains sustainable post-project in collaboration with any other major national initiatives.
The content will be made available for testing and inclusion in the main Europeana service. A separate local user interface to the content will be created where necessary for example where there is suitable cultural portal to which it could be contributed in the country.
The results this work will be described and packaged on the web as model for re-use in other countries as required. It is envisaged that this approach could be successfully targeted to wider group of countries which are (Croatia, FYROM) and may become eligible (Albania, BiH, Montenegro) for participation in Culture 2007-13 in future and which have important content to contribute to a Europeana service expanded to cover the culture and history of the whole of Europe.