Europeana eNews

Europeana eNews: Public Domain Mark, Reading Europe and More...

 

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Dear Reader, welcome to the November newsletter. Europeana eNews is published 6 times a year. It brings you stories about Europe's cultural and scientific heritage as well as updates on the organisations and technical developments that build and enhance the Europeana.eu portal.     Exploration and Discovery on Europeana     [W]e are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity but I do not think I can write more. For God's sake look after our people. Signed by Robert Falcon Scott, this was the last diary entry of the famous British explorer, who led the expedition to the South Pole one hundred years ago. Read More...     Reading Europe: 1,000 Books Online eLearning Awards 2010 News Agencies Open Photo Archives         Early editions of literary masterpieces, 18th century bestsellers and a 250-year-old travel guide are among the nearly 1,000 books available to explore in the new Reading Europe exhibition. Browse through the exhibition created by The European Library, and visit Europeana to discover more items related to each book. Read More...   Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Rembrandt van Rijn. They are all people who - in different times, places and ways - made history. They are also the ones, along with a range of other key historical figures, that Irish school students have blogged about winning a Europeana-sponsored eLearning Award for excellent use of technology in education. Read More...   From film premiers to presidential visits, news agency photographers have witnessed and recorded a vast number of key moments in Europe's modern history. Much of their work is locked away in news agency archives but a new project is now beginning a quest to make more of these images accessible to the public via Europeana. Read More...     Exploration and Discovery on Europeana     Scott's last expedition, Courtesy of BHL Europe. Blanche-Neige revient, Courtesy of Institut National Audiovisuel.   Available on Europeana, Robert Falcon Scott's published journals unfold the tragic story of the Terra Nova Expedition, officially known as the British Antarctic Expedition 1910. Scott's journey to the South Pole was to advance knowledge and lead to a major scientific breakthrough. Unfortunately, Scott and his crew made it to the Pole to discover that they were beaten by 33 days by a Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen, and to meet their desolate death. The account of Roald Amundsen about his voyage to the South Pole can be also found on Europeana. It tells us a different side of the story: glorious, adventurous and triumphant. Both of these works are in the public domain - the out-of-copyright information that people can freely use without restriction. Soon public domain works will carry a distinctive mark, which enables material not bound with known copyright restrictions to be labelled in a way that clearly communicates that status. The Public Domain Mark, which was developed by Creative Commons, a non-profit organisation that promotes creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, will be attributed to millions of public domain items available on Europeana. This will make finding public domain works easier on Europeana as well as on the Internet in general. In the near future, when you search Europeana for records of other famous explorers, maps and photographs of their legendary quests, or anything else from Europeana's vast collections, you will be able to search within public domain content only. The Public Domain Mark was launched this October at an annual Europeana conference in Amsterdam. Together with the Usage Guide for Public Domain Works that helps users of cultural and scientific content use public domain material responsibly, the Mark will play a crucial role in making public domain works more readily accessible online. A healthy and thriving public domain has always been a vital source for innovation and cultural works, as people reinterpret and experiment with ideas, and find inspiration for new creative work. Without this prolific process, for example, we wouldn't have known Disney's classic Snow White based on the Brothers Grimm's fairytale or enjoyed Verdi's renowned opera Otello inspired by Shakespeare's play. This is why support for the public domain is a fundamental part of Europeana's principle of sharing cultural and scientific heritage and stimulating contemporary reworking of it.     ^ ^ ^ Return to top ^ ^ ^     Reading Europe: 1,000 Books Online     El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha, Courtesy of National Library of Spain. Little Orphan Mary and the Gnomes, Courtesy of Biblioteka Narodowa, The National Library of Poland.   Early editions of literary masterpieces, English bestsellers from the 18th century and a1755 travel guide to Kamchatka in eastern Russia are just a few of the nearly 1,000 books available to explore in the new online exhibition Reading Europe: European Culture Through The Book. Created by The European Library and supported by Europeana, Reading Europe includes works in 31 languages from Bulgarian to Yiddish. It features some of Europe's most celebrated books, such as Dostoyevsky's The Idiot in its original Russian form andPrisoner of Chillon by Lord Byron. These books are notable because of their age and reputation, but also because they sometimes include printing errors and mistakes that were corrected in later editions. This was the case with the first Spanish edition of Don Quixote: "It was carelessly done - typographic, punctuation and foliation errors abound. Accents are missing and, what is worse, parts of the original, such as the passage in which Sancho Panza's donkey is stolen, were not included," explains José Luis Bueren from the National Library of Spain's Department of Digital Library. Reading Europe features more obscure titles as well as famous manuscripts. Jammers Minde is one of those hidden treasures. This fascinating 17th century autobiography of a king's daughter and her 22-year imprisonment in Copenhagen's infamous Blue Tower is a literary classic in Denmark, but almost unknown in the rest of Europe. Curatorial information is included alongside each book in the Reading Europe exhibition. You can learn even more about the books by viewing them in context on Europeana, and comparing them with other material associated with each work. For example: - Compare Don Quixote with engravings of scenes from the book and musical compositions inspired by the writing of Cervantes. - See the manuscripts from Leonardo Da Vinci alongside his paintings and sketches. - Read about Swiss folk hero William Tell, while listening to music inspired by the story. - Explore the works of English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton and then read his letters and other books.     ^ ^ ^ Return to top ^ ^ ^     eLearning Awards 2010     Bildnis Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Courtesy of Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Austria  The Venice Portrait of Shakespeare, Courtesy of VADS.   Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, William Shakespeare, Rembrandt van Rijn. They are all people who - in different times, places and ways - made history. They are also the ones, along with a range of other key historical figures, that Irish school students have blogged about in a project called History Matters which won a Europeana-sponsored eLearning Award for excellent use of technology in education. The students from Pormarnock Community School first learned some basics about representing their findings online. They then searched for a diverse and high quality range of text, images and videos on historical figures they had studied. Finally, the students created blogs with a number of posts and responded to each other's material. Donal O'Mahony, the teacher who developed the History Matters project, described Europeana as a valuable learning resource, for educators and students. "Europeana offers teachers and students the opportunity to source quality digital learning objects that will enhance teaching and learning," he pointed out. "These resources will increase the confidence of the teaching profession in using online material and allow students to represent their knowledge in a format that is meaningful to them within the context of what is required in the 21st century." He added that the History Matters project was not just about studying the past. "It's also about teaching digital responsibility and improving digital literacy. One of the key aspects in this regard is being attentive to the quality of online material, some of which has dubious provenance." The other winner in the Europeana-sponsored category was from Spain. Teacher Marcos Vence Ruibal helped his class to develop a comic book, Pek the traveller flea. Both projects were chosen as winners in the Europe's Digital Heritage category because it was felt they helped to develop and promote digital literacy among young people. Other criteria included the use of digital cultural content, the promotion of a European dimension and the potential of the project for use in collaborative work. The eLearning contest attracted 573 entries from 39 countries, and was run by European Schoolnet, a network of 31 Ministries of Education in Europe. The main goal of the competition is to acknowledge and share innovative ways of teaching and learning based on new technologies. It helps teachers to have their ideas and technical skills recognized. At the same time, it shows a wider audience how information and communication technologies can improve their methodology, enrich work in the classroom and positively impact on children's learning.     ^ ^ ^ Return to top ^ ^ ^     News Agencies Open Photo Archives     John Fitzgerald Kennedy in a restaurant in Rome, 1949, Courtesy of EURO-Photo. Sophia Loren, 1956, Courtesy of EURO-Photo.   From film premiers to presidential visits, news agency photographers have witnessed and recorded a vast number of key moments in Europe's modern history. The result of their work is literally millions of photos, glass plates, negatives and slides that cover a broad range of subjects. Major domestic and political events, celebrity visits, snapshots of daily life, cultural and sporting events are just some of the highlights captured by photographers over the decades. Despite the broad and interesting subject matter of these pictures, most are inaccessible to the general public because they are locked away in journalistic archives. That will change over the coming months, however, when the EURO-Photo project begins contributing images to Europeana. It plans to add 1 million photographs to Europeana, including the digitisation of 150,000 pictures currently in analogue form, between now and 2012. The images will come from 10 leading European news agencies in the countries of Germany, Portugal, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Poland. EURO-Photo's work is important for two key reasons. The publication of the photos on a public portal like Europeana opens up Europe's recent history to citizens, while the digitisation work will help to preserve many of the original photos. "These photos are deteriorating with time because of the chemical processes which relentlessly corrode the photographic emulsion," says Maurizio Lunetta from EURO-Photo. He adds that many of these images have been forgotten, because they are so rarely viewed. "We consider these images today as almost never seen. The intervention of digitisation is therefore necessary to preserve our visual memory. It is a priority."     ^ ^ ^ Return to top ^ ^ ^   Europeana, c/o Koninklijke Bibliotheek, PO Box 90407, 2509 LK, The Hague