London, 28th & 29th January 2009
MILE’s latest conference, in association with Bridgeman Art Library, Collections Trust and Electric Lane, ran for a day and a half as speakers debated and demonstrated ways to reach a unified approach to industry working practices. Nick Poole, keynote speaker and CEO of the Collections’ Trust, set the day’s tone by arguing the case that applying commercial approaches to your heritage collection needn’t sacrifice its cultural integrity.
“We can use public investment to create a commercial product which promotes the sustainability of our industry, but only if we do our job properly, use sensible standards and care about copyright & licensing...”
Nick Poole, Collections Trust
Mike Stapleton, director of System Simulation and one of MILE’s partners, presented perfectly-pitched musings on metadata, ending with a tantalising glimpse of another project, FABRIC, run in conjunction with Liberty’s and the V&A Museum. After Niamh Brennan and Garret McMahon of Trinity College Dublin delivered a message of hope and positivity for mapping data across schemas, Robina Clayphan, Europeana’s metadata expert, stipulated the importance of aggregating content for contribution to Europeana’s network. This was put to the test in the afternoon workshop, led by Sarah Saunders, during which delegates mapped fields across the most popular standards – CDWA Lite, IPTC Core and Extended versions, VRA Core and Dublin Core. Sarah prepared the ground with a basic breakdown of these standards, their strengths, weaknesses, and relevance for particular types of collection.
The workshop results will be published on MILE’s website, where you can also read the day’s presentations:
MILE - 'A Picture's Worth a Thousand Euros' - MILE needs your input to define an ultimate set of core fields for use across all industry sectors.
Register now for MILE’s next conferences! Contact lucy.geering@bridgemanart.co.uk
• ‘Word and Image’ – Friday 3rd April 2009 at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
• ‘Know your Rights’ – Wednesday 3rd June 2009 at Hotel Maritim, Dresden, Germany
‘A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words Euros’ Conference
Speakers:
• Harriet Bridgeman, Chairman, The Bridgeman Art Library
• Niamh Brennan, Programme Manager for Research Information Systems & Services, Trinity College Library Dublin
• Dr Richard Butterworth, Senior Cataloguer / Metadata Researcher, Project SILVER
• Robina Clayphan, Interoperability Manager, Europeana
• Stella Dextre Clarke, Senior Metadata Consultant, SILVER
• Abbie Enock, Managing Director, Capture
• Garret McMahon, Institutional Repository Content Manager, Trinity College Dublin
• Nick Poole, CEO, Collections’ Trust
• Sarah Saunders, Director, Electric Lane
• Mike Stapleton, Director, System Simulation
• Jessica Tier, Project Manager, The MILE Project
• Dr. Chris Town, Co-Founder and President of Technology, IMENSE
• Alec Turner, Software Engineer, System Simulation
What is MILE?
MILE (Metadata Image Library Exploitation) aims to promote European cultural heritage and make digital art more accessible by improving metadata.
Image libraries are treasurers of a vast wealth of Europe's cultural heritage. In the rush to digitise their archives of reprographic transparencies of original works of art. to keep up with increasing technological trends, the systems used to create the metadata supporting these images have struggled to sustain such demand.
MILE is coordinated by The Bridgeman Art Library