Seminar Series: Digital Work

Seminar Series: Digital Work

Abstract

The introduction of the European data space for cultural heritage places the cultural and scientific heritage sectors at the doorstep of a catalytic change. It is transitioning from an infrastructural paradigm to an ecosystem one, aiming to enhance the use of the vast accumulated digital resources.

The digital cultural heritage domain in Europe is in a transition period with the launch of DS4SH project at the end of 2022. This new data space has the ambitious task of transforming the delivery and use of digital cultural heritage collections and substantially impacting other sectors, such as tourism, education and creative industries.

Understanding cultural heritage dataspace and arriving at a consensus between technological providers, cultural institutions, and users will require some time. However, what is clear is that the data space introduces a model which departs from the current approach to achieving scale in digital heritage via centralised approaches (aggregation). It will bring more intelligent tools to the digital cultural heritage domain to analyse collections as data.

Data spaces in other domains are more mature in the sense of having clear use cases already defined, and the one on cultural heritage is still to discuss what will be the substantial change for the users from the introduction of the data space.

This presentation will explore the transition from centralised services providing access to federated digital cultural heritage to the de-centralised data space model. It will also discuss the experience of innovation labs in galleries, libraries, archives and museums as an inspiration for deploying data space services.

Milena Dobreva

Milena Dobreva is a Research Leader at the GATE Institute.

In 2006, she was the founding head of the first Digitisation Centre in Bulgaria. From 2008 to 2011, she worked at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, where she had principal investigator roles in research and development projects funded by the EC, JISC, the European Digital Library Foundation, and the Scottish Funding Council. In the period 2012-2017, Milena was a resident Associate Professor in the Media and Knowledge Science Faculty of the University of Malta. In 2017, she joined the University College London, where she led the introduction of four pathways within the MA programme in Library and Information Studies at UCL Qatar.

She is a member of the editorial board of the IFLA Library Journal and currently serves as a Europeana Network Association Board member. Milena is also on the Steering committees of all three major international conferences in digital libraries, ICDL, TPDL and ICADL.