Digital Agenda

On 19-20 March, at the National Archives of Norway in Oslo, the LoCloud Best Practice Network project was officially launched. The meeting gathered 32 partners from 28 different countries to present, plan and discuss the activities of the project over the next three years. 

Content from small and medium local institutions such as museums, archives and libraries is still underrepresented in the digital European arena. Cloud-based technology could offer an affordable and user-friendly solution for making their content available on-line.

LoCloud aims to develop cloud-based technology and services to help small and medium local institutions to aggregate their digital resources and make them accessible on-line, via Europeana.eu, the European Library, Museum and Archive.

The project will explore the potential of a cloud-based technology infrastructure for aggregating local content. It will also develop a number of micro-services offering geo-location and metadata enrichment, multilingual vocabularies for local history and archaeology, a historical place name gazetteer and a Wikimedia application to handling relevant ‘crowd-sourced’ content.

As a result of the LoCloud’s activities, access to over 4 million items of digital content will be made available through Europeana.

LoCloud relies on a large group of technical partners, content providers, aggregating services and partners with specific expertise which make together a very strong consortium. Gunnar Urtegaard, from National Archives of Norway, project coordinator, underlined during the meetings close: "If we can keep it simple for content providers, keep simple for users and remove all the complexity in-between, then this project has the potential to be a great success."

Contact LoCloud:

Gunnar Urtegaard
gunurt@arkivverket.no

National Archive Norway/Riksarkivet

Box  4013 Ullevål stadion
0806 Oslo

Norway

About LoCloud:

Europeana.eu provides access to the digitized content of Europe's galleries, libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections. It currently includes over 26 million books, photographs, paintings, films, sound recordings and archival resources from more than 2,200 institutions in every European member state.

More information can be found at http://www.europeana.eu/portal/.

LoCloud is one of a suite of projects, funded by the European Commission, to develop Europeana and enhance its contents. It will explore the potential of cloud computing technologies for Europeana, with a focus on small and medium sized institutions. It aims to support them in making their content and metadata available to Europeana.eu. To this purpose a set of services and tools will be developed to help to reduce technical, semantic and skills barriers and to enhance Europeana.

LoCloud aims to build on the achievements of two earlier Best Practice Network projects: CARARE,  in establishing a repository-based aggregator for Archaeological and Architectural heritage; and Europeana Local, in its work with local institutions and their regional and national aggregators, which has resulted in the contribution to date of well over 5 million items to Europeana.

The LoCloud web site will go live at the end of April at: www.locloud.eu.

LoCloud is co-funded by the European Commission's  ICT Policy Support Programme.

The plenary session and 7 of the workshops  will be streamed live on 21 and 22 June 2012.

You can also take part in the discussion in the online forum!

Read more information about the Digital Agenda for Europe and the online forum here!

What is the Digital Agenda?

From the official press release:

“The European Commission launched in March 2010 the Europe 2020 Strategy to exit the crisis and prepare the EU economy for the challenges of the next decade. […]

The Digital Agenda for Europe is one of the seven flagship initiatives of the Europe 2020 Strategy, set out to define the key enabling role that the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) will have to play if Europe wants to succeed in its ambitions for 2020.

The objective of this Agenda is to chart a course to maximise the social and economic potential of ICT, most notably the internet […]. Successful delivery of this Agenda will spur innovation, economic growth and improvements in daily life for both citizens and businesses.”

The Digital Agenda and e-learning

For the purpose of boosting the economy a list of planned actions has been put together, some of which relate directly to e-learning, others influence e-learning indirectly.

Pillar VI is exclusively focussing on enhancing e-skills, but other categories of actions, such as Pillars I (Digital Single Market) and  IV (Very Fast Internet), also contain actions which could have an imapct on the European e-learning market.

One of the actions most relevant to e-learning - Action 68 - calls on member states to mainstream e-learning in national policies. The Commission in turn will raise awareness on the benefits of adopting e-learning, sharing knowledge about results, practices and solutions available in Europe and laying the foundations for future plans.

The elearningeuropa.info community members have gatherred a variety of materials about this topic. Join the elearningeuropa.info community about 'Mainstreaming eLearning in National Policies' to contribute to the discussion.

Access the online forum of the Digital Agenda Assembly online space and post your views.