ICT PSP, Best Practice Network, 2.2 EUROPEAN DIGITAL LIBRARY AGGREGATING DIGITAL CONTENT IN Europeana, started: 01/07/2010, duration: 36 months

The richness and value of the European performing arts heritage is unquestionable. Even though these collections are now being digitized and published online, they remain scattered, and coordination is lacking between digital libraries and the performing arts field; however, there is a high demand for access to this content. The European Collected Library of Artistic Performance (ECLAP) fills this gap by creating a considerable, and hitherto missing, online archive for all the performing arts in Europe, and providing solutions and tools to help performing arts institutions to enter the digital Europe by building a network of important European performing arts institutions and archives and publishing content collections on Europeana, the European Digital Library (http://www.europeana.org ).

ECLAP is creating a best practice network, making use of advanced database and delivery tools for the production and dissemination of the rich multilingual European heritage. This will result in cultural enrichment and promotion of European culture, and in improvements in learning and research in the field of performing arts.

The major objectives of ECLAP are to:

• Bring together Europe's most relevant performing arts content, content never before accessible via the Internet, coming from major institutions; performing art material coming from theatre, dance, music, cinema and film, …: representing performances, lessons, master classes, teaching material, etc., in the forms of videos, audio, documents, images, animations, playlists, annotations, interactive content, etc.; available through ECLAP portal and published on Europeana;
• Create a stable and open best practice network of European performing art institutions, to help them to exploit digital content and to talk about new technologies and tools;
• Providing solutions and services to major performing arts institutions such as: content ingestion, metadata enrichment, content distribution, content aggregation into Europeana, IPR management, content channel visibility, play lists, annotations, multilingual semantic/fuzzy search queries, partner/colleague search, ...;
• Provide solutions and services for a variety of users: teachers, students, performers, researchers, and performing arts lovers for edutainment, infotainment and entertainment.

The ECLAP solution is establishing facilities to provide Best Practice Network users and partners many functionalities. Notably through ECLAP, users are able to:

• Search, retrieve and play extensive high quality multilingual content;
• Enrich and contextualize content;
• Upload and share multilingual content;
• Comment, annotate, rate and vote on content;
• Register and network with others;
• Create discussion groups;
• Upload digital resources for professional and User Generated Content;
• Use tools to solve IPR issues;
• Access all content via different devices such as PCs, tablets and smartphones

The technical infrastructure is based on the well-tested components such as: the open source AXMEDIS platform, open standards as XML, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL and SKOS. Web Services API's allow third parties and applications to access the ECLAP services. Partners also active in the Europeana V1.0 project establish full integration with Europeana.

ECLAP is also establishing a set of best practice guidelines covering performing art key areas, such as metadata and content modelling, mapping metadata standards, semantic enrichment, IPR management tools, business models, ingestion and integration of end-user contributions, education and leisure tools, digital libraries tools. To this end, ECLAP work is going to organize international workshops, conferences, via a number of working groups. The ECLAP also supports clustering between several projects identified by the European Commission: ECLAP will place at their disposal all solutions and analyses performed, as well as procedures for transcoding metadata and content, and all the experience and codes to replicate ECLAP solutions. ECLAP is co-funded by the European Union ICT Policy Support Programme as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme, Theme CIP-ICT-PSP.2009.2.2, Grant Agreement N° 250481.

All interested institutions and stakeholders are invited to register, to use and to be an active part of the ECLAP programme and collaboration framework. If you have any questions or would like to find out more about ECLAP tools and services, please contact info@eclap.eu  or visit our website at http://www.eclap.eu/.

ECLAP Partners

The ECLAP Consortium brings together European leading national performing arts institutions, universities and research institutes. The following partners from thirteen countries combine their expertise and scientific minds to achieve the ECLAP goals:

• DSI, Department of Systems and Informatics, University of Florence, Italy, (coordinator)
• AXMEDIATECH, Axmediatech Srl, Italy
• Beeld en Geluid, (Sound & Vision) , Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision,  The Netherlands
• CTFR, Dario Fo & Franca Rame Archive, Italy
• ESMAE-IPP, Escola Superior de Música e das Artes do Espectáculo do Porto, Portugal
• FIFF, Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil, France
• FRD, Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale, Italy
• IKP, The Institute of Polish Culture University of Warsaw, Poland
• ITB, Museu de les Arts Escèniques Institut del Teatre de Barcelona, Spain
• BELLONE, La Bellone, House of Performing Arts, Belgium
• MUZEUM, Ljubljana, Slovenia
• NTUA, National Technical University, of Athens, Greece
• ODIN Theatret, Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, Denmark
• OSZMI, Hungarian Theatre Institute, Hungary
• TWM, Institut Theaterwissenschaft, Ludwig Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany
• UCAM, Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK
• UCLM, Universidad de Castilla La Mancha,Spain
• UG, History of Art Department at the University of Glasgow, UK
• UNIROMA, Centro Teatro Ateneo, Department of Performing Arts, University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy,
• UVA, Department of Theatre Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

ECLAP is working to:

• Preparing performing art content items, collections, of never posted content on Europeana and items never accessible to public via online;
• Post enriched content on Europeana with semantically compliant with the standard of Europeana;
• Performing Networking among the most relevant European performing art institutions. The Working groups activities and the general WP and duties will be performed with the support of a set of WGs, international workshops, conferences. The ECLAP PBN is going to produce a set of bet practice guidelines with the support of the following WGs:
• Working group (A) on Theatrical Education and Training
• Working group (B) on Intellectual Property and business models for content
• Working group (C) on Best Practices Tools for performing art digital libraries and education
• Address aggregation of existing digital cultural content to make it searchable and accessible through Europeana, e.g. through:
  • adaptation of content;
  • application of metadata improvements and mappings;
  • improvement in interoperability between the content management systems of the individual content providers and Europeana;
• Disseminate and promote activities performed in ECLAP and its related benefits for the performing art institutions, including the access to wider collection via Europeana and ECLAP Services. This activity will be performed via a set of event, dissemination material, documents, web portal, promotion to conferences, publication on journals, etc.;
• Produce an exploitation plan for ECLAP to make possible the transformation of ECLAP project in an Association that will become self sustainable after the completion of the ECLAP project with the aim of supporting performing art institution in collecting, enriching content for education and entertainment and for posting it on Europeana. The Integrated activity of ECLAP and Europeana have a great value for performing art institutions.

Coordinator: Paolo Nesi
TEL: +39-055-4796523, 567
FAX: +39-055-4796363, +39-055-4796469
Email: nesi@dsi.unifi.it
www: http://www.disit.dsi.unifi.it
University of Florence, Department of Systems and Informatics, DSI
DISIT-Lab, Distributed Systems and Internet Technologies
Via S. Marta 3, 50139, Firenze, Italy

• ECLAP Best Practice Network
• ECLAP Private page