The Europeana ecosystem builds on a network of national, thematic and domain aggregators enabling cultural heritage institutions to share their content with Europeana and open it up to new audiences. Photoconsortium is since many years Europeana accredited aggregator in the domain of photographic heritage.

Europeana accredited aggregators meet twice a year in the Europeana Aggregators Forum – EAF, and the next event is taking place online on 20-21 May 2021 (invite only). The programme is rather dense with different sessions and topics for Aggregators to work on.

On day one (20 May), we will start at 13:00 with the EAF General Assembly, where we will announce the results of the current Steering Group elections, and we will also approve the accreditation of the new aggregators that submitted their candidacy to enter the EAF.

The second item on the agenda for day one is about the EU recovery funds, put in place to help repair the economic and social damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic. We will have a presentation from Harry Verwayen, the Europeana Foundation General Director, followed by a brainstorming session in breakout groups. Afterwards, we will have an update on what the Aggregators’ User Group has worked on since the end of last year, and we will get some information about the ongoing product development work at the Europeana Foundation.

Before the end of the day, we will have a short update from Julia Fallon, Community and Partner Engagement Manager at Europeana Foundation, on the work on a “community pact” for the whole Europeana Initiative, followed by an open-mic session. We will conclude the first day with an online social event.

On day two, from 9,45 to 13,00, there will be a capacity building session, focused on AI and metadata quality enrichment and multiilingual strategies. The session will present AI-powered tools and services that have been recently tested by aggregators and that other aggregators can also possibly reuse to improve metadata quality and foster multilinguality. It is a showcase of concrete use cases applicable also in content providers and aggregators workflows.

Confirmed presentations planned to-date:

• SAGE: a semantic enrichment and validation tool for EDM records (NTUA)
• JStory: an AI-assisted storytelling platform for Europeana (JHN)
• MateSub: automatic multilingual subtitling platform for Europeana (Translated)
• EnrichEuropeana+: Handwritten Text Recognition platform to automate transcription in Europeana (AIT)
• Machine translation and validation tool for EDM records (Pangeanic)