Europeana. A digital library for the humanities?

digital humanities seminar

Friday 19 June, 10.00 - 12.00am

at the Maison Française d'Oxford

‘Europeana. A digital library for the Humanities?'

Stefan Gradmann, School of Library and Information Science
Humboldt University, Berlin

Abstract. The presentation is concerned with ongoing work for the creation of a semantic layer as part of Europeana V1.0 which is to be launched in November 2010. This semantic data layer currently is in the process of specification and should enable advanced humanities computing operations, including digital hermeneutical heuristics. One of the key issues in this respect is the amount of logic support that would actually be required from a humanities computing perspective. We invite the humanities computing community to contribute to this specification effort in order to make Europeana one of the prime resources for all scholarly work concerned with cultural heritage in the widest sense.

Stefan Gradmann is Professor of Library and Information Science at the Humboldt University in Berlin, with a focus on knowledge management and semantics based operations. His research interests include digital libraries, digital identity management and document lifecycle management. The overall background of his work is an integrated view of the scientific information lifecycle with emphasis on interoperability and open, standards-based methods of modelling this scholarly information continuum - both in technical terms and in an e-science perspective.

Professor Gradmann studied Greek, philosophy and German literature in Paris and Freiburg (Breisgau) and received his Ph.D in Freiburg in 1986 in German Literature Studies. He has worked as scientific librarian at the State and University Library in Hamburg, he was the director of the GBV Library Network, and worked for Pica B.V. in Leiden as product manager and senior consultant. Later he was Deputy Director of the University of Hamburg Regional Computing Centre, the Project Director of the GAP (German Academic Publishing) Project of the German Research Association, and technical co-ordinator of FIGARO. His working languages are German, English, French and Dutch.

Europeana

He is currently heavily involved in building Europeana, the European Digital Library, and more specifically was leading WP2 on technical and semantic interoperability as part of the EDLnet project and currently leads WP 1 (Creating the Europeana Semantic Layer) as part of the Europeana Connect project as well as together with Makx Dekkers and Carlo Meghini leading work in WP3 of EuropeanaV1.0 where his main tasks are the moderation of the core expert group, liaising with external projects related to Europeana and producing the long term recommendations for future work.

Humanities Computing

He was an international advisor for the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and as such has contributed to the report "Our Cultural Commonwealth" (http://www.acls.org/cyber infrastructure/OurCulturalCommonwealth.pdf). Furthermore, he is technical director of the EERQI (European Educational Research Quality Indicators) project funded under FP7 / SSH.

Full programme of this seminar series