In April of 2013, the OpenUp! project successfully concluded its second year, and for that occasion, we organized the 2nd Annual meeting in Prague.
The meeting was held at the National Museum, Prague, Czech Republic from Wednesday, April 24th through Friday, April 26th. For the main venue, we chose the New Building of the National Museum, which previously housed Radio Free Europe, before that, the communist parliament, and was built in the early 20th century as a stock exchange. More than fifty participants from Europe and the USA gathered to participate in the meeting.
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| Group photo |
The first day of the conference started with the Steering Committee meeting, where administrative tasks were addressed and resolved. In the afternoon, two parallel sessions were conducted - Technology Management Group meeting followed by Content Providers meeting, and Outreach and Dissemination Group meeting. The first day was concluded by an excellent dinner featuring Czech cuisine at the spectacular Pantheon hall in the Historical building of the National Museum.
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| Katja Schulz is presenting EoL |
The Project Assembly meeting took place on the second day, bringing interesting overviews of project progress and presentations by several invited speakers. We particularly thank four special guests who were asked to address the conference: Katja Schulz (Encyclopedia of Life, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC), who presented past, present and future visions of the Encyclopedia of Life; Geer Oskam (Europeana) introducing aims, efforts and impact of open data provided by Europeana; William Ulate Rodrigues (Biodiversity Heritage Library, Center for Biodiversity Informatics, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis MO) who spoke on behalf of the Global Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) US/UK and BHL-Europe; and Vishwas Chavan (GBIF Secretariat, Copenhagen), who expressed his views on the changing paradigm in biodiversity data publishing.
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| Jiří Frank is presenting BLE |
After the presentations were over, the OpenUp! Tutorial and Outreach workshop took place being moderated by Jiří Frank (National Museum, Prague, Czech Republic) and Boris Jacob (MRAC, Belgium). During the event, the possibilities and benefits of becoming a content provider were stressed. Important information on providing content to Europeana through OpenUp! was presented, and the role of the Helpdesk was highlighted. Later in the afternoon, a short meeting of the ODG took place again, mainly discussing a new outreach strategy and usage of different dissemination approaches.
On the final day of the conference, the Review meeting by EU Evaluation Panel & Steering Committee took place. The reviewers had no major points of criticism and only a few recommendations, which we will implement during the project's final year.
Presentations given during the conference, as well as abstracts, more photos and other information concerning the event will soon be available at our project website, stay tuned!
