PACKED EXPERTISECENTRUM DIGITAAL ERFGOED VZW

Profile of the organisation

As a centre of expertise in digital heritage supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Flemish Community, PACKED plays a central role in Flanders and Brussels in centring the development of expertise in digitisation, digital archiving and access, and in spreading the acquired expertise. It aims at improving and safeguarding the quality and efficiency of actions with regard to digitisation, digital archiving, access to and re-use of digital material within the broader field of cultural heritage. PACKED is one of the founders and core members of the Platform ‘Duurzame Digitale Toegankelijkheid – Vlaanderen’ (Sustainable Digital Access – Flanders), a platform advocating sustainable access to digital collections. See http://www.packed.be for more information.

Relevant previous experience in the domain:

–          ATHENA – Access to Cultural Heritage Networks across Europe (2009-2011, co-WP leader on IPR);

–          Linked Heritage – Coordination of Standards and Technologies for the Enrichment of Europeana (2011-2013, partner and member of IPR task force);

–          DCA – Digitising Contemporary Art, a digitisation project of nearly 30.000 artworks created after 1945 to be submitted to Europeana (2011-2013, project coordinator and WPleader on partner network) – see http://www.dca-project.eu;

–          CEST (Cultureel Erfgoed Standaarden Toolbox), creation of a toolbox of standards for digitisation, digital archiving and interoperability, available at http://www.projectcest.be (ongoing);

–          AthenaPlus, co-WPleader on Creative applications for the re-use of cultural content (ongoing);

–          Open Cultuur Data België, coordination of a network for the support of publishing cultural heritage collections as open data, raising awareness about the topic and creating creative applications based on the open cultural data (ongoing) – see http://opencultuurdata.be

Role in the project

PACKED vzw is co-WPleader of the work package on intellectual property rights (WP3, together with Exeter University). In the WP3 PACKED is also in charge of subtasks on the rights labelling of content, the organisation of a workshop, and a survey on re-usable content in Europeana.

In WP5 (Valorisation and exploitation in the creative industries) PACKED takes the lead of the task on best practice and demonstration of innovative access to content for education. PACKED will also assist KULeuven in the organisation of a hackathon event in the framework of the project’s dissemination strategy.

 

Key personnel

Rony Vissers is the executive director of PACKED, and project leader of the DCA project. His previous professional experience ranges from collection manager at argos – centre for art and media (Brussels) to being a creator, producer and distributor of various media art projects. He also worked as a curator of film, video and music at the art centre STUC (Leuven). He holds master‘s degrees in information and library science, library and documentation science and communication sciences.

Barbara Dierickx is actively involved in the projects listed above. On the Flemish level she is also involved in a project which aims at making available digital content of cultural heritage organisations in a controlled environment, for re-use of the material in education/classrooms. Barbara holds master’s degrees in Cultural and Communication sciences.

Joris Janssens is in charge of the technical side of PACKED-projects. Current projects are e.g. the set up and implementation of custom Collective Access systems, development of websites and web applications (e.g. for metadata management) and set up of a web service for the creation of persistent identifiers. In the past he worked for the HOPE project where he co-authored the HOPE data model and developed best practices for digitising and preserving digital collections. Joris holds master’s degrees in Philosophy and Information and Library Sciences and is obtaining a bachelor degree in Computer Science.