LoCloud is a European program carried on by the cultural portal Europeana. Its goal is to provide cultural local insitutions with cloud-based tools, for helping them to manage their digital collections and to guide them through the process of publishing data within Europeana.
Introduction
As an Associate Project Manager, I was in charge of designing procedures for data production and publishing, dedicated to both the Archives Départementales and its local partners. As I had to perfectly understand and perform these very procedures, I have communicated regularly with IT engineers and support services, in order to solve issues or help me with understanding specific parameters. I was also in contact with several european teams embedded in the project, regarding our participation in designing the LoCloud Final User Survey.
Along these tasks, I guided our local partners to curate and then translate their collection within qualified data, in order to import it in the LoCloud Services Suite. The first results are the creation of online digital collections, based on LoCloud Collections services. These collections allow the partners to consider Digital Asset Management with a fresh eye, while giving them the tools to expose their content for the public. And ultimately, their data can be published in Europeana accordingly to mandatory standards, thanks to the OAI repository functionality of LoCloud Collections.
Deliverables
Content writing, Translation & Communication
In addition to an English only communication with the European partners of the project, I produced articles in French for my employer :
Article presenting the LoCloud contest (translated from the original English version)
I performed a public talk where I presented the whole LoCloud program, its general goal towards cultural heritage, and the dedicated set of tools which would be used all along the project.
Digital Asset Management
I have provided all of the involved French institutions with extensive tutorials which were highlighting guidelines and processes for preparing, indexing, importing, transforming and finally publishing content and data into Europeana. Most of the partners were only using the Omeka CMS and its OAI-PMH repository built-in functionnality, from which the LoCloud Collection services is powered.
The partners and their online collections :
Conservatoire de l'Estuaire de la Gironde, Blaye
In Video Veritas, St-Macaire
Musée des Douanes, Bordeaux
Pôle de la Mémoire Locale du Bourgeais, Bourg
Société Archéologique de Bordeaux, Bordeaux
Conservatoire de l'Estuaire de la Gironde, Blaye
In Video Veritas, St-Macaire
Musée des Douanes, Bordeaux
Pôle de la Mémoire Locale du Bourgeais, Bourg
Société Archéologique de Bordeaux, Bordeaux
A few slides of both presentations and tutorials
Data Publishing
I have set and applied a whole data workflow thanks to the LoCloud services MINT (mappings) and MORE (enrichment and publishing in Europeana) in order to properly normalize, enrich and publish the data provided by these partners.
This workflow was eventually adapted in order to comply with the Archives Départementales de la Gironde requirements, whose data is exposed through an OAI repository. The final mappings and procedures now allow the institution to initate a process of publishing more than 450k documents and 2M of pictures in Europeana.
You can find an example of search results from the LoCloud project, HERE.
