Last week the OpenUp! project successfully reached its second year and on that occasion we organized the 2nd Annual meeting in Prague.
The meeting was held at the National Museum , Prague, Czech Republic from Wednesday (April 24) to Friday (April 26). The New Building, formerly Radio Free Europe, was chosen as the main venue. More than 50 participants from Europe and also the USA gathered together to participate at the meeting.
The first day of the conference started with the Steering Committee meeting. In the afternoon, two parallel sessions were conducted - Technology Management Group meeting followed by Content Providers meeting, and Outreach and Dissemination Group meeting. First day was concluded by an excellent dinner representing the Czech cousine at the spectacular Pantheon of National Museum Historical building.
Project Assembly meeting took place on the second day bringing interesting overview of the project progress and also presentations of several invited speakers. We would like to highlight especially four special guests who were invited to give their speeches. They were 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 talked on behalf of the Global BiodiversityHeritage Library (BHL) US/UK and BHL-Europe and finally Vishwas Chavan (GBIF secretary, Copenhagen), who expressed his views on the changing paradigm in biodiversity data publishing.
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, first the benefits and possibilities of becoming new content providers were stressed. Also, important information on providing content to Europeana through the OpenUp! were given 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.
Presentations given during the conference, as well as abstracts, more photos and other information concerning the event will soon be available here, stay tuned!
