Antonella Fresa

In recent years Europeana and other digital cultural resources and collections have received large-scale investment from the European Commission and Member States – and some private investment as well – and it is now necessary to move to the exploitation phase.

The return on this investment, which has mostly taken the shape of public funding initiatives, needs to be assessed against the impact delivered to society in terms both of the use of Europeana by the general public, and in terms of its use by economic actors – most particularly the creative industries.

The potential impact of Europeana’s digital cultural assets has not yet been fully realised and needs stronger instruments to support its delivery.

The main issues:

– Increasing the exploitation of the digital cultural content generated through the digitisation campaigns;

– The metadata services are key elements for the content and the Creative Industry; and the new CC0 licences for Europeana content open new opportunities;

– The public domain, which is a tremendously rich resource and offers a great deal of value for society at large, is currently underexploited and there a number of barriers to re-use of this material.

The lecture aims to explore these issues, discuss specific characteristics of Creative Industries sector and propose elements of best practice.

Information about the speaker:

Antonella Fresa is ICT expert, General Manager and Administrator of Promoter, ICT research and innovation company established in Pisa (Italy). She has graduated in Computer Science at the University of Turin. Antonella has been working as a system engineer, manager, researcher, policy advisor for the High Technology Network and free-lance consultant for major ICT and online services. Between 1999 and 2002 she was a Project Officer at the European Commission, between 2002 and 2012 – an advisor of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities. She has more than 15 years of work experience in European cooperation projects and policy development frameworks. She’s currently Technical Coordinator of EC projects of digital content: DCH-RP, EuropeanaPhotography, Linked Heritage, DC-NET ERA-NET, MINERVA series and MICHAEL series. Antonella has been a member of various ICT, cultural heritages organisations and committees. In her free time she enjoys being at countryside and riding a horse.

International conference “Digitisation and photographic memory”