Judaica Europeana Work Groups Objectives and Processes

The work on Judaica Europeana is organized in 5 work packages. Access to produced public deliverables such as virtual exhibitions and newsletters will be provided on this website. The objectives of each work package can be outlined as follows:

Work Package 1: Project management
Leader: European Association for Jewish Culture, London

To effectively manage the project to deliver the solutions developed in the Work Packages on time, to maintain cost and quality in accordance with the requirements of the grant agreement between the Commission and the project consortium
To plan and organise external strategic cooperation activities
To liaise with Europeana
To build informal and formal relationships with other relevant projects and initiatives.

Work Package 2: Content selection, metadata alignment, knowledge management
Leader: Judaica Collection, Goethe University Library, Frankfurt / Main

To provide EUROPEANA with a critical mass of content:

To identify and select for digitization a critical mass of cultural heritage resources that belong to the thematic domain “Jews in European Cities” and are held in the collections of Judaica Europeana Partners
To identify already digitised resources that belong to the same domain
The selection of resources will be made by each Partner according to the jointly agreed guidelines with the aim of providing access to the widest possible range of objects, documents, books and other artefacts on the theme of “Jews in European Cities”.

To align the metadata for this content to the EUROPEANA metadata requirements

To survey the existing metadata schema that are now being applied by the partners for the description of their digitised resources
Define and implement the necessary steps to align these schemas to the Metadata requirements defined for EUROPEANA
To implement the required alignment through the work of experienced indexers

To survey and identify existing controlled vocabularies in the thematic domain area and establish and disseminate them throughout the domain:

To adapt and implement controlled vocabularies (taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies) for advanced indexing and retrieval of the content, and to adapt them to the semantic interoperability requirements defined for EUROPEANA
To test the adequacy of the metadata and semantic interoperability in a pilot knowledge management system that will support the work of a community of practice of scholars and cultural heritage professionals in the thematic domain area

Work Package 3: Digitisation, metadata entry, API and web
Leader: Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris

To put in place the technical tools required for Judaica Europeana tasks and provide support for Partners and Associated Partners. It includes support for:

The digitisation process and issues concerning hardware, software, file formats, design and presentation, storage
Content enrichment facilities through a metadata entry system
Advanced web management facilities based open source CMS and associated DBMS supporting mash-up from the EUROPEANA open API (Application Programming Interface)
Semantic interoperability including the representation of controlled vocabularies in RDF/SKOS
Selection, installation and support for the use of an open source knowledge management package

Work Package 4: Awareness and dissemination
Leader: European Association for Jewish Culture, London

To raise awareness of the project and promote its results
To promote the Judaica content to the different constituencies across Europe and motivate scholars, teachers and students, cultural heritage professionals to turn to Judaica as their primary resource
To promote Judaica Europeana and EUROPEANA to a wider group of public and private content owners and to involve Associate Partners that will contribute additional resources to the project
To ensure synergy between the Judaica Europeana dissemination and EUROPEANA

Work Package 5: Assessment and evaluation
Leader: Amitié, Bologna

To carry out a comprehensive evaluation showing how the addition of the thematic domain content by Judaica leads to an improved practice in the discovery, delivery, integration of cultural heritage resources for multilingual, multicultural use by the different target populations: scholars, cultural heritage professionals, education users, cultural tourists and the general public
To carry out in collaboration with other work packages a process-oriented project evaluation and report on the findings