Europeana Space Photo pilot: Innovate your photographic heritage … and your future business! | Fred Truyen's Digital Culture blog

" ... The web and the smartphone have changed photography irrevocably. No need to explain that selfies, instagram, GoPro’s and the sheer ubiquity of the image have completely transformed the place of photography in our lives. It also had a profound effect on professional photography. It is true that classic business models have suffered from this: news photographers now have to compete with thousands of citizens ready to share their smartphone pictures with news outlets, often having the first scoop on events ... But of course the new situation also holds tremendous opportunities. Some of those are currently underexploited. In the EuropeanaSpace Photo pilot, we are zooming in on the fact that currently there is an enormous wealth of photographic heritage from trusted sources available on platforms such as Europeana, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr commonsand the likes, where high digital quality is paired with useful metadata. In theEuropeanaPhotography project, some of the Espace partners contributed to put almost half a million images from early photography on Europeana, all digitized to the highest standards. Not only are these images true to the source, the state-of-the-art digitization means that the maximum information in the analogue source was translated into the digital file. This was demonstrated in the exhibition 'All our Yesterdays', where early photographs from this collection were reprinted in a breathtakingly high quality rendering a dynamic range that was never before available. We can now see these images in a quality hitherto unseen, including by the original photographer. In this way, the past comes to life in a very peculiar way ... But these innovations alone do not necessarily translate into new practices, in new markets, in new revenue streams. The photography pilot aims at innovation in photo agencies, archives, museums and education through reuse of the photographic content available on Europeana and similar open repositories, mixed with copyrighted and user-generated content stemming from modern day photographic practices.  A more durable and radical impact on innovation often comes from the availability of new sources, new raw materials. It is our opinion that the digital cultural heritage now available through sources such as Europeana (with >30 million objects) is such a new source. This is also the conviction of Europeana itself, which wants to stimulate the reuse of the contents it brokers trough Europeana Creative.  The Europeana Space Photography pilot wants to contribute to this effort, as this will lead to a much deeper innovation in the long run: how can users become more proactive in the reuse of digital photographic heritage in Europeana? How can they re-appropriate these contents and the past they represent in their current and future cultural practices? How can this increase in the number of proactive users lead to the emergence of real creative industries that build new business models on top of it? ..."