Living Labs

http://www.openlivinglabs.eu

The European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) is the international federation of benchmarked Living Labs in Europe and worldwide. Founded in November 2006 under the auspices of the Finnish European Presidency, the network has grown in ‘waves’ up to this day. To this date, 8 Waves have been launched, resulting in 370 accepted Living Labs. The ENoLL international non-profit association, as the legal representative entity of the network, is headquartered in Brussels, at the heart of Europe.

What is a Living Lab?

A Living Lab is a real-life test and experimentation environment where users and producers co-create innovations. Living Labs have been characterised by the European Commission as Public-Private-People Partnerships (PPPP) for user-driven open innovation. A Living Lab employs four main activities: 

1. Co-Creation: co-design by users and producers 
2. Exploration: discovering emerging usages, behaviours and market opportunities 
3. Experimentation: implementing live scenarios within communities of users 
4. Evaluation: assessment of concepts, products and services according to socio-ergonomic, socio-cognitive and socio-economic criteria.

Future Everything Festival (link)

FutureEverything is an award-winning innovation lab for digital culture and annual festival, established in Manchester in 1995. For almost 20 years FutureEverything has been exploring the meeting point of technology, society and culture which lies at the heart of the digital debate. Through a community network and regular events it makes connections between thinkers, developers, coders, artists, designers, urbanists and policy makers – inspiring them to experiment and to collaborate in new ways.

The FutureEverything festival brings people together to discover, share and experience new ideas for the future. Pioneering the practice of city-wide ‘festival as laboratory’ it combines a large scale cultural event – encompassing art, music and discussion – with new technology, novel research methods and playful social experiments. It has been named by The Guardian as one of the top ten ideas festivals in the world.

Europeana Labs: http://labs.europeana.eu

"This new Europeana Labs website is intended to provide all you need to get started using the Europeana APIs. Learn about the data, see what others have created, and find out how to build simple but powerful queries to extract bespoke results from a dataset of over 30 million objects - books, photos of art and artefacts, audio clips and more.

Last year we consulted with the developer community asking them what things would help them to make best use of the Europeana APIs. This Europeana Labs Beta site is the first major step towards putting in place the things we were told, but also a chance for us to learn more and make improvements before a full launch in late June."

National Library of Wales: projects

From: Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru

NLW Research leads, or is a partner in, a number of collaborative e-Research projects. Current projects include:

• Cymru1914
  Funded by JISC, this is a mass digitization project in collaboration with the special collections and archives of Wales to digitize the hidden sources about the impact of WW1 on all aspects of Welsh life: language, culture, politics, and community.

• Europeana Cloud
  Europeana Cloud is a Best Practice Network, coordinated by The European Library, designed to establish a cloud-based system for Europeana and its aggregators.  Europeana Cloud will provide new content, new metadata, a new linked storage system, new tools and services for researchers and a new platform - Europeana Research

• Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH)
  European Science Foundation Research Networking Programme documenting and classifying the practice of digital humanities across Europe. NeDiMAH builds on the AHRC ICT Methods Network to document how academic researchers engage with digital content, and the emergence of new approaches to linking, annotating, and using digital content.

• The Great War and the Valleys
  An online exhibition reflecting on the reality of The Great War on the town of Merthyr Tydfil and the Cynon Valley at the heart of the south Wales coalfield.

• Wales1900
  This project will develop a crowdsourcing platform for placenames of Wales, working in partnership with Galaxy Zoo, the People's Collection, Wales, and the University of Wales.

• The Snows of Yesteryear
  Funded by the AHRC Landscape and Environment Programme, this research Network will investigate resilience and vulnerability to extreme weather in Wales, in collaboration with climate scientists and performance researchers.

• Linking Parliamentary Records through Metadata (LIPARM)
  Funded by JISC, the project will link the digital archives of parliamentary material, both historic and contemporary, by creating a unified metadata scheme for all of its key elements.

The National Library of Wales (NLW) was one of 19 leading European research libraries involved in the Europeana Libraries Project, which, in a two-year period from 2011, aimed to provide free access to 5 million digital objects on the European Library and Europeana websites. Reflecting NLW's commitment to digitisation and allowing free access to digitized collections, the NLW aimed to provide the Europeana Libraries project with over 100,000 pages of text-based material, over 5,000 images from its Welsh Landscape collection of topographical prints, over 4,000 images from the John Thomas photographic collection and over 120,000 images from the Geoff Charles photographic collection.