Europeana Symposium during the Czech Presidency of the Council of EU

Head of the Digital Culture Team in the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, involved in numerous projects in the area of digitization of cultural collections. A graduate of cultural studies, philosophy and intellectual property law, with the background in editing and cultural projects coordination. She is the representative of Poland in Commission Expert Group on the common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage (CEDCHE).

Prof. Dr. Frederik Truyen is professor at the Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven. He publishes on Digitization, Photography, and E-Learning. He is in charge of the mediaLab CS Digital. His research interests are mostly related to Digitization and Publishing of Cultural Heritage. He is involved in projects on Open Educational Resources and Open Learning (currently E-SLP), and on digitization of Cultural Heritage: IDEM, RICH, 3PI (Hercules funding), EuropeanaPhotography and Europeana Space (EC CIP), Europeana DSI (aggregator for photography) and Migration in the Arts and Sciences (EC CEF Generic services). He has experience in data modelling for Image databases in the cultural-historical field. President of PHOTOCONSORTIUM, the aggregator of Photography for Europeana, and member of DARIAH-VL.

What he likes to do more than anything else though is to design and implement new business models that will change our way of thinking about heritage as an enabler of societal and economic growth. Quite taken lately by the developments of the sharing economy. A visual thinker, he needs a white board as much as a strong coffee. Mediocre football player, reasonable cook, aspiring photographer.

Kristīne Pabērza-Ramiresa is Member Engagement Officer at the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). In this role she works with organisations from around the world to collaboratively create the Library Map of the World – a source of country-level library statistics, a collection of stories about impactful library programmes contributing to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and a source of information about the library field in each country. Kristīne’s passion is impact and its evaluation. She is also an experienced facilitator and instructor on community needs assessment, performance measurement and impact evaluation.

Before joining IFLA, she worked at the Culture Information Systems Centre in Latvia where she managed several cultural heritage digitisation and access projects and led a longitudinal nation-wide research study on social and economic impact of public library services in Latvia.

Olga is Ukrainian, based in Austria. Head of strategic development of the Vienna-based MUSEUM BOOSTER and a research curator of the Future Museum project. Her work largely deals with designing and running long-term institutional and multi-constituent programmes.

Olga is also working on the Museum Innovation Barometer and DOORS: Digital Incubator for Museums, supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
Trained as an art-historian (CUNY, NYC), her long-term research focuses on art institutions as a medium and artistic forms of knowledge production. Former Fulbright and Edmund S.Muskie scholar.

Rehana Schwinninger-Ladak is the Head of the Unit "Interactive technologies, Digital for Culture and Education" since January 2018. The Unit’s mission is three fold:

i) To support the digital transformation of cultural and education institutions by promoting the digitisation, preservation and reuse of cultural heritage assets and the further development of Europeana as Europe's platform for digital cultural heritage and as the core of the common European Data space for cultural heritage.

ii) To support the modernisation of education and training systems in an age of rapid technological changes and

iii) to foster a wider use of extended reality technologies in industrial and societal domains.