HARRY VERWAYEN

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
EUROPEANA FOUNDATION

9th Dec

2:00PM-3:00PM

Harry Verwayen is the Executive Director,Europeana Foundation, the operator of the Europeana platform. Across Europe, museums, galleries and archives digitize their collections. Europeana supports these organisations in their digital transformation by making these collections available as widely as possible so that people can fund and use them. For work, for learning or just for fun. His work is guided by creative collaboration, supportive teamwork and the idea that sharing and reusing cultural content can positively transform the world.

Prior to this, Harry worked at the Amsterdam based think tank ‘Knowledgeland’ (http://www.knowledgeland.org) where he was responsible for business model innovation in the cultural heritage sector. Harry holds a MA in History from Leiden University and has worked over ten years in the Academic Publishing Industry.

ABSTRACT

The European Year of Cultural Heritage in 2018 awakened the cultural heritage field in Europe to the social and economic impact our sector can have. Not only do we contribute access to valuable content resources to the fast-growing cultural and creative industries, but the sector is seen more and more as an R&D lab, fertile soil, an environment in which technological, behavioural and organisational experimentation can take place in a relatively safe environment.

At the same time, the world around us continues to change. Artificial intelligence is feeding itself on the Big Data we are all mass producing, and new machine readable worlds in 3D are emerging from the garages of Silicon Valley. Imagine a future where everything physical will have a digital representation, an augmented ‘mirror world’ of information on top of the real world, accessible to you through augmented reality devices. We’ll be able to see it all at once..

PRESENTATION

Europeana Driving Digital Transformation

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