#newbusinessmodels Archives - Digital Treasures

August 19, 2022August 19, 2022

EDT Workshop New Business & Conceptual Models: “Face to Face to e-Commerce: the Migration Experience”

From Face to Face to e-Commerce: The Migration Experience, brief describes the DGLAB (Portugal, General Directorate for the Books, Archives and Libraries) experience on the transition from its previous approach and position online to E-commerce strategy adaptation, faced as an opportunity for paradigm change. José Furtado, head of the Division of Information Systems, Statistics and Quality in the Directorate General of Books, Archives and Libraries, presented their ideas and findings at the European Digital Treasures workshop ‘New Business & Conceptual Models’, held on 23^rd of May 2022 within the #28 ICARUS Convention.

José Furtado at the ICARUS convention in Paris, May 2022.

On the course 2020 to 2022, directly or indirectly COVID 19 pandemic deeply affected the business model conduced. Abrupt decline in sales as well as of the clients due to confinement were observed. At the same time, there was an incremental growth of online requests to services: a 13% growth of on-line interactions were experienced between January and June comparatively to the last 6 months of 2019 that continuously kept increasing since then.

All the above led to a shift of paradigm in this business area in order to better disseminate the institutional image of the archives, by introducing a different strategy, both at the physical shop and online service.

Decisions were taken towards the professionalization of the DGLAB’s online shop presence by means of disruptive technology in such way that could force the services to be also disruptive on their own work in order to optimize resources and process; aggregate other revenue-generating DGLAB services on the same platform; increase efficiency in customer service both at the “front-office” as “back-office” level, through a more immediate control of “stocks”; reading of sales flow indicators and order requests; improved payment and introduce flexible calculation mechanisms on shipping functionalities; tax configuration per country; General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance at Customer support features; ability for customers to view their order history and status; Live-chat integration etc.

Along with the consolidation of the strategic actions in the technological and operational field, start the path towards the creation of synergies that help us more easily identify and meet the needs of the user/customer/citizen by creating synergies with other entities is of crucial importance.

Encouraging easier access to archives heritage targeting public from other fields of research like design of products; magnifying the role of archives as a rich and unexplored source of resources for cultural commercial market; incentivizing public-private cooperation; generating product diversity to meet a broad range of public; promoting internships in real work context focus towards web design, marketing or communication; promoting initiatives focused on creating opportunities for artistic production, fostering identity expression as a right of citizenship that the State should support, should be the way to change.

In that sense, the challenge for next years will be to face e-commerce platform as a laboratory of experiences and the archives as a source of inspiration.

Read about this self-copying service in detail in our report here (p. 5) & check out the video on our YouTube Channel here.

Let’s present our workshop speaker

José Furtado works at DGLAB. Furtado’s activities towards archives extends for more than 30 years, both in Portugal and in Macau. He was involved at research activities, coordination of the training activities and quality services at DGLAB; promoted and developed studies for the quality of processes and assessments on the satisfaction of the clients of the DGARQ and internal collaborators, and implemented the performance indicators system. Participated in several working groups involved in the development of projects of high relevance, namely, the development of the platform for virtual consultation for archives (CRAV I) and application of projects to the Memory of the World (UNESCO) and European Heritage Label. From November 2012 until now he is the head of the Division of Information Systems, Statistics and Quality in the Directorate General of Books, Archives and Libraries, has a degree in History and has a postgraduate in Management of People and Knowledge and a post-graduation on advanced studies in Public Management, granted by the Institute of Administration, Lisbon.

Check out the recording of the presentation of José Furtado about “Face to Face to e-Commerce: the Migration Experience” here!

Additionally you can read the full report about the workshop her e.
Read more about the workshop here.

Written by José Furtado & the European Digital Treasures Team.

August 10, 2022August 10, 2022

EDT Workshop New Business & Conceptual Models: Self-copying service in the researching rooms of the Spanish State Archives

Miguel Ángel Bermejo Alonso, Head of the International Cooperation Service at the Spanish State Archives, gave a lecture on the Spanish State Archives self-copying service at the European Digital Treasures workshop ‘New Business & Conceptual Models’, held on 23^rd of May 2022 within the #28 ICARUS Convention.

Miguel Ángel holding his lecture during the workshop.

He presented the overview and results of this pilot project, which regulated the possibility for the beneficiaries of 2 of the archives of the Spanish State Archives system—the Archive of the Royal Chancery of Valladolid and the General Archive of Simancas—to obtain up to 50 reproductions of documents by using their own photographic devices.

After this experience, which was implemented for 4 months—from October 2021 to February 2022—several beneficial effects have been already acknowledged, such as the reduction of waiting times, with the consequent relief for the always overloaded reprographic services and the management cost savings. Read about this self-copying service in detail in our report here (p. 3) & check out the video on our YouTube Channel here.

Let’s present our workshop speaker

MIGUEL ÁNGEL BERMEJO ALONSO is the Head of the International Cooperation Service at the Spanish State Archives. Graduated in Librarianship from the University of Salamanca and in Information Science from the University of Alcala de Henares. He has been a member of the Corps of technicians in Archives, Libraries and Museums since 2017.

For more than 9 years he worked as a librarian at the National Library of Spain until joining the Corps of technicians of Archives, Libraries and Museums in September 2017. He started in the Archive Coordination Service with the management of grants to private non-profit organisations until December 2017 of the same year, when he moved to the International Cooperation Service, where he currently works on different European projects, such as EDT Project—he is a member of its Steering Committee—or Archival trace on migration AtOM—as a member of its Executive Committee.

He develops other bilateral cooperation collaborations and provides support in the Technical Unit of the Iberarchivos Programme.

Recordings

All sessions of the workshop were recorded and will be presented here on our BLOG within the next weeks.
You can now check out the recording of Miguel Ángel Bermejo’s presentation HERE.

Additionally you can read the full report about the workshop HERE.

EDT Workshop New Business & Conceptual Models: Introduction & first speech “Identification of potential for revenue generation”

Yvan Corbat, senior consultant at Grupo DEX and partner of the EDT project, led and moderated the European Digital Treasures workshop ‘New Business & Conceptual Models’, held on 23^rd of May 2022 within the #28 ICARUS Convention. He gave a general overview of the aims of the EDT project before the other partners of the project gave their individual presentations about new business models for the archival field.

Within the workshop, Leonard Callus, National Archives of Malta, held a speech about “Identification of potential for revenue generation” and explained how the National Archives of Malta undertook great efforts to identify and analyse new business models to generate revenue. Read about it in detail in our report here (p. 7) & check out the video on our YouTube Channel here.

Let’s present our workshop speakers

YVAN CORBAT is senior consultant at Grupo DEX and URBACT and UIA (Urbact Innovative Actions) validated expert, with particular expertise on cultural management and international cooperation. He has over 25 years of professional experience in international programms and project management, with particular focus on the strategic and operational management of multilateral-funded projects to support local/regional development, and on the design, implementation and evaluation of EU Programmes.

He has worked as advisor of the Minister at the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Chief of Staff for the XXV Anniversary celebrations of the Prince of Asturias Awards, under the auspice of UNESCO. In September 2020, he has been selected as expert for the Capacity Building for European Capitals of Culture project and, since 2020, he is volunteering as Solar Impulse Expert for the World Alliance for Efficient Solutions.

LEONARD CALLUS forms part of the National Archives of Malta’s management team and is responsible for records management, community relations and outreach initiatives.

Before joining the National Archives, he served in several managerial and policy-related capacities within the public administration.

Recordings

All sessions of the workshop were recorded and will be presented here on our BLOG within the next weeks.
For now: Check out the recording of the introduction and the presentation of Leonard Callus about “Identification of potential for revenue generation” !

Additionally you can read the full report about the workshop HERE.

Automatic topic detection and collaborative topic tagging in Archives Portal Europe’s multilingual environment – by Kerstin Arnold

The European Digital Treasures team wants to present the various presentations held within the workshop “New Digital Exponential Technologies Towards The Generation Of Business Models” on 2^nd and 3^rd of September, 2021 at the Provincial Historical Archive of Alicante (Spain). For this reason, we will post about each of the presentations within the upcoming weeks – stay tuned!

The first speech was held by Kerstin Arnold who has been working in the archives domain for more than 15 years! Having been part of various projects creating and establishing Archives Portal Europe, Kerstin is now the initiative’s acting COO in the role of the APEF Manager. She holds a Master degree each in Communication Science and in Library and Information Management and also is a member of the Technical Subcommittee on Encoded Archival Standards (TS-EAS) at the Society of American Archivists.

Abstract. Archives Portal Europe is a comprehensive and open resource on archives from and about Europe, that currently holds archival descriptions from more than 30 countries and in more than 20 languages. Following traditional approaches of archival description, the portal allows users to access the documents via the contextual entities of the records creators and the holding repositories, next to a general keyword search. To evaluate options for subject- or topic-based access points, Archives Portal Europe is working on an automated cross-lingual topic detection tool that aims at enabling users to identify relevant documents related to a topic well beyond the narrowness of direct keyword matching. Synergising different approaches for concept-based and entity-based topics, the tool then also is meant to allow for active topic tagging in order to improve coverage of topic-based relations between the heterogeneous and multilingual documents present in Archives Portal Europe. Building on the current status quo in the portal, this paper presents the tool’s set-up, initial results from the proof-of-concept phase, and next steps envisaged during alpha and beta development of the tool, which will be made available as Open Source to also be of benefit for other, similar initiatives in the cultural heritage sector.

You can watch the whole session on YouTube here and read the manuscript paper here!

Written by Kerstin Arnold & the European Digital Treasures Team.