Skip to main content

The EODOPEN second project meeting and the yearly EOD network meeting took place online on 13-15 May

Due to the current COVID-19 situation, the EODOPEN 2nd project meeting had to be moved online and 40 representatives of the 15 partner organisations from 11 countries joined from their home or library offices. On 13 to 15 May 2020, the project partners held a series of meetings of each work group and met colleagues from the EOD libraries.

“Under normal circumstances, these days, we would have been gathering in the beautiful town of Olomouc in the Czech Republic and it is a great pity that it is not so. Therefore, we decided to have this project and network meeting as an online meeting,” said Silvia Gstrein, the leader of the project and the Head of the Digital Services Department at the Library of the University of Innsbruck. “To be frank: it was the first time we had to organise an entire conference in this format, but it turned out to work amazingly well.”

On the first day, 13 May, the project partners discussed the project management-related activities and laid plans for the wider dissemination of the project in the future, such as the plan for developing audience awareness, and the ways of meeting the communication challenges after the COVID-19 situation. The working group “Delivery formats of digitised material for special needs” introduced the first results of the survey on the special needs of the users as well as the involved technical requirements. Two questionnaires, one for the users of mobile devices and the other for the blind and visually impaired e-book readers, have been translated into 12 languages and their distribution will be continued in the partners’ networks up to the end of June.

On 14 May, the meeting started with a series of sessions on the rights clearance assessment and support as well as the discussions about the rights clearance documentation tool. The attendees drew the plan for further activities and prepared for the next day workshop on identifying the requirements for a technical infrastructure. In order to visualize and make available main project results, namely the digitised 20th and 21st century literary works, requirements for a common portal were also discussed. The yearly "EOD user and network meeting" open to all the EODOPEN project participants and EOD libraries was held in the afternoon of the second day.

“My personal highlight was the last day’s workshop, which was about gathering the requirements for the tool for the documentation of rights clearance. About 30 participants came together in a brainstorming session, everyone sharing the same online ‘post-it-board’," said Silvia Gstrein, when commenting on the workshop that was organised on 15 May. “Here, a large amount of thoughts and ideas could be collected in a very short time which will now add to the work already done in this working group.”

EODOPEN or eBooks-On-Demand-Network Opening Publications for European Netizens is a 4 year project, co-funded by the European Commission under the Creative Programme, aiming at the direct engagement with national, regional and local communities in the selection of materials from the  20th and 21st centuries to be digitized. The project partner states are Austria, Estonia, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Germany, Portugal, Hungary, Sweden, Slovenia and Lithuania. Total expenditure of the project amounts to approximately 4 million euros.