European Library Automation Group (ELAG) conference in the capital of one of the BIBLIO project partner countries Latvia will take place in early June. Among the speakers is also a representative of the BIBLIO project partner organization.
ELAG is Europe’s premier conference on the application of information technology in libraries and other cultural heritage organizations. For over forty years, the ELAG conference has provided library and IT professionals with the opportunity to discuss new technologies, to review on-going developments, and to exchange best practices.
The next ELAG conference will take place in Riga, Latvia from 8 to 10 June 2022.
ELAG participants include more than 670 members in 27 countries all over Europe. The meetings aim at in depth discussions of particular library automation topics and at the promotion of informal exchange of ideas and experience. Topics of past conferences have included digital libraries, library portals, institutional repositories, web services, digital preservation and open source software. The topics covered are technical and meant for participants with an appropriate technical background.
The principal goals of ELAG conference are to:
- Promote knowledge sharing, collaboration, and mutual understanding of new library and archive technologies and services;
- Connect people working in libraries, archives, museums, and software development projects within and across those domains;
- Study the impact of changing user expectations and behaviors;
- Collaborate on navigating evolving library standards and the effects on library technology;
- Define common principles for library automation by sharing best practices and defining new standards;
- Foster exchanges about data, softwareand documentation beyond the scope of any single technology, vendor, or toolset.
This year, unlike in previous years, the conference will be held in person. The three-day conference will take place at the National Library of Latvia.
On the second day of the conference, Jānis Ziediņš, a representative of the BIBLIO project partner organization – Culture Information Systems Centre (CISC), will speak with a report “How language technologies could help cultural heritage”.
Since 2004 Jānis Ziediņš is working at CISC as Deputy director for ICT to help and lead IT projects in cultural sector. He has been involved in different types of culture related IT projects – most important of them – State Unified Information System for Archives and Joint Catalogue of the National Holdings of Museums, and development of Latvian state administration language technology platform Hugo.lv.
In his speech he will talk about Hugo.lv – Latvian state administration language technology platform that is freely accessible to every resident of Latvia. It provides automatic translation, speech recognition and speech synthesis, as well as a range of tools for supporting multilingual features in e-services. Therefore, CISC has done some test cases and real life integrations to expand access for cultural resource by automatic translations, speech recognition and synthesis.
For more information about ELAG conference, please, visit elag2022.lnb.lv.
On-line registration is open until 1 June 2022.
