Newsletter: May 2011
 100th Anniversary of the death of Mikalojus Ciurlionis (1875 - 1911)
"I want to compose a symphony out of rolling waves, the mysterious conversations of the secular woods, the twinkling of the stars, of our old songs, and my boundless longing“, wrote Lithuanian musician/artist Čiurlionis. Probably the best known classical Lithuanian composer, he created not only 250 musical compositions but also 300 paintings. Extracts from his musical works are now accessible via Europeana.
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 Linked Open Data
Linked Open Data is the spark that sets the world’s most creative and inventive minds to work. Open Linked Data helps generate meaningful links between pages. This makes it easier for people to discover your content, which in turn raises your profile and drives traffic to your website.
Introducing Linked Open Data to Europeana is critical to help Europeana become the authority source for European cultural information and the key channel through which the collections of Europe’s cultural heritage institutions are promoted to the widest possible audience.
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 Wine notes
Researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, have discovered that the taste of various wines changes according to music being played in the immediate environment. Test pieces were described differently by tasters when accompanied by music – a Cabernet Sauvignon was described as being ‘60% richer and more robust’ when accompanied by Carl Orff’s ‘O Fortuna’, from his Carmina Burana, compared to a music-free tasting.
250 adults were tested and offered a free glass of wine in return for answering questions about its taste. They drank the wine in one of five rooms, each of which played a different style of music - or no music - and were then asked to rate the wine's taste according to set parameters.
‘It is widely acknowledged within the scientific community that music affects behaviour,’ said North. ‘However, this is the first time it has been scientifically proven that music can affect perception in other senses and change the way wine tastes.’
The research is based on cognitive priming, which holds that certain styles of music stimulate, or ‘prime’, certain parts of the brain.
 Global Users
Here's where users of the Audio Aggregation Platform have been coming from in recent times...
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Today's featured archive: The Institute of Ethnomusicology of the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (GNI)
The Institute of Ethnomusicology (GNI), the oldest institute of the Scientific Research Centre (ZRC) of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SAZU), was founded on 21 October 1934. The first director of the institute, which before the Second World War was known as the Folklore Institute, was France Marolt; he steered the work of the institute towards the collection, research and publication of material and the publication of scientific findings. This remains the institute's primary orientation until today.
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Previously-featured archives include AIMP from Switzerland, ISPAN from Poland and ZTI from Hungary.
 The First World War in everyday documents: pictures, letters and memorabilia wanted
The project 'World War One in pictures, letters and memories' launched recently with a call to the public to participate in building a digital European archive by contributing private memorabilia from the First World War. Europeana is looking for photographs, letters, diaries, short films, audio recordings, objects and the stories behind them.
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 International workshop on audio aggregation for digital libraries
There will be a final EuropeanaConnect WP6 workshop in Lubljana, Slovenia, on June 16th and 17th, hosted by the Institute of Ethnomusicology (GNI) of the Scientific Research Centre (ZRC) of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SAZU)
(see above).
Topics will range far and wide across the digital domain, including:
- aggregating audio for Europeana.
- how to benefit from participating in Europeana as a content provider
- state of the art in data-mining and audio-similarity software.
- intellectual property rights issues
Speakers are expected from Europeana (Netherlands), Fraunhofer Institute (Germany), Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesellschaft (Austria), Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (Germany) and more. Contact Peter Vendramin here.
And of course, the EuropeanaConnect DISMARC Audio Aggregation Platform is on Facebook.
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EuropeanaConnect is coordinated by the Austrian National Library