Last week, the Historypin team united from as far as San Francisco, London and Sofia, Bulgaria to attend Europeana Tech 2015 conference at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (National Library of France) in Paris.

The conference brought together a diverse range of people from application developers, technologists, researchers, designers, and cultural heritage professionals to share knowledge and work together to help shape the future of cultural content.

Check out the Euopeana Tech programme 2015 here and the tweet list here.

Discussions were interesting, varied, and delved into the current challenges of working with cultural content including discoverability, the importance of rich metadata and how this can be achieved through technical and crowdsourced modes, optimised web search, publicity and R&D. Reuse was another important strand to be discussed including the latest designs and ideas to facilitate reuse in a way which would prevent the separation of content from it’s metadata.

Historypin’s Jon Voss spoke about the critical role that open data and technology can play in creating social value and how cultural heritage can be harnessed to help build stronger communities. He shared some of the great local projects around the world using Historypin, from neighbourhood history projects to reminiscence sessions, and local story collecting.

We heard from some inspirational speakers including Seb Chan (Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum), Dan Cohen (DPLA), Andy Neale (DigitalNZ), George Oates (Good Form & Spectacle), Tim Sherratt (Trove), Dr Chris Welty (Google), James Morely (Europeana Foundation) and Jon Voss (Historypin).

Thank you to Europeana for organising an insightful and fascinating conference and to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France for hosting.