Europeana and Researchers
Alastair Dunning (The European Library/ Europeana Foundation)
Based in the National Library of the Netherlandshttp://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-cloud
#cloud_EU / @europeana_cloud
Europeana relies on an ecosystem of aggregators and data providers to create
its central index of metadata records
These records point to items of digitised content from Europe’s cultural heritage
sector
Who submits data to Europeana?
Domain Aggregators National initiatives
Audiovisual collections
National Aggregators
Regional Aggregators
Archives
Thematic collections
Libraries
e.g. Musées Lausannois
e.g. Culture Grid,
Culture.fr
e.g. The European Library
e.g. APEX
e.g. EUScreen, European Film Gateway
e.g. Judaica Europeana, Europeana Fashion
Countries providing content – top 16
This creates an index of c.30m records.
These can be searched via the Europeana portal, via the API, and
downloaded as freely available open data
Screneeshot of portal,
The European Library(sorry about confusing name) has 120m
bibliographic records, drawn from 48 national libraries of Europe and >20
research libraries
This model of data aggregation (ie Europeana’s content strategy) has
strengths
Strong supply chainStrong network
Standarisation in licensing and metadata frameworks
This model of data aggregation (ie Europeana’s content strategy) has
weaknesses
Not demand drivenVarying qualities of metadata
Very broad coverage but not very deep
Europeana is developing; becoming less of a portal and more of a platform for others
to build tools on top of this index of records
Something that others can build tools on
The API (application programming interface) allows others to make more
granular use of the 30m metadata records
Creates a shared infrastructure for aggregators (and in long-term cultural
heritage institutions)
Combines metadata from Europeana, with that from The European Library (120m
bibliographic records)
Gives opportunity to third parties to access, modify, enrich, download that
metadata
eCloud is also experimenting with ingesting content (not just metadata)
The source of this data will be located during the project. It is likely to be out-of-
copyright data
Full-text – EasyishViewing (as opposed to hi-res) images - Okay
Audio-visual – Difficult
Building Europeana Research platform as part of the project.
Not as a search portal over all the data
But rather a suite of specific tools that allow better use and re-use of the
metadata for the research community, specifically humanities and social sciences
and access to specific content
Helping us define Europeana Research
How can we exploit this existing data better ?
What content should we ingest in the project ?
What disciplines should we concentrate on ?
What can we do pragmatically do within the project ?
What tools can be developed? 4 themes raised in proposal
Accessing and Analysing Big Data - permitting scholars to download, and therefore manipulate and
analyse large data sets Annotation - allowing researchers to annotate documents and
to share these annotations Transcription - allowing users to transcribe and interpret
documents Discovery and Access - ensuring that services are tailored so
that research material is better discoverable by the scholarly community
The Scholarly Primitives
What can we do short term and long term ?
Working with specific research projects to help them
Crowdsourcing bibliographies, creating channels of content … a
unique ID for each piece of cultural heritage
Other Work Packages will help execute this work. WP3 is building experimental tools ;
WP4 is ingesting content
But both of these Work Packages need advice on tools to build and content to
ingest
Hence the work of Work Package and these Export Fora … over to you
Project DetailsStart Date – February 2013
End Date – January 2016Total Project Cost – 4.75m Euros
Partners - 33
EU Funding Contributing 3.8m Euros (80%)Matched Funding 950k (20k)
co-funded by the CIP-ICT Policy Support Programme
http://ec.europa.eu/ict_pspCIP-ICT-PSP-2012-6 - Project number 325091
the author is solely responsible for it and that it does not represent the opinion of the Community and that the Community is not responsible for any use that might be made of information contained therein