Championing local and regional cultural heritage

Mary Rowlatt, MDR PartnersScientific Co-ordinators, EuropeanaLocal

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"A common multilingual access point would make it possible to search Europe’s distributed – that is to say, held in different places by different organisations – digital cultural heritage online.”

European Union Communiqué August 2006

Europeana.eu inspires ideas and understanding by sharing Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage with the world online

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Seeing Rembrandt´s paintings as they hung in his house when he died

Together with letters of sale, books on his influence, letters to his son, his wife, his patrons

Bringing the 2 halves of the Delacroix painting, showing Chopin & George Sand, together

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Seeing Rembrandt´s paintings as they hung in his house when he died

Together with letters of sale, books on his influence, letters to his son, his wife, his patrons

Bringing the 2 halves of the Delecroix painting showing Chopin & George Sand together Allowing every EU country to tell its stories from Royalty to Rags and to virtually repatriate their treasuresA virtual Cultural Tourism giving relevance to our great institutions The following of a research trail..........

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To pull together disparate sources, languages and formats to create a unique search experience for the user through the portal AND in other environments such as learning and tourism◦ Enable access to 2 million objects at launch◦ Have a google speed search in the deep web, across the

domains and material types User centred development Emphasis on interoperability and standards

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TEL (The European Library)◦ Collaborative platform of 48 CENL national libraries◦ Managed by The European Library Office, KL Netherlands◦ Free searching, object level, standardised metadata, multilingual

access ◦ Sequence of projects ((IST, eContentplus) 2003-◦ Each bringing in more national libraries and advancing technically

MICHAEL/MICHAELPLus (2004-8)◦ Driven mainly by Ministries of Culture◦ Funded under e-Ten◦ Access to collection descriptions

Research projects (FP6/ICT) ◦ DELOS, BRICKS, QVIZ and more

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End of 2006: full collaboration among EU National Libraries

From 2007 collaboration expanded to Archives, Museums and Audiovisual Archives

November 2007: EDL Foundation in place• major European associations of archives, audiovisual

archives, museums and libraries as founders 2 million books, films, photographs, manuscripts, and

other cultural works accessible by 2008 At least 6 million works by 2010

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EURBICA

FIATACEEMFCENLLIBER

MICHAEL

KBICOM EuropeCERLINABA

European Regional Branch of Intl. Council onArchivesIntl. Fed. of Television Archives Association Cinémathèques EuropeennesEuropean Museums ForumConference of European National LibrariansLigue des Bibliothèques Européennes deRechercheMultilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage inEuropeNational Library of The Netherlands International Council of Museums EuropeConsortium of European Research LibrariesInstitut Audiovisuel, FranceBundesarchiv, Germany

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Thematic Network: 2007-9 Establish trust between the institutions Create the organisational structure for Europeana Tackle domain interoperability issues (standards) Propose a practical implementation/prototype Business model

Annual cost 3.6 million EUR EC projects + national ministries + site revenue

Item or object level Make recommendations for future research

The work of Europeana.net

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Europeana - structure

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5 new content provision projects : EuropeanaLocal, EFG, Athena, Arrow and APEnet

Supported by co funding of €300,000 from the Dutch Ministry of Culture, Education and Science

5 new projects starting early 2009 including: Europeana v.1.0 and EuropeanaConnect

a fully operational service within 2 years

After eContentplus …CIP Policy Support Progamme◦Pilot actions, January 2009 call, 100 million EUR

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The policy background

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Europe's cultural and scientific riches at a click of a mouse

In ancient times, the library of Alexandria was said to contain up to 70% of all human knowledge

The challenge for the digital age is to do even better than that – and make the result last longer

Flagship project of the Commission’s i2010 strategy for the digital economy

Launched in September 2005

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Across Museums, Archives, Libraries, Audiovisual Archives and other content owners

Centres of Competence

Centres of Competence

Access

Digitisation

Preservation

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Contribution and role

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Best Practice Network Digital content sourced by regional/local libraries,

museums, archives

Local content infrastructure for harvesting and indexing metadata (objects stay on original sites) ◦ OAI-PMH repositories◦ Europe wide network of repositories/ aggregations ◦ map existing metadata to Europeana Metadata Application Profile◦ local vocabularies ‘SKOSified’

Establish easy processes for making content/metadata available◦ to Europeana and other services (tourism, education, family

history, research)

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Duration 36 months Budget 4.3 million Euro (80% funded) 1031+ Person-months in total 32 Partners 39 Deliverables

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Improve interoperability of digital content held by regional and local museums, libraries and archives

Improve availability for access and use ◦ estimated 20 million items identified initially by partners◦ prove the value of local/regionally sourced content◦ promote digitisation of local/regional content

Help develop Europe wide network of repositories + aggregations ◦ support sensible levels of aggregation (digital libraries, cultural

portals etc)

Integrated Europeana prototype service including EuropeanaLocal content

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Items and collections of high cultural value (‘treasures’) held at local or regional level

Specific local collections held by libraries, museums and archives, local audio-visual archives

Images high in the mix Public domain ‘cultural’ records held by archives etc. Promote content contribution from local

users/communities More digitisation needed for full representation of all

localities

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EDL Foundation 1 Ministry of Culture (as aggregators of local content) 2 national libraries 2 national museums (“) 3 national cultural agencies (“) 5 regional cultural authorities 7 public libraries 1 local museum 1 research foundation 1 regional digital library provider 7 private sector organisations

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Content

XML/HTTP

Resources

Collections

Metadata harvesting

Legacy databasesStandards

Items

IPRMetadata

OCRMiningCommission

EDLocal

Michael

EDL Foundation

Committee of Regions

National Cps

Ministries of Culture

Local Cps Regional CpsNational initiatives

Thematic networks

MinervaTEL

Tagging

Folksonomies

Ontologies

OWL

RDF

OAI-PMH

SemanticWeb

Meta noise

Taxonomies

Collabularies

Search engines

Geography

Deep content

Web Services

Web 2.0

Future services

Syndication/RSS/Atom

XML/HTTP

WIKIs

Participation

Blogs

Open Source

Multi-lingual services

Business modelsAJAX

IPR

EDLnet

Application profiles

Authentication

Controlled vocabularies

Payment

i2010

Google

TELplus

TEL-ME-MOR

Europeana

Fedora

DSpace

Greenstone

SKOS

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Advanced practice among EuropeanaLocal partners in implementing digital libraries, portals, OAI-PMH etc

France, Norway, Poland, Spain, UK etc Limited progress

Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Romania etc Spectrum from somewhat centralised to very regional/local

◦ Centralised initiatives seldom have full country coverage Europeana target for national portal aggregations is 14 member states

by 2012 Currently 6 or 7 underway? Collection level or item level?

EuropeanaLocal: phased approach

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1. Kick off meeting, London 26/7 June2. Analyse content available, metadata and

infrastructures in use ◦ themes?

3. Europeana sets up parallel ‘test’ environment ◦ index harvested EuropeanaLocal content ◦ implement Europeana interface developments on content

4. Guidance on installing repositories◦ support for implementation where necessary◦ Fedora, DSpace, Greenstone, LMS etc

5. Import from existing databases to OAI-PMH repositories◦ automate metadata conversion?

6. Transform vocabularies to improve semantics

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7. Regional training workshops and technical help/support

8. Local implementation planning

9. Move towards sensible levels of aggregation ◦ Low entrance barrier for new content suppliers to join

10. Promote low-cost digitisation ◦ (e.g. Minerva guidelines)

11. Policy/dissemination work ◦ National Meetings

◦ Website

12. Evaluation and progress monitoring

◦ User perspective, national user groups, impact study

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Technology and standards

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◦No Europeana application profile proposed yet, data used with existing schemas

◦So far received in TEL application profile DC (simple, qualified) MODS METS EAD proprietary

◦ Mapping and conversion done in-house at Europeana Longer term scalabiity

will require decentralisation automation of metadata conversion either at aggregator or central level

For the Prototype launched to European Commission, Council of Ministers, 19/20 November 2008 (and until Europeana 1.0 delivers in 2010)

Metadata defined to match specific functionality of prototype ◦ Used for search and display◦ Facet - defines if used for search refinement and type of facet (who, what,

when, where)◦ Timeline – defines if used in the timeline browse function◦ Advanced search – defines if used in advanced search◦ Full search result display – defines if content is displayed in full result display◦ + all elements used for simple search

Mixture of DC (qualified) plus 5(?) new elements◦ ‘Shown by: (ie URI)◦ ‘Shown at: a way of showing object in full context (needed e.g. for

archives, ‘treasures’ which may be embedded not just jpeg) ◦ User Tag: public tags created by registered users◦ Unstored: (‘bucket for useful stuff not mappable elsewhere)◦ Object : (internal use – identifies where to get thumbnail)

Mandatory◦ Date (of creation of original object – not of digitisation)◦ Shown by (URI of link to digital object)◦ Source (name of organisation holding object)◦ Title (title of the original object) ◦ Type (Text, Stillimage, Movingimage, Sound) – used in search

Mainly manually entered but also process text to look for person names

Similar technology as is applied by search engines, extracting keywords and assigning relevance according to frequency

Coverage is specified in any number of ways such as geographical names, administrative entities and coordinates. Need geo-metadata

Difficult to get disambiguous temporal metadata but possible

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Goal: providing the same level of discoverability to users regardless of their language

Europeana reviewing research to draw upon in next phase

◦ Gap analysis: results in January ◦ STITCH, Telplus, CACAO, Telplus (subject headings), Multimatch◦ Need to progress multilingual search and retrieval on metadata in

context, more automated◦ Full text discovery is improving with developments in machine translation

etc◦ Treble Clef one-to-one relationship not scalable◦ Need repositories of online dictionaries: parsers, stemmers

some languages don’t have◦ Commitment to SKOS as a tool

http://www.edlproject.eu/conference/downloads/EDLconf_Sjoerd.pdf,

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Europeana VI delivers first release early 2010 Institutions/aggregators use Europeana Semantic Elements

till then Need to deal with ‘place’ and geographic metadata Locally-implemented processes for metadata enrichment? Monitor new infrastructural standards

RSS/|ATOM Semantic web Social networks Collections Rights expression (C20 black hole) Identifiers

Interest in object models (ORE/OAI) for Europeana V1

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Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) specs released Oct 17 2008

Object surrogates ‘provide foundation for applications and services that

can visualize, preserve, transfer, summarize, and improve access to the aggregations that people use in their daily Web interaction’

Leverage the core web architecture Potentially interactive – not just one way like OAI-PMH Data may need re-indexing by Europeana Run in parallel with OAI-PMH

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Europeana is not just a project – it’s a call for action (Yvo Volman)

Improving basic conditions for digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation◦ Direct support for Europeana

Need to join forces to shape the digital future of culture!

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Become interoperable with Europeana Adopt Europeana standards/infrastructure

◦ OAI-PMH repositories (and OAI-ORE)◦ Europeana metadata application profile◦ Decide on a sensible level of aggregation

Digitise◦ Set up centres of competence on digitisation◦ Train people◦ Establish some priorities for digitisation

Work ‘cross domain’ ◦ that is: work with archives, audio-visual archives, museums

Access and re-use resources

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Questions/comments?

mary.rowlatt@mdrpartners.comMDR Partners

Scientific co-ordinators: EuropeanaLocalwww.europeanalocal.eu

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