Discovering libraries’ gold through collection-level descriptions

ELAG 2014, Bath 06-2014

Valentine CharlesData specialist

Large scale aggregation and its ecosystem

The European Library collects metadata for digital and non-digital materials from• 48 National Libraries• More than 50 University and Research libraries

According to the ENUMERATE survey 10-12% of content is digitised

Only 10% of the 132 million objects held at the Library of Congress digitised

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/business/yourmoney/11archive.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

Digitisation still in progress…

For the many digitised resources

Identification of the metadata fields Enhancements of more than 500

Collection Level Descriptions Surveys were sent to libraries members

to identify:• new digital collections;• special collections (digital and physical);• physical collections;

Collection descriptions as a strategy

Collaborating with a specific community: digital humanities

Traditional Humanities users want to search in large corpora and find special items.

But•Collections relevant for researchers are not always available in a digital form•Many collections are not known to research communities

Collection descriptions for researchers

Collection descriptions for researchers

CENDARI builds a research infrastructure that

Allows historical inquiry beginning with research questionsFacilitates historical research processesSupports transnational and comparative approaches Focusses on discovery and linking sources with research data

Collection descriptions for researchers

CENDARI has built an archive directory

• 800 collection descriptions were collected for WW1 and Medieval studies

• More than 100 supplied by The European Library

Collaborating with a specific community: digital humanities

Digitial humanities users• want to exploit large corpora in new ways• want to integrate corpora with other data

Archival research guide

Integrate collection descriptions with researchers’ studies

The Archival research guides:• access points to relevant contemporary research

questions• Connect collection description to others resources via

domain specific ontologies• Combined with faceted search, annotations, note-

taking tools, NER• linked to the community of historians

Collections descriptions are even more interesting when integrated to other data• Alignment of subjects, place names, time

period with LOD vocabularies

The European Library publishes its data as linked data and via an API• Data in RDF, and JSON

Beyond collection descriptions

Next steps The European Library will look into connecting

even more collections to its other data

• Link with full text for instance gives opportunity for new research uses

• Develop opportunities for enriching collection descriptions with annotation, named entity recognition, vocabularies enrichment…

• And incorporate the results of the collaboration with CENDARI

CENDARI project runs for two more years so stay tuned!

Thank you

Valentine CharlesValentine.charles@kb.nl

www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/ www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/access

www.cendari.eu/