Europeana in a research contextAlastair Dunning, @alastairdunning

The European Library / Europeana Foundation

Mining Digital Repositories Conference

National Library of Netherlands, April 2014

Oxyrhynchus Papyrus No. 20

Fragment of Homer's The Iliad, 2nd century Common Era

British Library, London

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Metadata record for Oxyrhynchus Papyrus No. 20 (numbered 742) from British Library, London

Metadata record for Oxyrhynchus Papyrus No. 20 from University of Oxford

Tool for transcribing Oxyrhynchus Papyrus from Ancient Lives project

Tool for measuring Oxyrhynchus Papyrus from Ancient Lives project

Discussion Forum Oxyrhynchus Papyri from Ancient Lives project

Images

Hi-res TIFF – British LibraryJPEG – University of Oxford

Full-text

Multiple transcriptions – Ancient Lives Project

Metadata

Version 1 – British LibraryVersion 2– University of Oxford Version 3 – Ancient Lives

Unstructured Commentary

Ancient Lives Project

The richness of this information is created

by many parties, but it sits in different

places, took many projects to make

happen and still is not fully connected.

Europeana as a data brain, helping connect

disparate datasets

Rather than Europeana as end-user facing portal

2005 A letter to the European Commission from 6 Heads of State (from France, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain and Hungary) suggests the creation of a European

digital library.

2007 The European Digital Library Network - EDLnet - begins to create a prototype, funded by i2010.

2008 Europeana's prototype is launched on 20 November.

2009 Europeana's collection reaches 5 million items.

2010 A European Parliament report approved in February asks for more content and funding for Europeana. It is unanimously approved.

2012 Europeana releases all metadata under a CC0 waiver, making it freely available for re-use. Europeana’s collection reaches 25 million items.

2013 Europeana continues to further its position as a catalyst for innovation and digital enterprise in support of the Digital Agenda of Europe - one of the pillars of the

EU’s Europe 2020 strategy

How does Europeana get its content?

Through its aggregation structure, Europeana represents 2,300 organisations across Europe

From 150 Aggregators

• Promoting national aggregation structures

• More efficient than working with every individual content provider

• Helps to achieve international standardisation

End-user generated content

• Crowd-sourcing projects such as Europeana 1914-1918 and Europeana 1989

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

The evolution is to Europeana Cloud : a infrastructure for aggregators and data providers.

This would allow members of Europeana Cloud to:

1.Upload metadata

2.Define who can use that metadata and in what ways (download, annotate, delete)

3.Give third parties access via APIs

4. Capability for sharing content also feasible

Development of Europeana as portal not

platform Cloud infrastructure sits at heart of this

“Portals are for visiting, platforms are for building on”

Europeana Labs as a platform for the

creative industries

Europeana Research as a platform for humanities,

social sciences

Europeana Research will not be a single discovery portal;

however at it will offer researchers access to APIs and

downloadable to ‘raw data’ stored in Europeana Cloud

Third parties can build their own specific tools using these APIs or

downloadable data

Europeana Research will give access to data that can only

be used in a non-commercial context

Europeana Research will have open APIs to allow bi-

directional access (read, write) to metadata in Europeana Cloud

(dependent on permissions)

Pilot Study 1:

Tool to search through Europeana (and other content) related to philosophy of logic http://greenlearningnetwork.com/axiom/

Pilot Study 2:

Musicologists’ tool to annotate early music manuscripts from disparate sources (Work in Progress)

Other Possibilities

Service and end-user tool to allow for transcription of multiple documents aggregated from multiple sources

Service to allow for extraction of geographic or other terms from aggregation of services

Aggregation of text documents for download for text mining

Text Mining Opportunties

Aggregation of corpora of primary sources, with harmonized licencing

Versioning corpora of primary sources

Enrichment of corpora via third-party tools

Brokerage of in-copyright material for non-commerical usage ? (Primary and secondary sources)

Ability to upload algorithms / software ?

Cons

Lack of maturity in research community in building APIs

Time taken for tool development

Quality and extent of underlying data still essential

Still needs engagement with research communities / tools builders

Pros

Europeana leverages its aggregation network to provide single access point to data

Tools can be built to help specific questions for researchers

Responsibility for sustainability and outreach are distributed

Works very well for time-limited projects

Europeana licencing framework provides standards for access to data

Thank you

Alastair Dunning, @alastairdunning