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