Europeana and AccessIT: how we got here

Poznan,Poland 30 September 2013

Rob Davies, MDR Partners, Coordinator

2005

“Digitisation and online accessibility are essential ways to

highlight cultural and scientific heritage, to inspire the

creation of new content and to encourage new online

services to emerge. They help to democratise access and to

develop the information society and the knowledge-based

economy”

-European Council of Ministers, Brussels 20 november 2008-

2008

Vision

“

A digital library that is a single, direct and multilingual access point to the European

cultural heritage.”

European Parliament, 27 September 2007

“A unique resource for Europe's distributed cultural heritage… ensuring a

common access to Europe's libraries, archives and museums.”

Horst Forster, Director, Digital Content & Cognitive Systems Information Society

Directorate, European Commission

Europeana Foundation

New Chair: Bruno Racine, Director French National Library

Board of participants from the professional heritage associations

• ACE: Association Cinémathèques Européennes

• CENL: Conference of European National Librarians

• CERL: Consortium of European Research Libraries

• EMF: European Museum Forum

• EURBICA: European Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives

• FIAT: International Federation of Television Archives

• IASA: International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives

• ICOM Europe: International Council of Museums, Europe

• LIBER: Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche

• MICHAEL: Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe

• Europeana Network – six elected members

June 2013

26 million+ items

2000+ partner institutions

2011

“Eur 100 billion

investment”

“Meta data should be widely and

freely available for re- use”

“Public Domain material should be freely

available for all”

“Europeana should be widely

promoted to end users”

“there is a need for

technical solutions for

persistent identifiers”

Commission recommendation on digitisation and

digital preservation, October 2011

• Member States to make solid plans for investments in

digitisation of cultural material and access via Europeana

• foster public-private partnerships to share gigantic cost ( estimated

at 100 bn EUR)

• Make 30 million objects available through Europeana by

2015

• including all Europe's masterpieces no longer protected by copyright

+ all material digitised with public funding

• More in-copyright material online creating legal framework

conditions

• Reinforce strategies/legislation to ensure long-term

preservation of digital material

Strategic Plan 2011-2015

Data Exchange Agreement

Recent Developments and Future Vision

• New services and functionalities in portal

• Funding battle

• Core funding of Europeana from 2014-2020 through the

Connecting Europe Facility (CEF)

• Rights labelling campaign

• User Generated Content

• 1914-18 and 1989 campaigns under Europeana Awareness

• More use - and re-use

• Not just a portal:„put content where the users are‟ (API)

• Creative industries, tourism, education, genealogy, fashion,

researchers

• Cloud services and infrastructure

• More support for smaller institutions e.g. LoCloud

www.europeana.eu

Metadata: mapping, harvesting and normalisation

• Europeana harvests and indexes descriptive metadata

associated with digital objects • OAI-PMH compliant repositories and aggregations

• No single universal cross-domain metadata standard

• Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE) developed for

Europeana prototype, Nov 2008 • Contributors map elements from their own metadata format to

ESE

• Normalisation carried out on some values to enable

machine readability.

Europeana Data Model (EDM)

• Starting point: ESE (Europeana Semantic Elements)

• lowest common denominator for object metadata

• forces interoperability

• flat model

• major drawback: richness of the original metadata is lost

• Goal is move to a model that allows more sophisticated

representation of data

• EDM will preserve original data while still allowing for interoperability

• Semantic Web representation

• Semantic linking between objects (Linked Open Data –

RDF/XML)

The general picture

Networked objects

Cultural artefact

Painting Sculpture Buildling

Best Practice Network

Demonstrate contribution of cultural institutions at local and

regional level

• Proof of Concept

Put in place infrastructure that will continue to increase the

content available to Europeana

• OAI-PMH repositories

• Europeana compliant metadata

• Manageable number of aggregations

Enhance the skills, expertise and motivation required to

support local institutions

Evidence through impact study

Main Goals

Main phases (2008-11)

• Year 1 Preparation, planning, training

• Year 2 Training, implementation and content delivery

(continuing into Year 3)

• Year 3 Dissemination at national and regional level

• National Awareness Raising Meetings in 27 countries

• Content providers in 27 countries

• National aggregators of local/regional content where identifiable:

national institutions, ministries, private etc

• A willing, innovative region or institution in other countries

• Contributed about 20% current total content in Europeana….by 2011!

• Over 5 million items

• Expansion of content providers (700+) throughout Europe

• Public libraries, museums, archives

• Progress in aggregation of local/regional content

• Job not yet complete:

• representation of most/all European localities an important goal

• Most technical challenges resolved

• longer term systemic problems (finance, qualified staff availability,

aggregation, skills) remain

http://www.europeanalocal.eu/

Main results

AccessIT

• AccessIT (Accelerate the circulation of culture through

exchange of skills in information technology)

• Culture (2007-2013)

• Strand 1.2.1 (cooperation projects)

• 1 May 2009 – 30 April 2011

• Partners

• MDR Partners (Coordinator)

• Instytut Chemii Bioorganicznej Pan –PSNC (Poland)

• Veria Central Public Library (Greece)

• Belgrade City Library (Serbia)

• Turkish Librarians Association

Main goals

• Practical training and skills development, guidance

• Enable smaller, local cultural organizations to prepare and

contribute digital content

• Establish/enhance training and competence structures in

each country

• Improving content flow to Europeana

• Extend Europeana Local to countries not covered by IST-

PSP

What skills are we talking about…so far?

• Good practice in digitisation and content creation

• Management of metadata and vocabularies (using Europeana standards)

• Collection development, description and management

• Selection and prioritization of digital content

• Infrastructures for enabling metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH)

• Management and expression of content rights

• Developing new services

• Handling user generated content

Why AccessITplus?

• What is Europe?

• Culture and history

• Limitations of geographical scope within IST-PSP

• Especially SouthEast Europe

• Culture 2007-13 Programme included Bosnia, Serbia and Turkey

• and Albania (as a „3rd Country‟)

• Implementation Partners

• Rijeka (Croatia)

• NULRS (BiH)

• Shkodra (Albania) – third country

• Tuzla (BiH)

• MDR, PSNC, Belgrade, Veria from AccessIT

• Skills agenda to enable participation: especially among

smaller, local institutions

Key results of AccessIT(plus)

1. Certificated online courses for professional

enrolment in national languages

2. Digital libraries: repositories or aggregations

harvested by Europeana

Thank you rob.davies@mdrpartners.com