Europeana: and the role of local and regional digital cultural content

1. Europeana: and the role of local and regional digital cultural content Belgrade, Serbia 25 September 2008 Rob Davies Co-ordinator, EuropeanaLocal

2. Flagship project of i2010 Letter by six Heads of State and Government to the European Commission (2005) Advocated creation of a virtual European library Aiming to make Europe’s cultural and scientific records accessible to all Positive response from the Commission Outline strategy: Communication "i2010: Digital Libraries" Communication on ‘access to scientific information in the digital age’ (2007) Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI)http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/index_en.htm

3. Focus of the DLI • Make Europe's rich and diverse cultural and scientific heritage easier and more interesting to use online • for work, leisure and/or study • books, films, maps, photographs, music, etc • Combine multicultural and multilingual environments with technological advances and new business models • Two strands: • Cultural heritage: • build a common European Digital Library • Scientific heritage: • ensure current and future access for research and innovation purposes .

4. The EU Vision • Across Museums, Archives, Libraries, Audiovisual Archives and other content owners • Centres of Competence • Centres of Competence Access Digitisation Preservation

5. The European Library(TEL)http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/index.html • Collaborative platform of 48 CENL national libraries • Managed by The European Library Office, Royal Library of Netherlands • Free searching, object level, standardised metadata, multilingual access • Sequence of projects • TEL • TEL-ME-MOR (2005-2007) • EDL project (2006-2008) • TELplus (2007-2009) • Each bringing in more national libraries and advancing technically

7. FUMAGABAhttp://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/organisation/cooperation/fumagaba/index.phpFUMAGABAhttp://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/organisation/cooperation/fumagaba/index.php • TEL project funded by the Swiss Development Agency (2008-9) • Includes the national library holdings of 10 eastern European countries (all CENL members). • Albania • Armenia • Azerbaijan • Bosnia and Herzegovina • Georgia • Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia • Moldova • Ukraine

8. TEL Serbian home page http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/organisation/services/userguide_sr.html

9. “For the users it is not important whether the sources of knowledge and experience are kept by archives, libraries or museums, but to get access to the sources they want, and to be able to use these sources across types of sources and sectors of institutions.”

10. A structure for EDL? Museum A Archive A Library A Library X National Digital Library Film Archive 1 Film Archive 2 Film Archive 3 Archive X ACE EDL Museum X Film Archive X TEL Eurbica National Archive 1 NL 1 NL 2 NL 3 National Archive 2 MICHAEL National Archive 3

11. Europeana.Net: goals • Establish trust between the institutions • Create the organisational structure for a European Digital Library • Tackle domain interoperability issues (standards) • Propose a practical implementation of the European Digital Library (a user defined prototype) • Make recommendations for future research

13. The roadmap to a European Digital Library • End of 2006: full collaboration among EU National Libraries • From 2007 collaboration to be 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 • 2,000,000 books, films, photographs, manuscripts, and other cultural works accessible by 2008 • At least 6,000,000 works by 2010

14. EDL Foundation

15. EuropeanaLocal (2008-11) • Best Practice Network • Improve interoperability of digital content sourced by regional/ local libraries, museums, archives • 20 million items in this project • Infrastructure for harvesting and indexing metadata • Europe wide network of OAI-PMH repositories/ aggregations • map existing metadata to Europeana Metadata Application Profile • local vocabularies processed via SKOS’ • Integrated within Europeana prototype service • Establish easy processes for making content/metadata available • to Europeana and other services (tourism, education, family history, research

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

17. Europeana content holders

18. EuropeanaLocal partners: types of organisation • EDLFoundation • 1 Ministry of Culture • 2 national libraries (as aggregators of local content) • 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

19. Variable starting points • Advanced practice in implementing digital libraries, portals, OAI-PMH etc • France, Norway, Poland, Spain, UK • Limited progress • Bulgaria, Greece, Romania etc • Somewhat centralised to very regional/local • Phased approach

20. Contributing content – not straightforward i2010 TEL-ME-MOR Michael Standards Legacy databases Ministries of Culture TEL Minerva Collections TELplus Resources Europeana IPR EDLocal SKOS Metadata Committee of Regions XML/HTTP National initiatives Items Application profiles Regional Cps Local Cps National Cps Metadata harvesting Content Thematic networks EDLnet Mining OCR EDL Foundation Commission Authentication Meta noise Syndication/RSS/Atom Web 2.0 OWL OAI-PMH Fedora SemanticWeb Blogs Web Services Ontologies Business models Greenstone Google Future services AJAX Controlled vocabularies Tagging RDF Participation IPR DSpace WIKIs Geography Collabularies Payment Open Source Search engines XML/HTTP Deep content Folksonomies Multi-lingual services Taxonomies

21. Important local content types • 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 • Public domain ‘cultural’ records held by archives etc.

22. Open Archive Initiative

23. Future steps • Europeana VI delivers first release early 2010 • Institutions/aggregators use Europeana Semantic Elements • 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 • Data may need to be reindexed by Europeana

24. Other eContentplus projects supporting Europeana • ATHENA (museums) • European Film Gateway • ARROW (public domain database) • APENet (national archives) • And now…….Europeana V1, EuropeanaConnects etc • After eContentplus …CIP Policy Support Progamme • Pilot actions • January 2009 call • 100 million EUR

25. Funding for new countries to join Europeana? • CENL • eContentplus • They will use digital content if it is there, but won’t pay (yet) • CIP programme • CH Research programme • Culture 2007-13 programme • National funding • Third party funding

26. Europeana and Serbia • Become interoperable with Europeana • Adopt Europeana standards/infrastructure • OAI-PMH repositories • 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

27. Thank You!! Rob Davies Scientific Co-ordinator EuropeanaLocal rob.davies@mdrpartners.com