EuropeanaLocal

1. EuropeanaLocal Championing local and regional cultural heritage Mary Rowlatt, MDR Partners Scientific Co-ordinators, EuropeanaLocal

2. Communiqué to Vision "A common multilingual access point would make it possible to search Europe’s distributed – that is to say, held in different places by different organisations – digital cultural heritage online.” European Union Communiqué August 2006 Europeana.eu inspires ideas and understanding by sharing Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage with the world online

3. Europeana.eu –The Vision • Seeing Rembrandt´s paintings as they hung in his house when he died • Together with letters of sale, books on his influence, letters to his son, his wife, his patrons • Bringing the 2 halves of the Delacroix painting, showing Chopin & George Sand, together

4. Europeana.eu –the Vision • Seeing Rembrandt´s paintings as they hung in his house when he died • Together with letters of sale, books on his influence, letters to his son, his wife, his patrons • Bringing the 2 halves of the Delecroix painting showing Chopin & George Sand together • Allowing every EU country to tell its stories from Royalty to Rags and to virtually repatriate their treasures • A virtual Cultural Tourism giving relevance to our great institutions • The following of a research trail..........

5. Aims and Principles • To pull together disparate sources, languages and formats to create a unique search experience for the user through the portal AND in other environments such as learning and tourism • Enable access to 2 million objects at launch • Have a google speed search in the deep web, across the domains and material types • User centred development • Emphasis on interoperability and standards

6. Predecessor infrastructural projects • TEL (The European Library) • Collaborative platform of 48 CENL national libraries • Managed by The European Library Office, KL Netherlands • Free searching, object level, standardised metadata, multilingual access • Sequence of projects ((IST, eContentplus) 2003- • Each bringing in more national libraries and advancing technically • MICHAEL/MICHAELPLus (2004-8) • Driven mainly by Ministries of Culture • Funded under e-Ten • Access to collection descriptions • Research projects (FP6/ICT) • DELOS, BRICKS, QVIZ and more

7. Roadmap • End of 2006: full collaboration among EU National Libraries • From 2007 collaboration 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 million books, films, photographs, manuscripts, and other cultural works accessible by 2008 • At least 6 million works by 2010

8. EDL Foundation

9. The work of Europeana.net • Thematic Network: 2007-9 • Establish trust between the institutions • Create the organisational structure for Europeana • Tackle domain interoperability issues (standards) • Propose a practical implementation/prototype • Business model • Annual cost 3.6 million EUR • EC projects + national ministries + site revenue • Item or object level • Make recommendations for future research

10. Europeana - structure

12. Europeana.eu – post November 2008 • 5 new content provision projects : EuropeanaLocal, EFG, Athena, Arrow and APEnet • Supported by co funding of €300,000 from the Dutch Ministry of Culture, Education and Science • 5 new projects starting early 2009 including: Europeana v.1.0 and EuropeanaConnect a fully operational service within 2 years • After eContentplus …CIP Policy Support Progamme • Pilot actions, January 2009 call, 100 million EUR

13. Digital libraries The policy background

14. i2010: Digital Libraries Initiative • Europe's cultural and scientific riches at a click of a mouse • In ancient times, the library of Alexandria was said to contain up to 70% of all human knowledge • The challenge for the digital age is to do even better than that – and make the result last longer • Flagship project of the Commission’s i2010 strategy for the digital economy • Launched in September 2005

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

16. EuropeanaLocal Contribution and role

17. EuropeanaLocal (2008-11) • Best Practice Network • Digital content sourced by regional/local libraries, museums, archives • Local content infrastructure for harvesting and indexing metadata (objects stay on original sites) • OAI-PMH repositories • Europe wide network of repositories/ aggregations • map existing metadata to Europeana Metadata Application Profile • local vocabularies ‘SKOSified’ • Establish easy processes for making content/metadata available • to Europeana and other services (tourism, education, family history, research)

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

19. EuropeanaLocal: key objectives • Improve interoperability of digital content held by regional and local museums, libraries and archives • Improve availability for access and use • estimated 20 million items identified initially by partners • prove the value of local/regionally sourced content • promote digitisation of local/regional content • Help develop Europe wide network of repositories + aggregations • support sensible levels of aggregation (digital libraries, cultural portals etc) • Integrated Europeana prototype service including EuropeanaLocal content

20. 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 • Images high in the mix • Public domain ‘cultural’ records held by archives etc. • Promote content contribution from local users/communities • More digitisation needed for full representation of all localities

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

22. 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

23. Variable starting points • Advanced practice among EuropeanaLocal partners in implementing digital libraries, portals, OAI-PMH etc • France, Norway, Poland, Spain, UK etc • Limited progress • Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Romania etc • Spectrum from somewhat centralised to very regional/local • Centralised initiatives seldom have full country coverage • Europeana target for national portal aggregations is 14 member states by 2012 • Currently 6 or 7 underway? • Collection level or item level? • EuropeanaLocal: phased approach

24. Europeana content holders

25. How to persuade local institutions to contribute?

26. Main stages • Kick off meeting, London 26/7 June • Analyse content available, metadata and infrastructures in use • themes? • Europeana sets up parallel ‘test’ environment • index harvested EuropeanaLocal content • implement Europeana interface developments on content • Guidance on installing repositories • support for implementation where necessary • Fedora, DSpace, Greenstone, LMS etc • Import from existing databases to OAI-PMH repositories • automate metadata conversion? • Transform vocabularies to improve semantics

27. Main stages (2) • Regional training workshops and technical help/support • Local implementation planning • Move towards sensible levels of aggregation • Low entrance barrier for new content suppliers to join • Promote low-cost digitisation • (e.g. Minerva guidelines) • Policy/dissemination work • National Meetings • Website • Evaluation and progress monitoring • User perspective, national user groups, impact study

28. Technology and standards

29. Open Archive Initiative

30. Europeana prototype metadata • No Europeana application profile proposed yet, data used with existing schemas • So far received in • TEL application profile • DC (simple, qualified) • MODS • METS • EAD • proprietary • Mapping and conversion done in-house at Europeana • Longer term scalabiity • will require decentralisation • automation of metadata conversion either at aggregator or central level

31. Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE) • For the Prototype launched to European Commission, Council of Ministers, 19/20 November 2008 (and until Europeana 1.0 delivers in 2010) • Metadata defined to match specific functionality of prototype • Used for search and display • Facet - defines if used for search refinement and type of facet (who, what, when, where) • Timeline – defines if used in the timeline browse function • Advanced search – defines if used in advanced search • Full search result display – defines if content is displayed in full result display • + all elements used for simple search

32. ESE… • Mixture of DC (qualified) plus 5(?) new elements • ‘Shown by: (ie URI) • ‘Shown at: a way of showing object in full context (needed e.g. for archives, ‘treasures’ which may be embedded not just jpeg) • User Tag: public tags created by registered users • Unstored: (‘bucket for useful stuff not mappable elsewhere) • Object : (internal use – identifies where to get thumbnail) • Mandatory • Date (of creation of original object – not of digitisation) • Shown by (URI of link to digital object) • Source (name of organisation holding object) • Title (title of the original object) • Type (Text, Stillimage, Movingimage, Sound) – used in search

33. Metadata enrichment Mainly manually entered but also process text to look for person names Difficult to get disambiguous temporal metadata but possible Similar technology as is applied by search engines, extracting keywords and assigning relevance according to frequency Coverage is specified in any number of ways such as geographical names, administrative entities and coordinates. Need geo-metadata

34. Multilingual Information Access • Goal: providing the same level of discoverability to users regardless of their language • Europeana reviewing research to draw upon in next phase • Gap analysis: results in January • STITCH, Telplus, CACAO, Telplus (subject headings), Multimatch • Need to progress multilingual search and retrieval on metadata in context, more automated • Full text discovery is improving with developments in machine translation etc • Treble Clef one-to-one relationship not scalable • Need repositories of online dictionaries: parsers, stemmers • some languages don’t have • Commitment to SKOS as a tool • http://www.edlproject.eu/conference/downloads/EDLconf_Sjoerd.pdf ,

35. Future steps • Europeana VI delivers first release early 2010 • Institutions/aggregators use Europeana Semantic Elements till then • 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

36. OAI-ORE • Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) specs released Oct 17 2008 • Object surrogates • ‘provide foundation for applications and services that can visualize, preserve, transfer, summarize, and improve access to the aggregations that people use in their daily Web interaction’ • Leverage the core web architecture • Potentially interactive – not just one way like OAI-PMH • Data may need re-indexing by Europeana • Run in parallel with OAI-PMH

37. Conclusion • Europeana is not just a project – it’s a call for action (YvoVolman) • Improving basic conditions for digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation • Direct support for Europeana • Need to join forces to shape the digital future of culture!

38. Europeana and Israel • Become interoperable with Europeana • Adopt Europeana standards/infrastructure • OAI-PMH repositories (and OAI-ORE) • 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 • Access and re-use resources

39. Thank you! Questions/comments? mary.rowlatt@mdrpartners.com MDR Partners Scientific co-ordinators: EuropeanaLocal www.europeanalocal.eu