Presentation by Rob Davies MDR Partners (Consulting) Ltd at: AccessITplus: Final project meeting 20 September 2013 Poznań, Poland

1. Europeana and AccessIT: how we got here
Poznan,Poland 30 September 2013
Rob Davies, MDR Partners, Coordinator

2. 2005

3. 2008
“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-

4. 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

5. 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

7. 2011
June 2013
26 million+ items
2000+ partner institutions

8. “there is a need for
technical solutions for
persistent identifiers”
“Europeana should be widely
promoted to end users”
Meta data should be widely and
eely available for re- use”
“Eur 100 billion
investment”
“Public Domain material should be freely
available for all”

9. 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

10. Strategic Plan 2011-2015

12. Data Exchange Agreement

14. 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

15. 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.

16. 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)

17. Cultural artefact
Buildling
Sculpture
The general picture
Networked objects
Painting

19. Main Goals
 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

20. 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

21. Main results
• 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

22. 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

23. 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 ISTPSP

24. 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 (OAIPMH)
Management and expression of content rights
Developing new services
Handling user generated content

25. 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

26. Key results of AccessIT(plus)
1. Certificated online courses for professional
enrolment in national languages
2. Digital libraries: repositories or aggregations
harvested by Europeana

28. Thank you
rob.davies@mdrpartners.com