Presentation given at ELAG 2014: http://elag2014.org/programme/elag-workshops-list-page/12-3/

1. Discovering libraries’ gold
through collection-level
descriptions
ELAG 2014, Bath 06-2014
Valentine Charles
Data specialist

2. Large scale aggregation
and its ecosystem
 The European Library collects metadata for
digital and non-digital materials from
• 48 National Libraries
• More than 50 University and Research libraries

3.  According to the
ENUMERATE survey 10-
12% of content is digitised
 Only 10% of the 132 million
objects held at the Library of
Congress digitised
 http://www.nytimes.com/200
7/03/10/business/yourmoney
/11archive.html?
pagewanted=all&_r=1&
Digitisation still in progress…

4. For the many digitised resources

5.  Identification of the metadata fields
 Enhancements of more than 500
Collection Level Descriptions
 Surveys were sent to libraries members
to identify:
• new digital collections;
• special collections (digital and physical);
• physical collections;
Collection descriptions as a
strategy

7. Collaborating with a specific
community: digital humanities
 Traditional Humanities users want to
search in large corpora and find special
items.
 But
•Collections relevant for researchers are not
always available in a digital form
•Many collections are not known to research
communities

8. Collection descriptions for researchers

9. Collection descriptions for researchers
CENDARI builds a research infrastructure
that
Allows historical inquiry beginning with
research questions
Facilitates historical research processes
Supports transnational and comparative
approaches
Focusses on discovery and linking sources
with research data

10. Collection descriptions for researchers
 CENDARI has built an archive directory
• 800 collection descriptions were collected for WW1
and Medieval studies
• More than 100 supplied by The European Library

11. Collaborating with a specific
community: digital humanities
 Digitial humanities users
• want to exploit large corpora in new ways
• want to integrate corpora with other data

12. Archival research guide

13. Integrate collection descriptions
with researchers’ studies
The Archival research guides:
• access points to relevant contemporary research
questions
• Connect collection description to others resources via
domain specific ontologies
• Combined with faceted search, annotations, note-
taking tools, NER
• linked to the community of historians

14.  Collections descriptions are even more
interesting when integrated to other data
• Alignment of subjects, place names, time
period with LOD vocabularies
 The European Library publishes its data
as linked data and via an API
• Data in RDF, and JSON
Beyond collection descriptions

15. Next steps
 The European Library will look into connecting
even more collections to its other data
• Link with full text for instance gives opportunity for new
research uses
• Develop opportunities for enriching collection
descriptions with annotation, named entity
recognition, vocabularies enrichment…
• And incorporate the results of the collaboration with
CENDARI
 CENDARI project runs for two more years so
stay tuned!

16. Thank you
Valentine Charles
Valentine.charles@kb.nl
 www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/
 www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/access
 www.cendari.eu/