Europeana Cloud Kick-Off Meeting, 5 March 2013, The Hague, The Netherlands. By Rob Davies

1. local content in a Europeana cloud
Rob Davies,
MDR Partners, Project Manager
LoCloud is funded by the
European Commission's ICT Policy Support Programme

3. Let’s hope it doesn’t rain

4. • Build on success of Europeana Local and CARARE Best
Practice Networks (25-30% of content in Europeana).
– 4 million + new items.
• Make it easier for small/medium institutions to make
good quality metadata and content available to
Europeana;
• Explore and test the potential of cloud computing for
aggregation, enrichment and re-use, with a special focus
on geographic location.
• Bring together local history and heritage resources
which are currently unevenly represented in the
Europeana ‘ecosystem’,
• More coherent views of content relating to a given
locality;
Main goals

5. 1. Scientific coordinator (National Archive, Norway) and a
project manager (MDR)
2. Strong group of technical partners, already important
contributors to development of Europeana, including AIT,
Athena RC, AVINET, IPCHS, NTUA and PSNC.
3. National and regional aggregation services or content
providers who will act as pilot implementers of the cloud
services; coordinate and disseminate at national level.
4. Partners with specific expertise in key aspects such as
vocabularies.
• All EU Member States represented (excluding Finland,
Luxembourg and Malta) plus Iceland, Norway, Serbia and
Turkey.
• Start date: 1 March 2013
Consortium etc

6. • ‘Default’ aggregation infrastructure in the cloud for smaller
content holders
– Build on MINT-MORE combination used in CARARE (EDM)
– Lightweight digital library
– Alternative ingestion paths
• Establish guidance, training and support facilities, built
around the LoCloud aggregation service.
• On line course
LoCloud: IaaS

7. • An enhanced aggregator service would incorporate
services that operate on the metadata (repository-
like services)
• Multi-step process
• Long lifecycle of metadata
• Need to preserve metadata
• Provide added-value from all the aggregated content
An enhanced aggregator

8. • Metadata editing (possibly collection-wide)
• Preservation services
• Rights management
• Enrichment services
• Spatial
• Thematic
• …
• Digital resources management (creation, cataloguing,
etc.)
Aggregator Services

9. An enhanced
aggregation service
Data
import
Pre-processing
(validations,…)
Ingest
(indexing,…)
Search /
Browse
EditingTransformation
Export
Enrichment

10. • Provide cloud-based software services to enable more
discoverable and interoperable content;
– geolocation enrichment tools
– metadata enrichment (NLP – English + Spanish)
– multilingual vocabularies for local history
– historic place-names ‘gazetteer’
– Wikimedia and crowdsourcing
• Cloud-based testlab
• A step toward distributed digital curation?
LoCloud: SaaS

12. Workpackage structure
Briefing, action planning in each country;
state of the art in relevant cloud
infrastructures; content and metadata
analysis; requirements analysis
WP 1
Planning, preparation and requirements
Specify, modify, test, implement core infrastructure
components: MINT, MoRe, Lightweight digital library
– all build on existing work
WP 2
Design and implementation of
aggregation infrastructure
Collaborative cloud-based testlab, involving partners
and users; develop and implement a suite of SaaS:
geolocation enrichment; metadata enrichment;
multilingual vocabularies; historic place-names;
Wikimedia and crowdsourcing
WP 3
Micro services for small and medium institutions

13. Workpackages (2)
Regional training
workshops, video, online course;
documentation and
help desk; support portal – centre
of expertise; service sustainability
planning with Europeana
WP 4
Enabling and supporting small and medium institutions
Group of inter-related evaluation
activities: infrastructure, metadata and
content; impact on institutions and end
users; Recommendations
WP 5
Evaluation and impact assessment
Website and social media; national and
international conferences and events;
competition among Europe’s regions;
sustainability planning; work with
aggregators
WP 6
Dissemination and exploitation
Coordination with Europeana Cloud
developments
WP 7
Management and coordination

14. • Move to cloud based architecture
• No single point of failure
• Scalability
• High availability
• API to access metadata & data
• Build services
• Allow content providers to create and catalogue their
digital resources on the aggregator
Future directions

15. Thank you
rob.davies@mdrpartners.com