Introduction to Europeana's relationship to researchers as part of eCloud prjoect

1. Europeana and Researchers
Alastair Dunning (The European Library/ Europeana Foundation)
Based in the National Library of the Netherlands
http://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-cloud
#cloud_EU / @europeana_cloud

2. Europeana relies on an ecosystem of
aggregators and data providers to create
its central index of metadata records
These records point to items of digitised
content from Europe’s cultural heritage
sector

3. Who submits data to Europeana?
Domain Aggregators
National initiatives
Libraries
National Aggregators
e.g.
Culture
Grid,
Culture.fr
e.g. The
European
Library
Regional Aggregators
Archives
e.g. APEX
Audiovisual
collections
e.g. EUScreen,
European Film
Gateway
Thematic collections
e.g. Musées
Lausannois
e.g. Judaica Europeana,
Europeana Fashion

4. Countries providing content – top 16

5. This creates an index of c.30m records.
These can be searched via the
Europeana portal, via the API, and
downloaded as freely available open
data

6. Screneeshot of portal,

7. The European Library
(sorry about confusing name) has 120m
bibliographic records, drawn from 48
national libraries of Europe and >20
research libraries

9. This model of data aggregation (ie
Europeana’s content strategy) has
strengths
Strong supply chain
Strong network
Standarisation in licensing and metadata
frameworks

10. This model of data aggregation (ie
Europeana’s content strategy) has
weaknesses
Not demand driven
Varying qualities of metadata
Very broad coverage but not very deep

11. Europeana is developing; becoming less of
a portal and more of a platform for others
to build tools on top of this index of
records
Something that others can build tools on
The API (application programming
interface) allows others to make more
granular use of the 30m metadata
records

13. Creates a shared infrastructure for
aggregators (and in long-term cultural
heritage institutions)
Combines metadata from Europeana, with
that from The European Library (120m
bibliographic records)
Gives opportunity to third parties to
access, modify, enrich, download that
metadata

14. eCloud is also experimenting with ingesting
content (not just metadata)
The source of this data will be located
during the project. It is likely to be out-ofcopyright data
Full-text – Easyish
Viewing (as opposed to hi-res) images - Okay
Audio-visual – Difficult

15. Building Europeana Research platform as
part of the project.
Not as a search portal over all the data
But rather a suite of specific tools that
allow better use and re-use of the
metadata for the research community,
specifically humanities and social sciences
and access to specific content

17. Helping us define Europeana Research
How can we exploit this existing data better ?
What content should we ingest in the project ?
What disciplines should we concentrate on ?
What can we do pragmatically do within the
project ?

18. What tools can be developed? 4 themes
raised in proposal
Accessing and Analysing Big Data - permitting scholars to
download, and therefore manipulate and
analyse large data sets
Annotation - allowing researchers to annotate documents and
to share these annotations
Transcription - allowing users to transcribe and interpret
documents
Discovery and Access - ensuring that services are tailored so
that research material is better discoverable
by the scholarly community

19. The Scholarly Primitives

20. What can we do short term and
long term ?
Working with specific research
projects to help them
Crowdsourcing bibliographies,
creating channels of content … a
unique ID for each piece of
cultural heritage

21. Other Work Packages will help execute this
work. WP3 is building experimental tools ;
WP4 is ingesting content
But both of these Work Packages need
advice on tools to build and content to
ingest
Hence the work of Work Package and these
Export Fora … over to you

22. Project Details
Start Date – February 2013
End Date – January 2016
Total Project Cost – 4.75m Euros
Partners - 33
EU Funding Contributing 3.8m Euros (80%)
Matched Funding 950k (20k)
co-funded by the
CIP-ICT Policy Support Programme
http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp
CIP-ICT-PSP-2012-6 - Project number 325091
the author is solely responsible for it and that it does not represent the opinion of the Community and that the Community is not responsible for any use
that might be made of information contained therein