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

"A common multilingual access point would make it possible to search Europes 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 Europes cultural and scientific heritage with the world online 2

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 3

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

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 5

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) 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 6

7 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 EURBICA FIAT ACE EMF CENL LIBER MICHAEL KB ICOM Europe CERL INA BA European Regional Branch of Intl. Council on Archives Intl. Fed. of Television Archives Association Cinémathèques Europeennes European Museums Forum Conference of European National Librarians Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe National Library of The Netherlands International Council of Museums Europe Consortium of European Research Libraries Institut Audiovisuel, France Bundesarchiv, Germany

9 Thematic Network: 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 The work of Europeana.net

10 Europeana - structure

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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 12

The policy background 13

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 Commissions i2010 strategy for the digital economyi2010 strategy Launched in September

Across Museums, Archives, Libraries, Audiovisual Archives and other content owners Centres of Competence Access Digitisation Preservatio n 15

Contribution and role 16

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) 17

Duration 36 months Budget 4.3 million Euro (80% funded) Person-months in total 32 Partners 39 Deliverables 18

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 19

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 20

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 21

Contributing content – not straightforward Content collections items and resources Content providers, mediators and aggregators Machine-to-machine technologies End-user service technologies EDLocal content provider organisation Content XML/HTTP Resources Collections Metadata harvesting Legacy databases Standards Items IPR Metadata OCR Mining Commission EDLocal Michael EDL Foundation Committee of Regions National Cps Ministries of Culture Local Cps Regional Cps National initiatives Thematic networks MinervaTEL Tagging Folksonomies Ontologies OWL RDF OAI-PMH SemanticWeb Meta noise Taxonomies Collabularies Search engines Geography Deep content Web Services Web 2.0 Future services Syndication/RSS/Atom XML/HTTP WIKIs Participation Blogs Open Source Multi-lingual services Business models AJAX IPR EDLnet Application profiles Authentication Controlled vocabularies Payment i2010 Google TELplus TEL-ME-MOR Europeana Fedora DSpace Greenstone SKOS 22

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 23

Europeana content holders Content level (infinite) Local level (1000s) National level (10s) European level (1) European Digital Library Virtual Information Space National ArchivesNational Libraries Aggregated repositories Archives Items & Collections Libraries Items & Collections Museums Items & Collections 24

How to persuade local institutions to contribute? Pragmatic approcah Must take into account existing infrastructure and systems Wider picture Improved discoverability and accessibility to content Regional services Need to establish basis for services on regional level Granularity Must be able to link content to common ontology European services Need a killer application on trans national level Legacy systems A multitude of database and storage technologies exist without any apparent standardisation Local repository Local services are built on existing systems and the local repository doesnt immediately add value to existing system Regional repository Regional repositories might form the basis for services useful to local institutions but do not currently exist EDL repository Once information arrives in EDL repository metadata granularity will have increased because of harmonization EDL applications EDL applications are currently focussed on 3rd party end-users and does not immediately add value to local institutions 25

1.Kick off meeting, London 26/7 June 2.Analyse content available, metadata and infrastructures in use themes? 3.Europeana sets up parallel test environment index harvested EuropeanaLocal content implement Europeana interface developments on content 4.Guidance on installing repositories support for implementation where necessary Fedora, DSpace, Greenstone, LMS etc 5.Import from existing databases to OAI-PMH repositories automate metadata conversion? 6.Transform vocabularies to improve semantics 26

7.Regional training workshops and technical help/support 8.Local implementation planning 9.Move towards sensible levels of aggregation Low entrance barrier for new content suppliers to join 10.Promote low-cost digitisation (e.g. Minerva guidelines) 11.Policy/dissemination work National Meetings Website 12.Evaluation and progress monitoring User perspective, national user groups, impact study 27

Technology and standards 28

Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting Item metadata URL Collection metadata Object Reuse and Exchange Object data OAI-PMH Repository & Toolkit Metadata storage Object data model for storage of metadata according to a joint EDLocal application profile Data migration toolkit Tools to facilitate migration of metadata from existing object data model to repository including harmonization Web Service GetRecord, Identify, ListIdentifiers, ListMetaDataFormats, ListRecords, ListSets 29

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

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

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

Metadata enrichment Object data Persons and roles metadata Topical metadata Geography and coverage metadata Temporal metadata Mainly manually entered but also process text to look for person names 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 Difficult to get disambiguous temporal metadata but possible 33

Goal: providing the same level of discoverability to users regardless of their language Europeana reviewing research to draw upon in next phas e 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 dont have Commitment to SKOS as a tool 34

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 35

Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) specs released Oct 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 36

Europeana is not just a project – its a call for action (Yvo Volman) 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! 37

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 38

Questions/comments? MDR Partners Scientific co-ordinators: EuropeanaLocal 39