The Europeana ecosystem and the role of libraries Jill Cousins The Researcher of Tomorrow, Europeana Libraries Final Conference, Madrid, December 4, 2012

Ecosystems only survive if you deliver more value than you capture (Tim OReilly)

History

People have many ways to find and use digital Cultural and Scientific Heritage End User

Access to Cultural Heritage

End User Access to Cultural Heritage scholar wikipedia search books Commons Public (Europe) Private Community Europeana EFG APEx Royal Library sound & vision national archive (Netherlands) bibliothéque national (France) Public (national) culture.fr The European Library EUScreen These can be seen as different spheres in a universe...

Publicly funded Support Digital Agenda for Europe Open Data Philosophy Europeana EU Screen APEx The European Library EFG Each with their own characteristics

The Business Model Which dictate the logic of value creation (or business model)

Europeanas had very much been supply driven

APEx Europeana InA University Computense The European Library Royal Dutch LIbrary National Archive Europeana acts as a super aggregator with a network of suppliers on whom it is dependent

We needed to change our perspective

To the demand side

It is clear that aggregation is still necessary and that it is valuable creating standards, interoperability, wide resource access etc

But the a single portal cannot cater to the needs of wildly differing customer segments...

Who have their own workflows and preferences for accessing information

So we needed to switch to being able to distribute - placing content wherever the user is and whenever they want it

The key to being able to make the switch from Aggregator to Distributor serving the user wherever they are was changing the licensing framework CC0 Open content Paid content Correct rights labels

Europeana now also acts as a super distributor CC0 Open content Paid content Correct rights labels

Is this a true ecosystem?

In this linear model, there is not enough sense of shared ownership and cooperation - Is Europeana giving more than it receives? CC0 Open content Paid content Correct rights labels

We are all trying to distribute to same markets, creating conflict, competition and confusion in the same publicly funded part of the ecosystem

And there is tension between single domain/cross domain

Drafting solutions

Europeana is a way to make our collective cultural heritage available and re- usable to foster cultural diversity and economic growth

It is comprised of hundreds of institutions and individuals that subscribe to this ideal, the Europeana Network or ecosystem. They are giving to make something better, bigger, more useful.

Can we rethink Europeana as a more collaborative, distributed model?

should we redefine Europeana as the collective wish to make our cultural heritage available for all to power social and economic growth?

Where all the partners contribute to the cloud (metadata, (open) content, software, knowledge) with a collectively owned infrastructure (Cloud)

Everyone is invited to act as a distributor by building services for users on top GLAM Research

And Europeana Foundation acts as the facilitator of this collectively owned Europeana ecosystem Licensing Framework EDM Business models Open Labs Knowledge sharing Funded by the Connecting Europe Facility content providers & aggregators

In this cloud we can develop new services such as Europeana Research that is used by Researchers and take a portion of the cake via CEF funding of the cloud infrastructure but still compete for projects. Portal VE Apps Channels API E-Research with /fashion/... with TEL/DARIAH /CLARIN

The role of libraries

To continue to pioneer access to digital material To organise content, create collections for users To turn TEL into Europeana Research To ensure interoperability & enforce standards To make users aware of valuable resources To digitise and preserve material for future generations To lead the way in cooperation & become greater than the sum of each part To support/be part of the ecosystem