Europeana Libraries: what is the value of a library domain aggregator? Susan Reilly (LIBER) LIBER 2012, Tartu

What this is not It is not about a portal It is not about end users It is not a sales pitch It`s about sharing our motivaton for joining this project and why we thought (think) it is worthwhile....

What’s on? 4 networks and project The big idea Friends with benefits Back to the future

Four networks and a project Europeana Libraries is a 2-year project funded by the European Commission’s ICT-PSP programme Will add over 5 million digital objects to Europeana 19 research and university libraries are participating Coordinated by The European Library Mixture of content: 3,319,045 pages 598,130 books and theses 368,000 articles 848,078 images 1,200 film and video clips 34,000 mixed content objects

Four networks and a project Network libraries: LIBER, CERL, CENL Project: Europeana Libraries The European Library: the library aggregator for Europeana Europeana: Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual aggregator

The big Idea Bring digital content from European national and research libraries to the researcher

The big idea Increasing amount of digital content in libraries Change in research behaviour, increase in cross disciplinary research Gap in provision of research infrastructure for the humanities Shrinking library budgets and more pressure to show ROI

The big idea All European cultural heritage available online by 2025 (Neelie Kroes) All public domain masterpieces available in Europeana(Digital Agenda) Cost= 10 billion per year over the next 10 years (Collections Trust) Increase in Open Access and born digital content

Growth in systematic collaboration More complex research Less time for research (occurs in bursts) Some barriers: Lack of linking between archives Lack of standadisation of online databases and archives Difficulties in data linking arising from the lack of standardisation, and the inconsistencies in quality, reliability, and functionality across different resources

The big idea Source the content Aggregate it Improve it Make it available in a meaningful way And…… do all this in a sustainable manner

The big idea A valuable resource for researchers with full-text search capabilities A robust network of national and research libraries An efficient sustainable aggregation model for research libraries across Europe This means developing the framework for a library domain aggregation service! !!!

Creating the business model

Friends with benefits Efficiency Effectiveness Visibility Credibility

Friends with benefits Research and National Libraries have worked together before….. But not through the same aggregator….

Efficiency

Visibility Digitisation equals visibility: Prof. David Nicholas (yesterday)

Effectiveness

Credibility

Friends with benefits Consultation & articulation of value proposition Business Model Business Plan

Friends with benefits Enabling searching of bibliographic records of texts in hard copy and metadata for related digitised texts at the same time Offering OCR services for providers’ digital content to support full text searching in the portal Pushing the data out to other academic / research services Providing access to universities’ own digital repositories …and more?

Back to the future Some hurdles Do we really share a common vision? What if research libraries don’t sign up to the service? Can we ensure that researchers use the portal?

Back to the future More content More tools/services More innovation More contact with the reseach community

Back to the future Service opened up to all research libraries New projects for new innovation, service,and content Europeana Newspapers Europeana Cloud