Jan Molendijk

Europeana and CARAREAmersfoort, 31 januari 2013

Europeana

• Why – purpose• When – origin and history• Where – european project in The Hague??• What – deliverables/results• How – method• Challenges

Europeana - Why

• Online access to cultural heritage• Alternative to??

• Yes and no…

Europeana - vision

• Search through all of Europe’s cultural heritage, using your own language, and get results thatare relevant, inspiring, educational, fun

• Europe’s digitised cultural heritage accessibleand used more, either through Europeana portal, or 3rd party tools (e.g., games, Blackboard, online learning, blogs, etc.)

• C-H sector cooperating throughout Europe and across domains sharing best practices, specialist knowledge, software, tools

Europeana - Why

• Focus on access and findability, not onstorage

• Mainly from trusted sources– Starting UGC experiments

• Metadata search– Starting full text search experiments

• Multi-domain: libraries, museums, archives, audio-visual archives– Add publishers’ content?

Europeana - When

• Initiative in 2006, letter from Sarkozy and 6 otherEuropean leaders, in response to Google Books initiative

• Building on previous projects (e.g. TELnet)• 2008 launch of prototype

– 2M objects

• 2010 stable production version (Rhine)– 10M objects, proper backend tooling/processes

• 2011 search and user interface enhancements (Danube)– 15M objects, nice(r) search features

• 2013 EDM based release (see preview.europeana.eu)– 24M objects, richer metadata, improved,

Europeana - Where

• The Hague, in the building of the KB, the Dutch National Library

• 35 people, from UK, Finland, Sweden, France, Germany, Denmark, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Greece, Romania, New Zealand, Canada, and Holland

• + 3 people in UK, 2 in Greece• Dozens of people in contributing projects

throughout Europe• Development Environment in Pisa, Production

System in Amsterdam and Almere• Users all over the world

Europeana - What

• Database of metadata• Aggregation/ingestion infrastrcuture• Website/portal, API, LOD• Processes / best practices

– Development and integration– Ingestion

• Thematic network– Knowledge exchange– Policies (e.g. Public Domain Charter)

• Open Source software

Europeana - What

• Over 24.000.000 objects

• Text, images, sound, video, 3D• From 31 countries: Europe + Iceland, Norway,

Switzerland, Serbia• All metadata available under CC0 license• Portal: over 20.000 visits per day and growing

• API over 80 implementations• LOD

Europeana - How

• A lot of meetings, a lot of travelling• Financed through eContentPlus project

Europeana Version 1/2/3 + contributionsfrom national ministries

• Aiming for sustainable funding under CEF from 2014/15

• About 20 other projects to work with, of which 2 are big technology projects

Europeana - How

• Germany alone has 30K C-H institutions, we estimate Europe has 200K+

• Need to work through aggregators– National (e.g., Culture.fr, Deutsche Digitale

Bibliothek)– Domain Specific (e.g., TEL, EFG)– Thematic (e.g., E. Travel, E. Judaica)

• Sustainability of Europeana– And of aggregators…

CARARE

• Challenging project• One of the first to apply EDM as a delivery

format to Europeana• Passionate about metadata quality• Especially strong on geolocation data

Vragen?

Challenges

• Cooperation on a European scale, getting all 27+ countries to participate

• Operational reality vs. Project fantasy– E.g., “all countries must provide more that 5% of the content” ☺

• Project bureaucracy• Numbers game vs. Quality of objects• Budgets for digitisation and preservation are limited• IPR and copyright issues

– Re-use of data and images– 20th century black hole

• Cooperation or competition with commercial parties?

European projects (1)

• Paper• Words have a tendency to grow into work• Detailed planning 2-3 years ahead,

changes must be accounted for in detail• Mostly 50-80% funded – need to find

matching funds• Travel almost seems to be a goal

– Which is A Good Thing: furthers cooperation

European projects (2)

• Project funding precludes longer term commitments, e.g., to hosting partners, to employees.

• 2-3 years focus vs. 500+ years commitment

• What happens when a project ends?– Example: Digitization project Russian Archive

• Multilinguality pushed– Common language is ‘bad english’– 1 -> 6 -> 27 languages