Local Content in the Europeana Cloud

Kate Fernie, 2Culture Associates

LoCloud is funded by the European Commission's ICT Policy Support Programme

Sharing Cultural Heritage Online with LoCloud: workshopDigital Heritage, 1st October, 2015

Granada, Spain

Pôle de la Mémoire Locale du Bourgeais (Bourg, France) CC-BY-NC-ND

Our journey

• Best practice network funded by the EU under the CIP ICT PSP programme

• 1st March 2013 to 29th February 2016

• 33 partners in 26 countries• Scientific coordinator: National Archives, Norway

• Project management: 2Culture Associates, UK

• Strong group of technical partners

• National and regional aggregation services, and individual content providers

http://www.locloud.eu

Our partners work with large numbers of local museums, libraries, archives and independent collections with an enormous amount of interesting content which is increasingly available online.

Spanish football with Kubala as coach (between 1974 and 1983)from Pontevedra Public Library and Asturian Library, Public Domain

Network

• To add over 4 million digital resources from small and medium-sized cultural institutions to Europeana

• To make it easier for small/medium institutions to make good quality content available Increase the amount of local history and heritage resources available to Europeana users

• Enable more views of content relating to localities for education, tourism, creativity and more

Main project goals

Europeana

• A huge online database of information about cultural content held by European cultural heritage institutions

• A network of organisations and expertise• A catalyst for new services

http://www.europeana.eu

Statue of Apollo Curium – under repair, Cyprus Unversity of Technology

It can seem like heavy lifting

Project activities• Supporting cultural institutions in making their content

available to Europeana• Creating technical solutions suitable for smaller institutions• Exploring the potential of cloud-computing technologies• Creating metadata enrichment services• Providing support, guidance and training

Skaters CC-BY-NCJavni Zavod Republike Slovenije za

Varstvo Kulturne Dediscine

• Based on the open source Omeka system• Allows users to publish digital objects on-line in a few minutes• Scalable, user friendly, with OAI-PMH interface • Provides storage for metadata and content in various formats• Incorporates web traffic analytics• Cloud-based • Developed by PSNC

LoCloud Collections

https://locloudhosting.net/

Example

Where?

Piper's Crag, West Yorkshire. © Carved Stone Investigations: Rombalds Moor (CSIRM)

What?

When?

http://support.locloud.eu/

Cloud-based micro-services for metadata enrichment and capture:

• Where– Geo-location – Historic Place Names service– Geo-coding application

• What– Vocabulary service• Vocabulary matching service • Background linking service

Enriching records

Geo-coding• Institutions can upload metadata records to add geographic

coordinates using place name gazetters• Can be used in crowd-sourcing environments• Enriched data loaded back into the original databases.

http://support.locloud.eu/

• Many local historical archives relate to places whose names changed in modern times

• The Historic Place Names Service enables local cultural institutions to collaborate in developing a thesaurus

• For use in enriching metadata records

Historic Place Name Service

Sebastian Munster. Europa Regina, Cosmographia, Basel, 1570, [Wikipedia.org].

http://support.locloud.eu/

Que?

• LoCloud Vocabulary service is based in TemaTres• Incorporates 29 standard thesauri available as Linked Open

Data• Allows users to • add and create vocabularies• add terms to vocabularies• add translations• Enrich their records

http://vocabulary.locloud.eu/

Wolf Skull and Child, Co. Cavan, Ireland, Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland

Core infrastructure to aggregate the metadata from our partners and provide to Europeana:

• MINTo Metadata mapping and ingestion

• MORe aggregator framework o Metadata harvesting, validation and enrichmento User-friendly interface for data providers

Aggregator

http://support.locloud.eu/

Integrates the microservices

• LoCloud support portal includes– user and technical documentation– eLearning materials– Question-and-Answer service– Access to a ticket desk system– Videos!

http://support.locloud.eu

Journey’s end or new beginnings?

• LoCloud has developed services and aggregation infrastructure in the cloud

• for local cultural institutions to publish their content online and to supply it to Europeana

• Over to our partners

Cluj in the second half of the 20th century, Public Domain

Thank you!

LoCloud is funded by the European Commission's ICT Policy Support Programme

The views and opinions expressed in this presentation are the sole responsibility of the

authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission.

kfernie27@gmail.com

http://www.locloud.eu