Europeana Cloud Kick-Off Meeting, 5 March 2013, The Hague, The Netherlands. By Alastair Dunning

1. What we learnt yesterday / The honesty box

2. What we learnt yesterday:
eCloud - What's in it for a content provider:
• Possibility to get enriched data back
• Citation / provenance are important (also for end users)
• Persistent identifiers are essential
• Any cloud must be secure and trusted
• There should be direct access to make changes (regardless of your
place in the aggregation chain)
• The process of updating metadata / content should be automated
• Potential for batch download of data from Europeana eco-system

3. What we learnt yesterday:
eCloud - What's in it for the users:
• Notification of new content
• Be able to create corpora of content from different sources
(Europeana ecosystem and external)
• Researchers need to manage their own collections
• Researchers must be able to build own tools
• eCloud may tackle rights issues (ie access to protected content for
research communities) but rights / authentication should be invisible
to researchers
• Creating valuable links between data (primary and secondary
sources)

4. How Will Researchers Access the Cloud?
Via third party tools and services built on top of
the Cloud
The project needs to decide who can have access
to the cloud and with what permissions (ie who
can upload, edit, and download)

5. How Will Researchers Access the Cloud?
Content & Data
3rd Party Tools “Portal”
“Annotation”
“API”
“SPARQL”
Europeana services
+ 3rd Party
Services

6. Why aren't more commercial aggregators involved
(Elsevier, Science Direct etc) … the ‘interesting
content’
- Difficult to introduce commercial providers in EU projec
- But content Strategy work in WP1 – to what extent should
publishers’ content be available via Europeana Research ?
- Europeana happy to have dialogue more generally with engaged
publishers
- But will they license their metadata as CC0 ?
- (Is cultural heritage content not interesting … ?)

7. How to successfully align the technical
developments and the community orientated
activities in the project ?
WP2 / WP5 interactions defined in Description of Work
Joint Meetings
Content Co-ordination group between overlapping WPs

8. “Will there be more than metadata in the cloud? If
so, where will it come from?”
• Content will be accessible via the Cloud, though it might not be stored in the
Cloud
• This work is in WP4, M18-24, to define 5m pages of content to be made
available via Europeana
• But work actually starts today with Content Auction. Where could extra content
come from ?
• Partners within project
• Other cultural heritage institutions, particularly those with open content
• Publishers
• Other new media companies

9. What is the relationship between The European
Library and Europeana in the project
The European Library (TEL, the library aggregator for Europe) and
Europeana share the same office and both have tasks in this project
 Europeana will lead the strategic work (WP5)
 The European Library will be the main point of ingestion (WP4)
 The technical construction of the Cloud will be shared (WP2)

10. “Please define CONTENT regarding quality,
licensing, long-life data storage, ownership, etc…”
… good questions … to be answered during the project
What quality content will be required for Europeana Cloud (ie
resolution of image, format) – To be defined by content provider but
it requires minimum standards
Who owns the content in the Cloud ? The original copyright holder
Length of storage …. Ooh, tricky one.

11. “The Europeana dataset has been created from a political
perspective. How has this influenced the scope and content
of the dataset? And, does Europeana have to take this into
account in order to serve researchers’ needs?”
No – politics perhaps created the concept of Europeana, but the dataset
is driven by what ever projects and aggregators can provide.
Europeana has limited ability to influence national digitisation
policies.
This fact does need to be taken into account in the WP1 content
strategy work