Presentation at the seminar "Collections: storing and using of the metadata" held at the Finnish National Museum Helsinki, 16-17 November 2017

1. Data scale and diversity
issues at Europeana
Antoine Isaac
Collections – storing and using the metadata
Finnish National Museum, 16 November 2017

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What is Europeana?
CC BY-SA
Europeana’s markets and services

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Access to Europe’s cultural heritage
Europeana Essentials
CC BY-SACC BY-SA
53 million digitized objects, from 3,700 institutions in 44 countries

4. Engage people
● Place the digital cultural heritage where
people are: Wikipedia, Pinterest, online but
also in the street, participating via collection
days, or transcribathons.
● And develop more browse entry points for
specific interest areas

5. Re-use with Partners
Make content available to:
●Educators, Teacher Networks and
Ministries of Education
●Research Networks
●the Creative industries/innovators
So it they can make it work for their
audiences

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A network of data partners
●Data providers: Cultural heritage institutions providing content and metadata to
Europeana
●"Intermediate” Aggregators: organizations
or projects gathering metadata and content
for institutions from a specific country, sector,
or on a specific domain (music, archaeology,
theater…) and making it available for
Europeana and other data consumers

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What data does Europeana
hold?
Europeana Essentials
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● Descriptive and technical metadata
● Thumbnails
As a rule, content is still served from our data partners
● Some content for specific projects
● newspapers text and images
● user-generated content (Europeana 1914-1918)

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Big data?
Europeana Essentials
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Volume – not so big
● Metadata <1TB
● Thumbnails <4TB
● Some content for specific projects <10TB
53 million digitized objects, from 3,700 institutions in 44 countries

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Big data?
Europeana Essentials
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Velocity - manageable
● Approx. 2M records added or removed between May 2017
and September 2017
● Updates are done continuously, but not in real time (our
data ingestion team pushes the buttons)

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Big data?
Europeana Essentials
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Veracity - problematic
● We have big data quality issues

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Big data?
Europeana Essentials
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Variety – huge
53 million digitized objects, from 3,700 institutions in 44
countries
● Many different themes and types of objects
Books, newspapers, journals, letters, diaries, archival papers, paintings, maps, drawings,
photographs, music, spoken word, radio broadcasts, film, newsreels, television, fashion,
sculpture, 3D objects, and more
● Libraries, archives, museums have different ways to describe objects.
Even within a sector, big differences can be observed
● Heterogeneity makes quality issues even harder to cope with

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Multilinguism
Europeana Essentials
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● Officially we get metadata in 39 languages
● But there are more languages used in individual metadata
fields

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Europeana Essentials
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Work by Péter Kiraly (Göttingen Research alliance)
http://144.76.218.178/europeana-qa/languages.php?collectionId=

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Europeana Essentials
CC BY-SACC BY-SA
Work by Péter Kiraly (Göttingen Research alliance)
http://144.76.218.178/europeana-qa/languages.php?collectionId=

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Multilinguism
Europeana Essentials
CC BY-SACC BY-SA
● Officially we get metadata in 39 languages
● But there are more languages used in individual metadata
fields
• Over 400 language codes
• E.g., 6 values in x-aramaic-latn - not a valid code by the way
• But the most common case is lack of language information!

16. What do we do with it?
France, Public Domain
1914, National Library of France
Agence de presse Meurisse
Concours de cycles nautiques sur le lac
d’Enghien : Berregent piloté par Austerling

17. Segmenting - discovery

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Europeana Collections
Europeana Essentials
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Thematic collections

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Contributing to third party sites -
Wikimedia Commons
Europeana Essentials
CC BY-SACC BY-SA
Europeana 1914-1918 content on Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons| CC BY-SA

21. Segmenting - re-use

22. France, Public Domain
1932, National Library of France
Agence de presse Mondial Photo-Presse.
Tournoi royal de motos à Londres :
changement d'une roue de side-car en marche
Still, we need to
work on data

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Title here
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Europeana Essentials
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Data modelling for
interoperability and richer data
CC BY-SA
Clavecin, Bartolomeo Cristofori
Cite de la Musique,
MIMO - Musical Instruments Museums Online|CC BY-NC-SA
Europeana Data Model example

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A community driven model
• Involving experts from libraries, archives and museums, as
well as academic partners
• The input from the different communities makes the model
stronger
Bible Translators
Anatolia College, Greece | Public Domain

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The Europeana Data Model
(EDM)
OAI-
ORE
OWL

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Following the Linked Open Data
principles
http://vimeo.com/36752317

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Europeana Essentials
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Enriching data
CC BY-SA
Several processes produce richer data that
we and others can use to build new and
innovative services
• Harvesting richer Linked Open Data from
data partners
• Crowdsourcing
•Automatic semantic enrichment
Latvijas dzelzce u karteļ
1937, National Library of Latvia, Latvia | Public Domain

28. CC BY-SA
Thumbnail
Metadata
Link to data
provider
Rights

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Links to contextual entities

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The Entity Collection
Contribution to multilingual coverage
Entities effectively used to enrich Europeana Objects
Entities present in the Entity Collection

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Multilingual enrichment is not easy
Poisonous India or the Importance of a Semantic and
Multilingual Enrichment Strategy
Marlies Olensky, Juliane Stiller, Evelyn Dröge, MTSR 2012
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-35233-1_2

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Data Quality Committee
Working on recommendations for the community on:
○ Mandatory metadata elements for ingestion of EDM data
○ Metadata checking and normalization
○ Meaningful metadata values (in the context of use)
○ Quality of content (digital media)
○ Coordination with other quality-related initiatives
http://pro.europeana.eu/get-involved/europeana-tech/data-quality-committee

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Title here
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Name of image | Creator
Providing organization|
Country, licence
Name of image | Creator
Providing organization| Country, licence
antoine.isaac@europeana.eu
@antoine_isaac