Symposium Nederlands erfgoed in Europees perspectief, 31 januari 2013, Amersfoort

1. Europeana and CARARE
Amersfoort, 31 januari 2013
Jan Molendijk

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

3. Europeana - Why
• Online access to cultural heritage
• Alternative to??
• Yes and no…

4. Europeana - vision
• Search through all of Europe’s cultural heritage,
using your own language, and get results that
are relevant, inspiring, educational, fun
• Europe’s digitised cultural heritage accessible
and 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

5. Europeana - Why
• Focus on access and findability, not on
storage
• 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?

6. Europeana - When
• Initiative in 2006, letter from Sarkozy and 6 other
European 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,

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. Europeana - How
• A lot of meetings, a lot of travelling
• Financed through eContentPlus project
Europeana Version 1/2/3 + contributions
from 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

11. 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…

12. 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

13. Vragen?

14. 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?

15. 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

16. 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