This document discusses efforts to aggregate and enhance collection-level metadata from various European libraries to improve discovery of digitized and non-digitized materials. Only about 10-12% of collections are currently digitized. The European Library collects metadata from over 50 contributors and has enhanced over 500 collection descriptions. Collection descriptions are being integrated into research platforms like CENDARI to facilitate historical research by connecting sources to relevant questions. Future work includes linking collection metadata to full text and other data sources.

1. Discovering libraries’ gold
through collection-level
descriptions
ELAG 2014, Bath 06-2014
Valentine Charles
Data specialist

2. Large scale aggregation
and its ecosystem
 The European Library collects metadata for
digital and non-digital materials from
• 48 National Libraries
• More than 50 University and Research libraries

3.  According to the
ENUMERATE survey 10-
12% of content is digitised
 Only 10% of the 132 million
objects held at the Library of
Congress digitised
 http://www.nytimes.com/200
7/03/10/business/yourmoney
/11archive.html?
pagewanted=all&_r=1&
Digitisation still in progress…

4. For the many digitised resources

5.  Identification of the metadata fields
 Enhancements of more than 500
Collection Level Descriptions
 Surveys were sent to libraries members
to identify:
• new digital collections;
• special collections (digital and physical);
• physical collections;
Collection descriptions as a
strategy

7. Collaborating with a specific
community: digital humanities
 Traditional Humanities users want to
search in large corpora and find special
items.
 But
•Collections relevant for researchers are not
always available in a digital form
•Many collections are not known to research
communities

8. Collection descriptions for researchers

9. Collection descriptions for researchers
CENDARI builds a research infrastructure
that
Allows historical inquiry beginning with
research questions
Facilitates historical research processes
Supports transnational and comparative
approaches
Focusses on discovery and linking sources
with research data

10. Collection descriptions for researchers
 CENDARI has built an archive directory
• 800 collection descriptions were collected for WW1
and Medieval studies
• More than 100 supplied by The European Library

11. Collaborating with a specific
community: digital humanities
 Digitial humanities users
• want to exploit large corpora in new ways
• want to integrate corpora with other data

12. Archival research guide

13. Integrate collection descriptions
with researchers’ studies
The Archival research guides:
• access points to relevant contemporary research
questions
• Connect collection description to others resources via
domain specific ontologies
• Combined with faceted search, annotations, note-
taking tools, NER
• linked to the community of historians

14.  Collections descriptions are even more
interesting when integrated to other data
• Alignment of subjects, place names, time
period with LOD vocabularies
 The European Library publishes its data
as linked data and via an API
• Data in RDF, and JSON
Beyond collection descriptions

15. Next steps
 The European Library will look into connecting
even more collections to its other data
• Link with full text for instance gives opportunity for new
research uses
• Develop opportunities for enriching collection
descriptions with annotation, named entity
recognition, vocabularies enrichment…
• And incorporate the results of the collaboration with
CENDARI
 CENDARI project runs for two more years so
stay tuned!

16. Thank you
Valentine Charles
Valentine.charles@kb.nl
 www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/
 www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/access
 www.cendari.eu/