Presentation on The European Library given at Consortium for European Research Libraries AGM, October 2012

2. Future Directions
for The European
Library
Alastair Dunning,
Programme Manager
@alastairdunning
www.theeuropeanlibrary.org

3. Previously, The European Library
has
• Brought European National
Libraries together
• Created a shared European
catalogue
• Acted as the forerunner of
Europeana

4. But the focus has been on
• National Libraries
• Bibliographic data
• Europeana Libraries project (2011-2)
began working with research libraries
and research content
• How do we include Research
Libraries at a service level ?

5. New(ish) forms created in digital research
libraries
• Research datasets
• OA journal articles (and monographs)
• Digitisation of special collections
• Theses
• Mass book digitisation
• Grey literature
• Digitised special collections (and
descriptions)
• Open Educational Resources

6. Plenty of other significant players in this
field
• OCLC World Cat
• Google Book Search
• Google Scholar
• Microsoft Research
• Hathi Trust
• arXiv, Cessda, PubMed Central, DARIAH
• Open-AIRE (Driver), BASE

7. Special Collections
 “… as non unique and common research
material becomes more accessible online, often
without the need for library mediation (e.g.
Google Books), the salience of Unique and
Distinctive Collections grows stronger still. They
can attract researchers and research funding,
and enhance the institution’s extramural
reputation … a valuable asset.”
 http://www.rluk.ac.uk/files/UDC%20Project%20Plan%20revised%20post%20Board%2011%20Oct.pdf (RLUK
Unique and Distinctive Collections Project)

8. Special Collection
descriptions
“To be used effectively Unique and Distinctive
Collections must be visible and their contents
discoverable. Their existence needs to be
promoted. Collection level descriptions need to
be widely disseminated. At item level full online
cataloguing is usually essential; often more
detailed indexing may be necessary in the case
of specialist materials and discovery of content.”
 http://www.rluk.ac.uk/files/UDC%20Project%20Plan%20revised%20post%20Board%2011%20Oct.pdf (RLUK
Unique and Distinctive Collections Project)

9. Special Collection
descriptions
 Many collections are not known to networks of
research communities
 TEL can provide a point for item and collection
descriptions of special collections
 Can do this within a European context, ie shared
with similar collection descriptions of other
libraries
 Provides greater institutional awareness as well

10. Digitised Collections
 However, descriptions not enough … access to
full-text (or digitised item) is taken as the norm.
 Therefore, where materials are digitised, TEL
offers opportunity to aggregate on a large scale
 Not just special collections - books and
newspapers
 Again, this can help with discovery and provide
link back to original library
 Two examples – manuscripts / newspapers

12. 12

13. Digitised Collections
 Aggregations of full text also give opportunity for
new research uses
 Digital Humanities are galvanised by existence
of such corpora
 Multiple methodologies in linguistics, geography,
literature, history to exploit such text
 Related opportunities for enriching texts –
annotation, entity recognition, crowdsourcing
etc.
 Working with research libraries, TEL can provide
aggregation
 Developing relationship with related projects

14. A European research platform
 Europeana Cloud project (2013-5) puts
some of this into practice
• Ability for contributing partners to share and
retrieve content within a common space (‘a
cloud’)
• Ability for research community to build tools
on top of this content
• Europeana Research platform, led by TEL
 Utilising Europeana networks and position
as part of ‘Connecting Europe Facility’

15.  But special collections are far from a
library’s only contents.
 TEL will aggregate any metadata from
research library.
 Exposing aggregated data as linked data
and via an API
 Exposing data via other sources (EBSCO,
ProQuest, ExLibris)
 Aggregating full text also feasible

16.  Opportunity to create links between
different formats from different sources –
digitised book and OA article
 Opportunity to create ‘views’ specific for
different subject areas, particularly
humanities and social sciences
 Exploring relationship between citation
patterns (DiggiCore project)
 Dependent on further work on metadata
development and semantic enrichment

17. In practice …
 Sustainability ... Inviting Research
Libraries to join TEL
 Exposing / linking to their metadata /
content / institutional holdings
 Asking Research Libraries via CERL and
LIBER to contribute to TEL strategy
 Exploiting the aggregation of digitised
material – not just bibliographic records
 Development of Europeana Cloud project
 A Europeana Research platform