All posts by Marcin Werla
First million of digital objects from Poland in Europeana!
Today another data synchronisation between Polish Digital Libraries Federation and Europeana has been finished. Europeana is a portal which aim is to give access to digitised cultural heritage coming from collections of European cultural heritage institutions. This portal is filled with data about cultural heritage objects via a network of so called metadata aggregators – services which are responsible for gathering data from cultural heritage institutions and passing it to Europeana (with some additional processing if necessary). The Digital Libraries Federation is the only one Polish metadata aggregator and supports data transfer from 70 different services to Europeana. The data comes initially from several hundred cultural heritage institutions, including libraries, museums and archives.
During the data transfer finished on the 8 February, the Federation provided data describing 783 275 objects (previously it was around 550 thousands). Several Polish institutions provide data to Europeana independently from the Federation, cooperating with international metadata aggregators. These institutions provide metadata about another 313 950 objects. Therefore on the 8 February 2012 the total number of digital objects visible in Europeana, and provided by Polish cultural and scientific institutions crossed 1 million and now is exactly 1 097 225. More detailed information about Polish metadata providers is in the table at the end of this text.
Currently Europeana gives access to data about 22 976 336 objects, and the group of Europena’s millionaires beside Poland (4,76% share in the total number of objects) includes the following seven countries:
- France – 3 674 775 objects (15,99%)
- Germany – 3 339 475 objects (14,53%)
- Sweden – 2 359 314 objects (10,27%)
- Italy- 2 086 224 objects (9,08%)
- Spain – 1 873 783 objects (8,16%)
- Norway – 1 557 820 objects (6,78%)
- The Netherlands – 1 222 818 objects (5,32%)
Poznań Supercomputing and Netrworking Center, operator of the Digital Libraries Federation, besides cooperation related to the data transfer, is also country coordinator of Europeana PR activities. This duty is performed as a part of the Europeana Awareness project, in the cooperation with National Audiovisual Institute.
18th “Digitisation” Seminar
Dziś w Warszawie miało miejsce osiemnaste seminarium z cyklu “Digitalizacja” zorganizowane przez Centrum Promocji Informatyki, a prowadzone przez dra Henryka Hollendera. Program tej edycji seminarium składał się z ośmiu wystąpień podzielonych na trzy bloki tematyczne. W pierwszym z nich dr Edyta Kotyńska przedstawiła analizę funkcjonowania polskich bibliotek cyfrowych przeprowadzoną pod kątem procesów czy też zadań, które są realizowane w przypadku takiego przedsięwzięcia oraz ich ustandaryzowania i udokumentowania. Poza wprowadzeniem teoretycznym w wystąpieniu przedstawione zostały również wyniki ankiety, którą autorka przeprowadziła wśród instytucji tworzących polskie biblioteki cyfrowe.
Continue reading 18th “Digitisation” Seminar
DLF on the highway of digital information
Distributed Catalogue of Polish Libraries (KaRo), allowing to search the contents of library catalogues from several tenths of Polish libraries (including National Union Catalogue and the National Library) is available in the new version – KaRo 3. Cooperation between the KaRo author and the PSNC Digital Libraries Team allowed to include in KaRo for the first time also results from the Polish Digital Libraries Federation. From now on KaRo users will be able to find out with one query if particular publication is available on-line in one of DLF digital libraries and if it is included in the catalogue of one of the libraries. Sample search results are on the screenshot below.
Integration between KaRo and FBC was made with the use of OpenSearch protocol. detailed information on DLF OpenSearch API can be found here. New version of KaRo was developed as a part of NUKAT – AUTOSTRADA INFORMACJI CYFROWEJ (NUKAT – HIGHWAY OF DIGITAL INFORMATION) project .
December 1980 in resources of Polish Digital Libraries Federation
If you are interested, how life in Poland looked like shortly before the beginning of the martial law, you can check the resources of Polish digital libraries. For example among materials from December 1980 you can find:
- Errata. Miesięcznik Niezależnego Zrzeszenia Studentów Politechniki Poznańskiej – independent students magazine, edition issued on 1980.12.12
- Tygodnik Chełmski. Pismo PZPR, R.I Nr 10 – magazine published by the communists party, edition issued on 1980.12.13
- Biuletyn Informacyjny MKZ NSZZ Solidarność Województwa Chełmskiego, Nr 1 – local Solidarity magazine issued on 1980.12.09
Google analytics for digital library evaluation
If you are interested in the topic of evaluation and monitoring of digital libraries, I recommend you to read the master thesis of Hsin Ju Lee titled “Google analytics for digital library evaluation“. Hsin Ju a year ago joined our team for a few months as an intern. She wrote her thesis as a part of the DILL master studies and for this purpose she was using Google Analytics data of the Polish Digital Libraries Federation.
QR Codes in the Rabbit House
Since 22 October in the Xawery Dunikowski Sculpture Museum w Królikarna (The Rabbit House) – a branch of the National Museum in Warsaw (MNW) you can see an exhibition titled „KoLekcja w Królikarni” (Collesson in the Rabbit House). On the Królikarnia website you can find that, this exposition is “thought to be an announcement of the new image of the permanent galleries in the main building of the MNW” and that “it prepares the visitors to see familiar works, but presented in a new concept – not in chronological and geographical order, but according to types and functions of paintings”.
This exhibition is also the first one in the history of the MNW, where the information plates located near the paintings contain specially encoded links to more detailed information about these paintings available in the Digital National Museum in Warsaw. To achieve this in the Digital National Museum a series of themed collections was created representing particular parts of the exhibition:
- KoLekcja: Old Painter’s Workshop. Inventio et Repetitio
- KoLekcja: Engraver’s Workshop
- KoLekcja: Studio of inspired artist
- KoLekcja: City – Workshop
- KoLekcja: Storia or How to Paint a Man and His Passions
- KoLekcja: Portrait. Memory and Likeness
- KoLekcja: Landscape or In the Search for Territory
- KoLekcja: Genre Scene
- KoLekcja: Still Life
In these collections you will find descriptions and digital images of exhibits, which can be seen in the Rabbit House. With the use of functionality provided by dMuseion, a system developed by PSNC, creators of the exhibition were able prepare QR codes containing links to exhibits’ descriptions available on-line. Then these codes were placed on the exhibits’ information plates in the MNW branch.
Visitors of the exhibition, looking at the exhibits, with thier mobile phones equipped in a camera, a general QR code software Internet access, are able to get additional information about exhibits. This information is made available via dMuseion system with websites optimized for viewing on mobile devices.
Mobile devices users in the Digital Library of Wielkopolska
Some of this website readers may be interested in data about the number of visits from mobile devices in the largest Polish digital library – the Digital Library of Wielkopolska (DLW). On the basis of Google Analytics data recorded in the first half of 2011, we can say that the general distribution of systems of DLW users is the following:
- Windows: 396 586
- Linux: 6 103
- Macintosh: 6 907
- Unknown: 405
- Other: 814
This makes 410 815 visits total. If from the “Other” category we will select only mobile devices systems, the ranking will be the following:
- iPad: 249 (83)
- Android: 201 (39)
- iPhone: 189 (16)
- SymbianOS: 54 (1)
- iPod: 38 (14)
- Sony: 19 (3)
- BlackBerry: 18 (1)
- Nokia: 15 (0)
- Samsung: 12 (2)
- LG: 2 (1)
The number in brackets in the number of returning visits i.e. visits included in the overall number of visits, but such visits, which were not the first visits of the particular user on the DLW website. This makes 797 visits total in the period of 6 months, and out of this 160 are returning visits.
One of the key issues of the mobile devices users is the fact that majority of materials from Polish digital libraries are historical documents which are made available on-line as digital images (scanned pages) and not as text documents. On the other hand, the e-paper readers which are gaining popularity in Poland, are focused on presentation of documents prepared for flexible changing of text layout.
Second issue which may seem to be problematic is the support fordocuments in DjVu format, which is the format of about 80% of objects available through the Polish Digital Libraries Federation (see http://fbc.pionier.net.pl/owoc/attr-stats#format). It is worth to know, that necessary software is available both for Android (e.g. http://code.google.com/p/ebookdroid/) and iOS (e.g. http://xzonesoftware.com/products/xdjvu).
If you are interested in the problems related with the use of objects from digital libraries on mobile devices you may find interesting a post titled “Dlaczego nie potrafię wyrzec się książki tradycyjnej? Czego chcę od bibliotek cyfrowych?” on the e-book.info.pl blog (Polish version only).
Polish Digital Libraries Conference – Last days for registration
The registration for the 2011 Polish Digital Libraries Conference will be open for only two more weeks. Current edition of the conference will be held in Kórnik Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences between 10th and 13th of October. The conference will be accompanied by two parallel tutorials, a workshop and the demonstration day of the IMPACT project.
Detailed program of the conference (in Polish) is available at: http://www.man.poznan.pl/PBC/2011-program-konferencji/
Attendees registration for the Polish Digital Libraries 2011 conference
Since today the registration for the Polish Digital Libraries 2011 Conference and associated events. In the next week we are also going to publish the agenda of these evets.