In the last few days agendas of two conferences were published:
We hope to see you on both of those events!
Europeana announced that the Europeana Data Model (EDM) has just been published. It is a new way of structuring the data that Europeana will be ingesting, managing and publishing. The EDM is a major improvement on the Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE), the basic data model used from the beginning of Europeana.
The new data model has been developed by members of Europeana v1.0, EuropeanaConnect and experts from academic and cultural circles. Also, the EDM has been validated by technical specialists at libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual collections. However, the data model is still under development and it will be refined until the end of 2010. The EDM is compatible with the ESE and no data will need to be resubmitted.
Detailed information can be found in the EDM Primer and Definition of the EDM Elements.
If you are interested in the new data model, you can consider participation in two free of charge events: the Europeana Open Culture Conference (14-15 Oct, Amsterdam) and Europeana Day (19 Oct, Poznań).
According to e-biblioteka Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego (e-bUW) portal, Warsaw University Library plans to digitize and publish on-line on e-bUW around 40 thousands publications until 2012. Documents which will be scanned are part of precious collection of 19th century periodicals. Readers will be able to browse various titles including “Kurier Warszawski”, “Gazeta Warszawska” and “Korespondent Warszawski”. The full list of titles that are to be scanned can be found here.
Scanning of those precious periodicals is performed in frame of the NUKAT – AUTOSTRADA INFORMACJI CYFROWEJ project, which is co-financed by Innowacyjna Gospodarka programme. We wish e-bUW successful project and many new publication on-line.
Moreover in frame of this project, KARO system will gain possibility to search metadata of all digital libraries connected to Digital Libraries Federation portal. Integration will be based on OpenSearch API implemented in DLF.
The aim of the EuropeanaLocal project, which runs form over 2 years now, is to establish connection between local and regional cultural institutions and Europeana and to create standard proceudres for establishing such connections for institutions, which will be interested in such cooperation after the end of the EuropeanaLocal project.
An example of such activities in Poland is the Digital Libraries Federation, acting as a Polish metadata aggregator for Europeana. DLF was the first Europeana content provider connected to Europeana in the frame of EuropeanaLocal project, and this connection was made in December last year. Presently similar connections were established by aggregators of local and regional institutions from Spain, Norway, UK, Sweden, Greece, Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Austria.
In september a major update of Europeana software is planned, to the version with the codename “Rhine”. Before this update the following countries are planned to be connected: Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Ireland, Hungary, Belgium, Holland, Portugal and maybe France. Such large scale confirms the idea of the creation of national metadata aggregators, which was the basis for the EuropeanaLocal project and later was included in the Europeana Content Strategy.
Map showing metadata aggregators currently registered in the EuropeanaLocal project is available at the website of this project.
Google supports more and more activities in digitization of cultural heritage. Since the beginning of this year, Google announced agreements under which the collections of Europe’s largest libraries will be digitized and made available via Google Books.
An agreement with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage was announced in March. It covers cooperation with the National Libraries of Florence and Rome in order to digitize up tu million out-of-copyright works.
Next was an agreement with the Austrian National Library to digitize up to 400 000 public domain books. These include works from Poland, since this library has about 1800 Polish titles.
In July, Google announced an agreement with National Library of the Netherland, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Google will scan more than 160 000 public domain books.
In all cases the librarians will select works for digitization. Google will digitize these books and make theme available via Google Books. They will be available for anyone in the world with connection to the Internet. It is important that libraries will receive copies of the scans. Thanks to this digital copies can be made available via library web pages and archived for long term. In addition the digital books will be available via Europeana.
dLibra 5.0 is still under intensive development. One of the most important things, that we are working on, is the user interface of the dLibra Readers Application. By changing old mechanism and adding new features, with extensive use of Web 2.0 approach, we are trying to improve user experience, of this most often used part of the dLibra system.
Recently we have modified the search mechanism and interface, in which we have previously implemented some important changes, like thumbnails in search results view. Currently we have also changed mechanism of selecting ambiguous synonyms values and filtering by collections. On the attached screen we can see the current result.
Selection of the ambiguous values is now visible on the left side of the search results page. For those, who have already used digital library based on the dLibra system, changes of values presentation can be noticeable; interface is also more friendly and intuitive. Other change allows a selection of more than one collection by which search results are narrowed.
We have also prepared some changes in content view interface. When viewing content on the bottom of the screen there is a new functional toolbar, in which there will be possibility to use few options from the user profile.
In relation to the previous version of dLibra there is also a change in view handlers selection – now each data format will have its default view handler and option of changing it to another (if possible) will be presented in the new toolbar.
The last thing, which is worth to mentioning, is some improvements to new publication creation mechanism in WWW application of the dLibra. New functionality was presented on dLibra Users Meeting at the PBC 2009 conference. Partly thanks to our users voices we have decided, before the dLibra 5.0 release, to prepare some improvements. One of attached screenshots shows the new interface of second step of publication creator.
Presented features are in test phase and can be changed before the final release. In the middle of August we are planning to stop the development of this dLibra version and start functional tests before the final release.
On July 19th 2010 the Jagiellonian Digital Library based on dLibra software officially started. This digital library is partially sponsored by the European Community from the funds of European Regional Development Fund for the Operational Programme ‘Infrastructure and Environment’ for years 2007 – 2013, Priority 11. “Culture and Cultural Heritage” Action 11.1. “Protecting and preserving cultural heritage of supra-regional importance”.
Looking at first publications it is worth noticing two different ways of maps presentation. One of them uses Zoomify, which has been used before in Kujawsko-Pomorska Biblioteka Cyfrowa. The example of the map presented this way is Mappa szczegulna [!] Woiewodztwa Płockiego i Ziemi Dobrzynskiey… The second way of presentation is based on The Google Maps Image Cutter mechanism developed by Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis – University College London. The example can be Karta pocztowa Królestwa Polskiego przez K. Widulińskeigo Sekretarza Jeneral(nego) Poczt wydana na r. 1827.
Viewing maps with any of these methods does not require installing any additional software. Zoomify based on flash technology seems to be a bit slower than Google solution using JavaScript. However, two different publications were used to compare both solutions and this opinion might not be objective. Beside that, the functionality of both Zoomify and The Google Maps Image Cutter is similar. More advanced versions of Zoomify are payable but its free basic version supplies enough functionality to successfully present maps on digital library pages. The Google Maps Image Cutter is all free.
We encourage digital libraries to use both solutions. It should increase the attractiveness of the presented maps or drawings.
In frame of the 2nd conference ICIT’2010 (International Conference on Information Technology) and 8th National Conference on Information Technology a number of interesting articles, related to information technology, were presented and discussed. Multimedia systems, knowledge organisation systems and IT project management are only selected topics of conferences sessions.
Digital libraries topic was also present at both conferences. Articles presented in the first digital libraries session investigated issues of semantic digital libraries, management and on-line presentation of multi-domain cultural heritage and quality control procedures in Pomerian Digital Library. The second digital libraries session included articles related to analysis of end-users perception of Pomerian Digital Library and quality models of digital library from the perspective of IT project.
Recently Europeana has crossed the level of 10 million objects. Because of this we have decided to calculate again some simple statistics regarding the participation of Polish resources in Europeana. For today the share of resources published in Europeana by Polish institutions is about 3,4% which gives Poland 9th place in Europe. As you may remember, in similar statistics prepared by us on the 29 of March this year Poland was on the 6th place, with a share about 4,5%.
Also the position of Digital Libraries Federation have changed. Since the last statistics was calculated, the number of objects from Polish institutions provided to Europeana via the Federation increased by over 34 thousands (more than 10% increase). It was to small, to hold the 8th position in the content providers ranking. Presently the DLF occupies position number 10.
More detailed statistics are available here. Although such statistics and its comparisons should not be read directly – e.g. nowadays Poland digitizes and publishes on-line its cultural heritage slower than other European countries. We assume that the high level of technological advancement and coherence of digital libraries in Poland allowed us to contribute to Europeana in its early stage of activity. This is why Poland and DLF were quite high in the March statistics. Presently Europeana receives content from other institutions, from countries where the process of cultural heritage digitisation started earlier and was/is more intense. Such institutions are now technically ready to cooperate with Europeana and they were able to transmit large amount of data right from the beginning. That is why our position decreased.
Do we have a chance to catch up on this? Of course – the one thing is that more and more institutions in Poland starts to cooperate with Europeana. Some of these already publish on line significant amount of digital objects (e.g. National Digital Archive in collection http://www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl/ publishes around 150 000 objects). On the other hand the Polish Ministry of Culture has quite ambitious plans, described also in the documents that we have recently mentioned. So there is a hope 
In the last few weeks Europeana has updated data transferred via the PIONIER Network Digital Libraries Federation. Even though some problems occurred, the operation ended with success. In this update the Federation has for the first time passed thumbnails for the most of objects from the Federation – almost 300 000 thumbnails. Furthermore the objects number from the Federation increased almost up to 350 000. Thanks to the dLibra Framework functionality some of thumbnails were generated automatically.
Figure 1. Thumbnails for objects transferred via the Federation.
This data transfer to Europeana was the first transfer for 6 new digital libraries:
We encourage new digital repositories to join the Federation and thus the Europeana! More on this topic here.
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