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).
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.
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.
28th February, 2010 was the deadline for submission of reports on the application of The Commission Recommendation on Digitisation and Online Accessibility of Cultural Material and Digital Preservation. Poland, as a Member State of the European Union, was also obliged to submit such report on the current implementation stage. You can download it here.
According to the document, it is estimated, that at the beginning of 2010 there is in Poland:
Of which around 350 000 (17.5%), mainly located in the libraries, is visible in the European digital library, archive and museum – Europeana. In order to increase digital objects number and then to make them visible in the Internet, four Competence Centres were set up:
There is more interesting information in the report. The National Library estimates now, that there is around 1 600 000 books in the public domain in Poland. It is a great resource, which can be freely digitized and make available in the Internet. Thats way in the document there is an assumption that by 2013 there will be 1 000 000 digitized objects in the global network from libraries in Poland. Furthermore by 2020 there will be 15 000 000 of Polish digital objects, which will be stored in the digital repositories of different types:
The Committee for Digitisation at the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the four aforementioned Competence Centres are responsible for work on reaching that number (you can find more here on the programe).
Moreover the report contains a short description and contact addresses of 5 selected data providers for the Europeana. We are pleased to note, that 4 out of 5 presented, are visible in the Europeana via the PIONIER network Digital Libraries Federation:
If you are looking for more news about:
I encourage you to read the whole report and the document mentioned in the report – “Program for digitisation of cultural goods and collection, storage and availability of digital items in Poland in 2009-2020“.
The Europeana Data Model (EDM) has been recently validated by experts from multiple cultural heritage domains. More details can be found at the Europeana Group Blog.
In a recently published “Aggregators Handbook”, prepared by the Europeana v1.0 project for metadata aggregators willing to cooperate with Europeana, a case study showing the way for aggregator to start such cooperation has been included. The basis for this study were the experiences of the Polish Digital Libraries Federation. The text of this case study is also available at the information pages for potential Europeana partners.
Created and developed by PSNC Digital Libraries Federation since December 2009 is connected with Europeana. The Federation was the first metadata aggregator connected as a part of the EuropeanaLocal project, and currently is the 8th Europeana content provider in the terms of the number of objects delivered.
On June 1, 2010 Europeana announced its “White Paper 1 Knowledge = Information in Context: on the Importance of Semantic Contextualisation in Europeana”. Europeana’s first White Paper looks at the key role linked data will play in Europeana’s development and in helping Europe’s citizens make connections between existing knowledge to achieve new cultural and scientific developments.
Linked data gives machines the ability to make associations and put search terms into context. Without it, Europeana could be seen as a simple collection of digital objects. With linked data, the potential is far greater, as the author of the white paper, Prof. Stefan Gradmann, explains.
Professor Gradmann used an example with word “Paris” to show how the search results may lead to items in the Louvre located in Paris, where it is also possible to see paintings portreting Paris, a Greek prince who abducted Helen of Troy. From there links lead to the topics associated with the mythical Apple of Discord and further to the forbidden apple eaten by Adam and Eve.
The example presented in the White Paper shows how linked data will allow Europeana to propose connections between millions of items. These connections can then be used to generate new ideas and knowledge, on a scale not possible before.
Full text of the White Paper is available at Europeana.
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