PSNC Digital Libraries Team

Yesterday Google announced an agreement with the Italian Ministry of Culture, allowing this company to digitise up to a million of public domain objects, located in Rome and Florence National Libraries. The selection of objects for digitisation will be made by librarians.

While announcing this agreement, Google also referred to Europeana, showing its support for this initiative:

Digitization of books is a tremendous undertaking, requiring the joint effort of a great number of public and private stakeholders. For this reason, we’re supportive of many other efforts at digitization, such as the European Commission’s Europeana. We want to see these books have the broadest reach possible — the books we scan are available for inclusion in Europeana, of which the Florence Library is a contributing member, and other digital libraries. The more of the world’s historical, cultural treasures we can bring online, the more we can unlock our shared heritage.

In this context it is worth to notice, that the creation of Europenana was initiated as activities in some sense competitive to the Google Books project, which was initially focused on mass digitisation of books, newspapers etc. written only in English.

TED (acronym for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a series of meeting, on which the invited speakers have 18 minutes to present their idea for changing the world, which was evaluated by the organizers as an “idea worth spreading”. TED conferences are organized once a year in California, USA, and the recordings of speeches are available at TED websites. The TED meetings are extended by the TEDx initiative, which is focused on organization of similar conferences around the world. This year for the first time a Polish TEDx meeting was organized – TEDxWarsaw. It was held on the 5th of March, and since yesterday the video recordings from this meeting are available. For the 28th of May TEDxPoznań meeting is planned.

In February this year, during the TEDUniversity event there was a 5 minute “lecture” of Time Berners-Leeon open data. This lecture illustrates with really interesting examples how important is to publish the source data in the Internet, instead of publishing just papers/reports prepared on the basis of this data. This lecture is a supplement for the Tim Berners-Lee speech from the TED2009, in which he called for wide publishing of source (raw) data in a way allowing its automated reuse (the Linked Data standard). We recommend you to see both these speeches:

• TED2009: Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web
• TED University 2010: Tim Berners-Lee – The year open data went worldwide

Such approach is also an important direction of the development of digital libraries. Presently in project such as Europeana, the automated reuse of metadata describing digital objects distributed in many digital libraries is implemented on a large scale. The next step can be a stronger semantic integration of this metadata, as for example shown in the “Thought Lab”. It is a prototype service allowing advanced search and exploration of a slice of information available in Europeana, which basis is the automated semantic integration of the metadata. Another example are the works in the DRIVER II project in the area of so called “enhanced publications”, which are complex objects connecting both scientific papers and source data used in this papers. Examples of such prototype enhanced publications can be found at one of the project websites.

One of the project from Europeana group – Europeana Connect is currently preparing several surveys and usability tests to evaluate new elements on the Europeana website. If you are interested in improvement of Europeana sign up as a Europeana test user. In order to join you need to fill in a small survey with information about yourself and your use of the internet and mobile phone.

dLibra also needs some testers! dLibra 5.0 is developed in a bit different way than a previous version. If you are interested in taking a closer look at things which will be available in 5.0 take a look at our dlTeam repository which is using dLibra 5.0. Software still may contain some bugs, if you spot any – let us know!

source: http://www.europeanaconnect.eu/news.php?area=News&pag=26

Between 16th and 18th February 2010 in Veria Central Public Library (Βέροια – city located in Middle Macedonia region in Greece) a training for ACCESS IT project was conducted. The training led by Adam Dudczak and Marcina Werla from PSNC DL Team covered wide range of topics related to digitisation, creation of digital libraries and aggregation of metadata for Europeana and other purposes. The training was divided into following sections:

1. What is all this digitisation about and which objects should be digitised?
2. How to digitize objects?
3. How to create a digital repository?
4. How to describe digital objects?
5. How objects and metadata from digital repositories can be reused?
6. How to (and why) prepare a repository for Europeana?
7. How to set up a metadata aggregator?
8. Should I know something more about digital preservation?
9. Why to evaluate accessibility and usability of digital libraries?
10. What comes next?

The training had 15 participants representing Greece, Serbia and Turkey.

In the ACCESS IT project these persons will create in their countries centres of competence on digital libraries, trying to cause the increase of the amount of cultural heritage available on-line and visible in Europeana. On the basis of materials prepared for the training and conclusions from discussions and practical exercises an on-line course will be prepared. It will be the basis for wide training action for cultural institution employees in three mentioned countries. This training connected with certification is planned to reach to several thousands of people causing the increase of knowledge and practical skills in the digital libraries area.

The training was described by regional press (1, 2, 3) and on the Flickr profile of the Veria Central Public Library some photos from the training were published.

Veria Central Public Library is one of the largest public libraries in Greece. It takes many initiatives related to European cooperation and to the promotion of reading. Particularly worth to notice and recommend is the idea of Magic Boxes – a way to arrange the library space for the youngest readers, which was implemented in Veria Central Public Library at the end of 2008.

Very good news for all administrators of digital repositories created using DSpace platform. Vangelis Banos published a DSpace plugin which allows to expose Europeana Semantic Elements compliant metadata through OAI-PMH interface. Source code and detailed instruction can be found at author’s website. Plugin was already used in digital library created and maintained by Veria Central Public Library (Greece).

In case of Polish digital libraries connected to Europeana via the PIONIER Network Digital Libraries Federation there is no need to expose the metadata in the ESE schema on the level of particular digital library. Data in the Dublin Core schema harvested from digital libraries is automaticaly enriched with the mandatory ESE elements and exposed in this form for Europeana.

Issue 3/2009 of the PIONIER Magazine, published by PIONIER Consortium and Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center is available on-line in the PSNC Digtial Libraries Team Repository. This issue is devoted mostly to digital libraries.

On the 6th of January 2010 in the morning broadcast of the radio Emaus at 9:35 you could listen to an interview made by presenter Piotr Jóźwik with Marcin Werla from the PSNC Digital Libraries Team. The interview was related to the connection of the Polish digital libraries to Europeana, carried out during the EuropeanaLocal project.
Clicking below you can listen to this interview:

EuropeanaLocal – Interview in the Radio Emaus

Besides of the interview the fact of connection of the Polish Digital Libraries Federation to the Europeana, with significant help of the creators of Polish digital libraries, was mentioned in several Polish Press Agency news and also Polish Catholic Information Agency and also in many regional information services and popular Internet portals, including:

“Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa w Europeanie”

• wiadomosci.onet.pl
• ksiazki.wp.pl

“ŚBC posiada forum umożliwiające pracownikom współtworzących ją
instytucji oraz czytelnikom komunikację i wzajemną pomoc – techniczną i
merytoryczną. Wykorzystuje oprogramowanie dLibra; rozpowszechnione w
kilkudziesięciu bibliotekach cyfrowych, zrzeszonych w Federacji
Bibliotek Cyfrowych, a udostępniających łącznie w sieci ponad 260 tys.
publikacji.”

“Zbiory biblioteki Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego w portalu Europeana”

• wiadomosci.onet.pl
• wiadomosci.gazeta.pl

“…za upartą realizację marzenia o stworzeniu polskiego systemu
rozproszonych bibliotek i włączenia go do europejskiej sieci wielkie
uznanie należy się Zespołowi Bibliotek Cyfrowych Poznańskiego Centrum
Superkomputerowo-Sieciowego, który przygotowuje i ulepsza informatyczne
narzędzie, koordynuje funkcjonowanie polskich bibliotek w sieci krajowej
i międzynarodowej.”

“Podkarpackie książki w europejskiej sieci”

• rzeszow.gazeta.pl

“Zasoby Podkarpackiej Biblioteki Cyfrowej, wchodzące w skład Federacja
Bibliotek Cyfrowych, zostały udostępnione w największej bibliotece
cyfrowej w Europie.”

“Księgozbiór Wirtualny FIDES w Europeanie”

• info.wiara.pl

“12 grudnia 2009 r. zbiory cyfrowe umieszczone w Księgozbiorze
Wirtualnym Federacji FIDES stały się widoczne w portalu Europeana dzięki
uczestnictwu w serwisie Federacji Bibliotek Cyfrowych, wraz z ponad 250
tysiącami obiektów z polskich bibliotek cyfrowych.”

From 11 December 2009, in the European Digital Library – Europeana, there are avaialble resources of dozens of Polish digital libraries congregated around the PIONIER Network Digital Libraries Federation. These resources include over 250 000 digital objects made available by the hundreds of cultural and scientific institutions from different parts of Poland. Among them are both treasures of our national heritage, as well as interesting regional materials or modern scientific and educational publications. The vast majority of publications is available to all Internet users without any restrictions.

Europeana, one of the flagship initiatives of the European Commission, is a web portal which is point of access to digital versions of cultural and scientific heritage. The portal is available from November 2008. In the official launch day it allowed to reach some of 2 million digital objects scattered throughout the Europe. In December 2009, after the data ingestion from the Polish digital libraries, the number of objects in the Europeana exceeded 5 million, of which ca. 5.5% comes from the Polish digital libraries. According to current development plans, Europeana is projected to reach 10 million objects in July 2010. Portal performs a critical role in providing and promoting the cultural heritage of European countries and it is important for Poland to be adequately represented in Europeana.

Polish digital content aggregator for Europeana is Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, the operator of the PIONIER Network Digital Libraries Federation and the PIONIER Network operator.

The PIONIER Network Digital Libraries Federation (PIONIER DLF) integrates network of Polish digital libraries, which have been systematically created since 2002. PIONIER DLF was launched in June 2007 by the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center. PIONIER DLF currently provides search within descriptions of over 315 000 digital objects. Moreover, it maintaines an extensive database about Polish digital libraries, as well as it is a key element in digitization coordination in the Polish digital libraries. It is worth mentioning that about 10 000 new objects each month is made available by digital libraries connected to the PIONIER DLF . By PIONIER DLFs connection with Europeana, these objects will be more visible and promoted worldwide.

The MyEuropeana, a set of features for Europeana personalisation is available again. It is related to the beginning of final stage of Europeana end-users functional tests. We encourage you to use it and to report any issues (please report to: info@europeana.eu).

All interested in the European Digital Library should by happy because of the publication of the draft version of the Europeana functional specification. The document is titled “Europeana Outline Functional Specification For development of an operational European Digital Library” and can be downloaded from the Europeana project outcomes website.