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.
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:
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:
ca. 500 000 digital object in the libraries (80% available via the Internet),
ca. 1 000 000 digital object in the archives (20% available via the Internet),
ca. 500 000 digital object in the museums (1-2% available via the Internet).
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:
digital libraries,
digital archives,
virtual museums,
audiovisual collections.
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:
Between 16th and 18th of June this year in Austin (TX, USA) the Thirteenth International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertation ETD2010 was organized by NDLTD. On the symposium the representatives of scientific institutions from all over the world were exchanging experience related to popularization of the idea of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), and also to collecting ETDs and making them available on-line. Main activities in this subject from USA, Canada, several countries from Central and South America and also Africa and Europe were presented.
The symposium had two keynote speeches. The first one, on opening of the symposium, was made by Larry Johnson (CEO, The New Media Consortium) and titled “Seven Channels of Change: How Technology is Unfolding, Everywhere We Look”. As the seven channels Larry Johnson numbered:
“Computing in Three Dimensions”
“Games Are Reality”
“Keyboards are for Older People”
“Users ARE the Content”
“Collective Intelligence is the New Knowledge”
“The People Are the Network”
“The network is everywhere”
The second keynote, simply titled “Google Books”, was made by James Crawford, the Engineering Director of… Google Books. Besides of the general description of this service, James Crawford emphasized the source of content for Google Books, cooperation possibilities and of course issues related with IPR. Also several technical curiosities were mentioned, like issues related with the automated discovery of the book creation/publishing date.
Because of the location of this edition of the symposium, the majority of presentations was related to activities in the USA and neighboring countries, including prestigious universities like Stanford or Yale. European experiences were presented also by Agnieszka Lewandowska from PSNC. She described the aggregation of ETDs metadata from Polish digital libraries done by the Digital Libraries Federation and the process of transferring this metadata to the DART-Europe Portal. The presentations of the Polish achievements caused interest. The symposium participants have asked several questions, mostly regrading the organisational and technical aspects of the Federation, the rules for automated selection of object exposed for the DART-Europe and of course the directions of the DLF development.
Two sessions were dedicated to strictly technical aspects such as cloud computing, semantic technologies or the use of HTML5. Very interesting presentation was made by Ed Fox, the NDLTD Executive Director, but also well known scientist specialized in the digital libraries. He presented the results of a research made by his team on the influence of large high resolution displays on the comprehension of long documents and on user experience when using such documents. For the purpose of this research an interactive gigapixel display was constructed, consisting of fifty standard LCD monitors (rectangle 5 x 10 monitors). This display was used for an experiment, in which the participants were asked to do several tasks with a tens pages long PhD thesis. These tasks should be done by reading the document on the mentioned display, on single monitor and on… paper. After achieving the tasks, participants had to answer a series of questions describing the quality and comfort of work with the document in all three tested ways. As a result it came out, that the large display, allowing to view all document pages at once in a readable quality, was the best for quick looking through the document. In tasks requiring deep analysis of the document the winner was… the traditional table on which the document was available in printed form.
Conference was also accompanied by the NDLTD awards, given in three categories:
Innovative ETD
Innovative Learning through ETDs
ETD Leadership
Full list of awarded is available in a dedicated NDLTD press release. In the “Innovative ETD” category one of three awards was granted to Andre Zimmermann, the graduate of PhD studies in Geography on the University of British Columbia (Canada). In his work he was analyzing the erosion of streams, and the research was made as a series of micro-experiments realized in a laboratory. Because his PhD thesis was published as ETD, he could include in the content the video recordings showing his experiments. This was for him a major improvement in the possibilities of explaining the results of research. The PhD thesis is available at UBC repository, and below you can find short comment from the laureate commenting the received award:
We also estimated the publications growth rate in Polish digital libraries over the last three months. According to data stored in the PIONIER DLF the average number of publications added every month is 15 000. At the end of 2009, we calculated the growth rate at the level of 10 000 publications a month. This means the increase of 5 000 publications! More can be found on the site with the total number of publications.
Digital culture and all the opportunities granted to users by new media are leading to reflection on the role and future activities of memory institutions in this extremely interesting times. This cultural transformation were the main topic of “Transforming Culture in the digital age” (http://transformingculture.eu/) conference which was held on 14th – 16th of April in Estonian city Tartu. Organizers manager to gather academics as well as renowned practitioners from all around the Word. Conference programme was filled up with more than 50 lectures , presented in three parallel tracks. Sometimes it was really hard to choose where to go because all presentations were very interesting. Thankfully organizers decided to publish full text of all papers as an ebook, it is available http://dspace.utlib.ee/dspace/handle/10062/14768.
During the conference Adam Dudczak for the PSNC DL Team presented a paper “Large-scale aggregation of metadata from distributed digital libraries in Poland”. Paper described basic assumptions, motivations , architecture and achievements of Digital Libraries Federation.
Among many interesting presentation which was presented at the conference we selected three the most interesting.
Authors analyzed the development of the World Wide Web, this analysis was a starting point for discussion about potential impact of semantic web (or as some people say web 3.0) to our cultural habits. To give a glimpse into how it might look like, authors presented results of scientific project CUPID (Cultural Profile and Information Database). CUPID was aimed to build a prototype of a service which aggregates, categorize, personalize and distribute cultural content (i.e. recommended exhibitions and concerts). After the presentation there was a really interesting discussion about privacy of internet users and how will cultural content consumption look like in the world of automatic recommendations (see Epic 2015).
Augmented Reality and Locative Media are very interesting not only from the perspective of the industry but opens many interesting opportunities for the cultural institutions. Author of this presentation showed a lot of examples of cultural/art projects which are using augmented reality and geo-awareness. Two most interesting examples:
BioMapping (http://biomapping.net) – using a special devices capable to record human emotions and their geographic location Christian Nold created a emotional map of the cities like San Francisco and Paris.
In general all Julian Olivier’s works are very interesting but Advertiser (http://selectparks.net/~julian/theartvertiser/) is exceptional. Julian says that Advertiser is more a Improved Reality than an Augmeneted Reality Project. It is somehow true, just imagine a public space free from all advertisements.
These examples (and others) illustrated the rising role of virtual reality in the way how we perceive reality.
National Digital Library of Finland (http://www.kdk2011.fi/en/) is a project of the Ministry of Education of Finland. Project was started in 2008, and will last till 2011, it is a joint effort of 35 institutions (including governmental , scientific and cultural units). Aim of this project is to assure a long term access to resources of libraries, museums and archives. This should advance development of national scientific and learning infrastructure.
It seems that National Digital Library of Finland project will deliver:
national standards and recommendations in order to achieve interoperability between various data providers,
roadmap/strategy for long term digital content preservation,
web interface (in 2011) which will allow to access to a whole variety of Finland’s cultural heritage.
The architecture and some of the goals of National Digital Library of Finland are very similar to Digital Libraries Federation. In the initial phase of development it will serve as a metadata aggregator who will forward Finish metadata to Europeana.
On the 1st of March 2010 on the Europeanę projects group website an annual activity report was published. Section 4.4 of this report unfortunately contains outdated data (coming probably from August 2009, from the “Europeana Content Strategy” document), and according to this data the Polish participation in Europeana is lower than 1%.
As for last several months we were working hard to increase this input, we have decided to show you the current (2010/03/29) statistics on the participation of particular countries in Europeana. These statistics are following:
#
Country
Number of objects
Participation
1
France
2 571 101
36,76%
2
Spain
907 338
12,97%
3
Germany
782 667
11,19%
4
Uk
728 585
10,42%
5
Netherlands
382 492
5,47%
6
Poland
315 521
4,51%
7
Norway
271 738
3,89%
8
Sweden
229 583
3,28%
9
Finland
191 384
2,74%
10
Europe
170 980
2,44%
11
Slovenia
103 373
1,48%
12
Italy
96 581
1,38%
13
Greece
74 451
1,06%
14
Belgium
54 311
0,78%
15
Switzerland
27 403
0,39%
16
Austria
25 507
0,36%
17
Estonia
18 201
0,26%
18
Romania
11 453
0,16%
19
Portugal
8 171
0,12%
20
Luxembourg
6 215
0,09%
21
Hungary
5 887
0,08%
22
Serbia
5 576
0,08%
23
Ireland
4 609
0,07%
24
Iceland
667
0,01%
25
Latvia
69
0,00%
26
Cyprus
40
0,00%
TOTAL
6 993 903
The 4.51% score positions Poland just below the group of countries the most represented in Europeana (the border for this group is 5%). It is worth to notice, that as for today, we are on the 6th position in Europe, before countries like Italy or Norway. This is very good score, but of course you need to keep in mind, that what is visible in Europeana, is not everyhing that was digitised or is published on-line. This score for sure shows, that the infrastructure of digital libraries in Poland in currently on of the most interoperable in Europe.
The Digital Libraries Federation, the main Europeana content provider from Poland, is currently on the 8th position of the list of 66 actual Europeana content providers (the number in brackets is the number of objects visible in Europeana via the particular content provider).
Culture.fr/collections (1 632 053) [France]
Hispana (849 827) [Spain]
Bibliothèque nationale de France (823 378) [France]
Saxon State Library – Dresden State and University Library (SLUB) (530 563) [Germany]
CultureGrid (381,450) [UK]
Het Geheugen van Nederland (381 427) [Holland]
Scran (310 802) [UK]
Federacja Bibliotek Cyfrowych (297 431) [Poland]
Knowledge Management in Museums (225 969) [Sweden]
Nasjonalbiblioteket (206 170) [Norway]
Besides of the Digital Libraries Federation, data from Poland to Europeana is also provided by The National Digital Library POLONA (18 090 objects).
Year 2009 appeared to be the record year in terms of the number of newly started digital libraries. Yesterday on dLibra project home page, 16th entry concerning 2009 has been added to the list of dLibra installations. It means that in 2009 there were started 4 more digital libraries than in 2008 (see http://dlibra.psnc.pl/biblioteki/). Moreover, from the information that we receive it appears that 2009 is not finally “closed” – there is still a chance to increase the number of newly started digital libraries in 2009 by several entries.
Digital Libraries Federation (DLF) can also be proud of the record – in 2009 the total number of digital objects available through DLF increased by around 150 000 – it is twice as much as in comparison with 2008, when this number increased by around 75 000!
