The Europeana Libraries project and TEL (The European Library) joint meeting was held in Bucharest on 21-23rd of May. The theme of the meeting was Looking to the future: how do we place our service at the heart of Europe’s research communities? Some videos from the meetings are available here.

PSNC participates in Europeana Libraries project Work Package 5 (as an external expert), whose main objective is to Enhance the searchability of existing library-domain content in Europeana by defining transformations from ESE metadata to EDM and establishing best practice taking account of the different types of library contributing to Europeana.

Internally, the Europeana portal is switching to a new data representation schema, called EDM (Europeana Data Model). The main difference between EDM and the previously used ESE (Europeana Semantic Elements) is that EDM is more Semantic Web and Linked Open Data oriented, ontology-based format. EDM makes a clear distinction between the physical resource (e.g. a painting, or an old print), called Provided Cultural Heritage Object, and the so-called Web Resource, which is a digital representation of the object, possibly one of many. This distinction has not always been clear in ESE. Also, ultimately EDM should become an event-oriented ontology, similar in this aspect to CIDOC CRM.

In case of libraries, the EDM poses challenges a bit different from those of museums. One of the first questions to decide upon was whether the Provided Cultural Heritage Object is the Item (physical copy of a book) or the Expression (an abstract edition of a book), referring to FRBR terms.

Before the meeting institutions participating in WP5 were asked to prepare a manual mapping of a number of chosen metadata records from their collections to EDM. The goal of this excercise was to express doubts or inconsistencies in the mapping or the EDM libraries profile (separate profiles for monographs and series), thus validating the profile. In the next step, TEL will prepare automatic mapping description for the provided internal library formats, and test them against new metadata records and the new metadata aggregation infrastructure.

PSNC’s participation in the Europeana Libraries project is related to the development of methods for semantic integration of cultural heritage objects’ metadata beeing a part of stage A10 of the SYNAT project.