Breaking the Waves

Alastair Dunning

(The European Library /

Europeana)

Discovery Summit

London, Feb 2013

@alastairdunning

“There is a tsunami of data that is crashing

onto the beaches of the civilized world. This

is a tidal wave of unrelated, growing data

formed in bits and bytes, coming in an

unorganized, uncontrolled, incoherent

cacophony of foam…. we see graphic

designers and government officials, all

getting their shoes wet and slowly

submerging in the dense trough of stuff….

they walk stupidly into the water, smiling—a

false smile of confidence and control.

The tsunami is a wall of data—data

produced at a greater and greater speed …

in amounts that double, it seems, with each

sunset ....

... [Thankfully]

Google mastered the

technical art of the

search.”

http://intdev.stc.org/2012/02/question-information-quest-inform/

But Europeana’s

aims are different

Trusted data from

European cultural

heritage

Before that - a

quick aside

• 26m (Feb 2013) metadata

records from 2,200

European galleries,

museums, archives and

libraries

• Books, newspapers,

journals, letters, diaries,

archival papers... Paintings,

maps, drawings,

photographs… Music,

spoken word, radio

broadcasts…

• Only links to digitised

content; 31 languages

• Started in 2007

• Based in National Library of

Netherlands

Europeana - Europe’s cultural heritage portal

• Centrally indexes 115m

bibliographic records, plus

16m digital links

• 48 National Libraries of

Europe

• Plus 19 research libraries

• Links to digitised content

and bibliographic records at

libraries

• Started in 1990s - ‘Mother’ of

Europeana. Now aggregates

content for Europeana

• Also hosted in National

Library of Netherlands

The European Library (TEL) Europe’s library aggregator

Europeana

Libraries

Museums

Film & Sound

Archives

Archaeological

Heritage

Other

Cultural

Heritage

National

Aggregator

National

Aggregator

Europeana

The

European

Library

ATHENA

Euro. Film

Gateway

ApeNet

CARARE

Other

Aggregators

Culture

Grid (UK)

National

Aggregator

Europeana

The

European

Library

ATHENA

Euro. Film

Gateway

ApeNet

CARARE

Other

Aggregators

Culture

Grid (UK)

National

Aggregator

European

a

The

European

Library

Culture

Grid (UK)

National

Aggregator

British Library

Spanish

National Library

German National Library

Italian

National Libraries

French

National Library

and another

43 national libraries

19 research libraries

and RLUK

End of aside

Europeana Portal

Europeana API

Europeana Linked

Open Data

Europeana SPARQL

Endpoint

Linked Data &

aggregation of

data for others -

source and quality

of data is

paramount

Europeana and

TEL are testing the

waters of resource

discovery

Are we making

progress? And what is impeding progress ?

The European Library to

release

>115m bibliographic

records to be released as

CC0 this year

Working with

RLUK to release

members’

metadata as linked

data

API and Linked

Data to be

published this year

as well

22m+ metadata

records released

as CC0 by

Europeana

c.2,200 institutions

Some of largest

cultural datasets in

the world

but ...

Cool URIs

97% of links

resolve properly

660,000 (c.3%) of

records have

broken links

Licencing

64% of

records do not

come with

clear licensing

about the

content

Current licence distribution in Europeana

Europeana has launched a rights labelling campaign to improve this

and even when

metadata is

technically well

formed ... it might

not help user

discovery

Quality of

metadata ?

User path ?

Lack of

context ?

Multiple

records for

one item

The perils of

basic search

And of course

semantic differences

Much of this is

‘basics’ - licencing,

permanent URIs,

quality of metadata

intelligent URIs

More complex

issues such as

semantics and

clustering of

records and

relevancy ... ... are being

addressed by the

Europeana Data

Model

s

Europeana

enriches with

GEMET thesaurus;

GeoNames;

Semium for dates;

DBPedia;

…while TEL uses

MACS for subject

headings; VIAF for

persons, orgs;

GeoNames

and working with

OCLC on

clustering records

no point aggregating if you

can’t reuse

for europeana and tel, finding

re(users) is critical

Europeana dataset: 77

prototypes based on

Europeana data

http://popcorn.webmadecontent.org/je9 HTML5 Music Player

How do I get

involved?

Europeana Network

Adopting open licencing

Clear and documented APIs Ensuring data currency and

accuracy

Optimising data for reuse

So rather than

Canute holding

back the waves ...

HMS

Discovery

charting new

waters.

Thank

you !

What is going to disrupt us and how will we

react?

There are a lot of us working in this area; how do we work

effectively together?

What changes do libraries, museums and archives need

to make to support better resource discovery ?

http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/record/2000085285616?query=canute&link-level=THUMBNAIL

http://www.kb.dk/images/billed/2010/okt/billeder/object131728/en/

http://www.europeana.eu/portal/record/09405y/8CA4B71EC49BB62BC393766CD6545DBFECFC988

B.html

http://www.freezeframe.ac.uk/collection/photos-british-arctic-expedition-1875-76/ls99-3-9?mode=giant

http://www.africamuseum.be/collections/browsecollections/europeana

http://www.digitalnz.org/records?i%5Bcontent_partner%5D=Europeana

http://www.geheugenvannederland.nl/?/zoom/index/&language=nl&i=http%3A%2F%2Fresolver.kb.nl%2Fresolve%3Furn%3Durn%3Agvn%3ANIOD01:AE0810&size%3Dlargels

http://opac.nebis.ch/F/VIJSXF7GE9YNUIG95HFXLJR26FEGPA73LSMTYS36MTLBGNFQAH-

13374?func=service&doc_library=EBI01&doc_number=005289411&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA&pds_handle=GUEST