MICHAEL and the European Digital Library:

promoting teaching, learning and research

The MICHAEL Project is funded under the European Commission eTEN Programme

David DawsonMuseums, Libraries and Archives Council, UK

Users of MICHAEL

• many different user communities• education• cultural tourism• research• ‘co-ordination’

Researcher

• Associate Professor from Canada

Subjects

What will the EU Digital Library be?

• a common multilingual access point to Europe’s distributed• held in different places by different

organisations - digital cultural heritage, • all types of cultural material

• texts, audiovisual, museum objects, archival records etc

• targeted at delivering rapidly a critical mass of resources to the users.

Building blocks

• The European Library (TEL) as a gateway to the collective resources of national libraries across Europe

• The work ongoing in the Michael and Michael Plus projects in describing and linking digital collections of museums, libraries and archives from different Member States and providing access to these collections

European Digital Library

Collections

Items

MICHAEL TEL

MICHAEL and the European Digital Library

How is the EDL going to work?

• Interoperability Working Group established by the Commission

• Representatives and experts from all sectors

• Discussing high-level issues

• Being taken forward by EDLNet• MLA leading workpackage to involve all

stakeholders

Semantic interoperability2010 functionality

2008 Search functionality

MARCTEL AP

EADArchives AP

SPECTRUM / CIDOC

Museum AP

ONE institution may have both library (MARC) and archives

(EAD) databases

Support for semantic interoperability (eg RDF)

XML Harvesting

Scholarly PublicationsePrints AP

Libraries search

Controlled vocabularies

Controlled vocabularies

Controlled vocabularies

Controlled vocabularies

Existing portals(UK PNDS, FR Guichet, DE BAM etc)

Th

e Eu

rop

ean D

igital L

ibrary

Archives search

Museumssearch

ePrintssearch ‘Who, what, where, when’

Other …specific APs

Controlled vocabularies

Search

Licensing Policies • Users need to know what use conditions and rights apply to a

resource • Administrators need to know what use conditions and rights apply

to a resource • Systems need to know what use conditions and rights apply to a

resource

• Every digital resource has use conditions and rights associated with it: • even if it is freely available • even if it is public domain • even if it is not obvious what they are

• Make the use conditions and rights in your resources explicit: • use a recognised machine readable license if you are able to • state the use conditions and rights that apply to your resources in the

metadata • use the basic controlled vocabulary (to be) developed by the European

Digital Library, and use it consistently • look at existing frameworks for expressing use conditions and rights

Enabling the EDL to promote your contentThe EDL will help you to promote your content to new audiences. Get

involved! Start planning! Your content • Technical standards

• Create your content using open standards • use the MINERVA Technical Guidelines

• Metadata • Use your existing cataloguing standards• Prepare to map your data to domain-specific Dublin Core Application

Profiles – use the European Metadata Registry • Terminologies

• Prepare to take the opportunity offered by the semantic web• Publish your terminologies and thesauri using SKOS

• Registries• Make your content visible • register your content and services with existing registries - such as TEL and

MICHAEL• …

Thank you

david.dawson@mla.gov.uk