Sustaining project value in Centres of Competence - Hildelies Balk

Sustaining Project Value in Centres of Competence

Hildelies Balk – Pennington de Jongh, 9 November 2012

Sustaining Project Value in Centres

Hildelies Balk 9 November 2012

Overview of this presentation

1. Background and overview of Centres of Competence in the digital library domain

2. Common characteristics and first observations

3. Lessons learnt from the IMPACT Centre of Competence



1. Centres of Competence/excellence• I2010 Vision →Digital Agenda → Horizon 2020 • Important role for Centres of Competence and Virtual

Centres of Excellence in European research infrastructure• Digital Library field: currently 6 Centres existent/formed• Collaboration between these advocated by EC• Benefits in sharing of resources, offering services in a

uniform and transparant way• New funding opportunities if Centres manage to collaborate• Report being compiled by KB on current best practice of

setting up, organizing and maintaining a Centre of Competence (CoC) or Virtual Centre of Excellence (VCoE)



Why share information?

• to support each other in the building of a sustainable organisation for sharing expertise, tools and resources.

• to indicate areas of potential collaboration.

What do we share: • basic information on the Centre: Background, Vision,

Mission, Legal entity, Office, Governance and Management• how will the Centre stay alive: Business Model,

Customers, Revenues, Facts&Figures on how it’s really doing, Succesfactors in Building and Maintaining the Centre and Challenges it faces.

Where do we share: http://centresofcompetence.wordpress.com/

http://centresofcompetence.wordpress.com/



Centres in the digital library domain: Overview• The Open Planets Foundation provides practical tools, solutions and expertise in digital

preservation, assuring long-term access to digital content. It builds on the Planets consortium which brought together sixteen major research and national libraries, national archives, leading technology companies, and research universities.

• PrestoCentre, a foundation for the audiovisual digitisation and digital preservation which brings together experts, researchers and businesses, collecting their best practices, tools and relevant information and promoting the cooperation among them.

• IMPACT Centre of Competence in Digitisation aims to make digitisation of historical printed text in Europe better, faster and cheaper by sharing expertise and providing access to tools for all parts of the digitisation workflow. IMPACT provides tools, services and facilities for further advancement of the State of the Art in this field

• 3D-COFORM Virtual Competence Centre, a Virtual Centre of Competence in three dimensional digitisation aiming to provide (and give advice on) digitisation tools to design and capture 3D objects, to design and test practical business models for their deployment and to facilitate the search of expertise by content-holders.

• V-MusT.net (the Virtual Museum Transnational Network) a virtual centre of competence for the integration of digital collections and virtual environments in virtual and physical museums.

• APARSEN VCoE is a Network of Excellence in digital preservation bringing together 31 organisations covering a wide spectrum of roles and expertise in the field.

http://openplanetsfoundation.org/

http://www.prestocentre.org/

http://www.digitisation.eu/





http://www.vcc-3d.com/

http://www.v-must.net/





http://www.alliancepermanentaccess.org/





2. Common characteristics of Centres in the digital library domain

• Not for profit (CIC, INPA, Stichting etc)• Income: mix of membership, paid services and funding

for projects• Organisation: small core facility of 1-3 fte , consisting

of director/business developer, technical coordinator, admin/web

• Website main hub• Strong buy–in from original consortium



Report: first observations

• Opportunities for revenue dependent on field: digitisation offers more opportunities than digital preservation

• VMustNet most enterprising, already very active as a Centre during project → successfully initiating new projects and gaining revenues

• IMPACT most active in engaging commercial partners in Centre

• OPF (first Centre, dates from FP6) has strong community in the digital preservation field

• VCC-3D strong emphasis on practical deployment of 3D documentation and training → encouraging membership



3. Lessons learnt from IMPACT Centre of Competence : basic information

• Background: the IMPACT Centre of Competence is building on the research and development of partners from the IMPACT (Improving Access to Text) project , (FP 7, 2008 to 2012). The IMPACT Project brought together libraries, imaging scientists, industry partners and digitisation professionals.

• Legal entity: part of non profit foundation of hosting organisation (decision on form for independent entity pending)

• Host: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel Cervantes, Madrid/Alicante• Governance: Board of Premium members• Management: Manager and developer; distributed effort of

members in web site maintenance, software maintenance, business development

http://www.impact-project.eu/



Lessons learnt from IMPACT Centre of Competence : staying alive

• Business Model: multisided platform• Customers:

o Content holders (libraries, archives, museums) o Research institutes in the fields document imaging, OCR,

language technology and the processing of ‘noisy’ texto Service providers (software and integrated services)

• Revenues: membership fees, varying from 600 to 10.000 euros; fees for services, project funding, sponsorship

• Facts&figures: IMPACT Centre of Competence currently has 9 premium members and is in the process of registering appr 40 standard members



Building the IMPACT Centre of CompetenceBusiness Model Generation

(http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com)

date footertext 10

Key Partnerships Key Activities

Key Resources

Cost Structure

Value Propositions Customer Relationships

Channels

Customer Segments

Revenue Streams



Building the Business Model: sessions



With all 26 partners….



Building the Business Model:

Gathering ideas….

And finding commitment



Key Partnerships

Key Activities

Key Resources

Cost Structure

Value PropositionsCustomer Relationships

Channels

Customer Segment: Content Holders

Revenue Streams

Evaluation Service (third party tools & production workflows)

Private sector content holder

(e.g. Publishers)

Public sector content holders

(e.g. MLA, Scientific)

Conferences

Library organisations (CENL, LIBER, IFLA, CERL)

Website

Publications by partners

Mailing Lists

Direct Contacts

Dedicated Contact /

Consultant

Contact Point(HelpDesk) for

first basic information

Governments/Public Funds for

building digi Capacity

Pay-as-you-go usage of services

Funding (Partners / Public)

Membership Fees 10.000 ayer for board members

Funders

Partners with business & marketing

expertise from IMPACT

consortium

Content holders around core of

IMPACT libraries

Website Content Management

Experts serving requests that come in

through website

Marketing in MLA community at different levels by taking part in

international forums and conferences, and bilateral contacts

Human Experts (affiliated to

centre/IMPACT partner

institutions)

Website

Office with communication Infrastructure

Content Providers

(e.g. e-books, mobile)

Search Engine companies

Providing in house

training courses on

request

Training & Education in

digitisation on CoC

membership conditions (e.g. one

course a year free)

Community Network of experts in

digitisation

A very small permanent CoC team: one full itme expert intermediary for the

network and one part time admin

Committees & Working Groups

(e.g. standards) to be set up and maintained by

interested partners

Framework Integration in your library workflow with technical support

from CoC (utilising Taverna toolkit)

Educators (digital Library based

courses)

Training Providers

Maintaining knowledge

base

Providing and maintaining

Online Tutorials

Helpdesk

Training / Accreditation

fees

Reduced fee for pay as you go services

that are not included

One stop shop for digitisation:

information sharing, tool demos, online

training

Expert to Expert (research)

Expert to expert (digitisation)

National Libraries as institutions

Free (registration)

Subscription fee of 6.000- 10.000 euros a year (dependent of budget)

Centralized in CoC: One Expert technical/

executive cooridnator handles requests for

service, giving (technical) advice,

maintaining customer relatinships and acquiring new

customers

Access to network of experts in research

Dataset resarch & evaluation

(access to images, Ground Truth, OCR

and metadata. Community forum,

benchmarking)

Membership of CoCboard – opportuinity to shape

Centre, shape discussions on stadards, decide on new

partners

Opportunities to send (young) staff

members abroad for short periods to help set up digiprojects

Pay as you go

Access to technical support from research partners (on

CoC SLA basis)

Digitisation consultancy by experts

from partners

(government/local

funding)

Travel and sustainance for

digitisation experts

Certain level of on demand tool

services (e.g. small scale OCR)

Research Datasetaccess to images,

demoset GT

in person Training & Education

in digitisation

TEL/Europeana

Consortia of related projects

Hosting datasets (one partner)

Server (+software)

Maintaning datasets hosting partner 0,2 fte libraries 0,1 fte each

Costs for at least 0,5 fte admin

support

Hosting and maintaining website (one or two

partners)Infrastructure, hardware, (supporting software?)

and 0,2 fte

Hosting and maintaining framework

(one partner) infrasturcture, hardware0, 2

fte

Costs for (technical)Coordination and services

1 fte

Office Costs

Online Tutorials

Knowledge base

Access to language resources

Researchers interested in content (historians, language experts,

journalists, amateur genealogists) – could pay for small scale OCR and

enhancement of text

Contributions in Kind:making digitisation

experts available for consultation and for updating and maintaining knowledge base

and tutorials

Contributions in Kind:hosting the

CoC office

Contributions in Kind: hosting

webiste

Fees for conferences

and wrokshops

Contributions in Kind maintaining datasets (libraries)

Contributions in Kind: volunteers correcting OCR

Engaging with

volunteers for

coorection of OCR

Coordination of requests that

come in through website

Coordination of all activities in

the Centre

Maintain DatasetsIn libraries and at

the providng organisation

Maintaning the framework

Finding new funding

opportunities and engaging in new

projects

Maintaning the evaluation tools

On demand tool services for non members (e.g. small scale OCR

and enhancement, Evaluation toolkit)

Organisations in MLA field

Taverna Framework as is, with a good user manual

Datasets, with metadata and ground truth

Evaluation tools

Framework

CONTENT HOLDERS

Blue blocks: shared with all customers

segments

Red blocks: focus on Content

Holders



Succesfactors in Building the IMPACT Centre of Competence:

• strong ‘home base’ in the commitment of original IMPACT consortium, created by continuous engagement with all stakeholders (series of workshops and f to f meetings over three years)

• partners most involved in building the Centre successfully tapped their network to extend the Centre beyond the IMPACT consortium

• distributed organization and shared costs • sound business model with 3 customer segments that

each benefit of the presence of the others• Support of the EC (extension IMPACT project, advice,

encouragement)



Succesfactors sustaining the IMPACT Centre of Competence:

• Users keen to test and use tools and resources provided

• Interoperability platform developed by IMPACT allows showcasing ad testing of tools.

• considerable interest of private sector companies in the Centre

• obtaining project funding for activities that support the aims of the Centre

• keeping the costs low• ongoing enthusiasm and commitment of partners



IMPACT Centre of Competence: Challenges

• Responding to the expectations from potential and current members

• Integrating tools and services in the website • Supporting implementation of tools • keeping innovation alive in the long-term• continue to identify and attract target customers and

stakeholders



More information: www.digitisation.eu

Sustaining project value in Centres of Competence - Hildelies Balk

Documents

Transcript of Sustaining project value in Centres of Competence - Hildelies Balk