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

ArchaeologicalHeritage

OtherCulturalHeritage

National Aggregator

National Aggregator

Europeana

TheEuropeanLibrary

ATHENA

Euro. FilmGateway

ApeNet

CARARE

OtherAggregators

CultureGrid (UK)

National Aggregator

Europeana

TheEuropeanLibrary

ATHENA

Euro. FilmGateway

ApeNet

CARARE

OtherAggregators

CultureGrid (UK)

National Aggregator

Europeana

TheEuropeanLibrary

CultureGrid (UK)

National Aggregator

British Library

Spanish National Library

German National Library

Italian National Libraries

FrenchNational Library

and another43 national libraries

19 research librariesand RLUK

End of aside

The obvious way of exposing data:

Europeana Portal

More contemporary dissemination:

Europeana API

More contemporary dissemination:

Europeana Linked Open Data

More contemporary dissemination:

Europeana SPARQL Endpoint

(experimental / temporary URL in 2013)

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 (2013)

Working with RLUK to release members’ metadata as linked

data

API and Linked Data to be published this year (2013) as well

22m+ metadata records released as CC0 by Europeana c.2,200 institutions

Some of largest cultural datasets in

the world

Hooray !

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

a good example

Current licence distribution in Europeana(end of 2012)

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 ?This example leads to the

user to a copyright message in German, then then the jpeg without any

metadata

Lack of context ?

Again, the user is led to a jpg without any

explanation of the image

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

no point aggregating if you can’t reuse

for europeana and TEL, finding re(users) is critical

Europeana API: 77 prototypes based on Europeana data

Multimedia HTML5 Music Player

Stackathon - Artwork Audio Annotations

API Implementation by Royal Museum for Central Africa

API Implementation by Digital New Zealand

Europeana exposes content to HistoryPin,

Wikipedia, Pinterest, among others

How do I get involved?

Text

Culture Grid - UK Aggregator

The European Library - Europe’s library aggregator

Europeana NetworkOpen forum for cultural heritage

community

Following the guidelines form the Discovery

Programme will also help

Adopting open licencing

Clear and documented APIsEnsuring data currency and accuracy

Optimising data for reuse

So rather than Canute holding back

the waves ...

HMS Discovery charting new

waters.

Thankyou !

Slide 1 - http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/vicpopmus/t/zoomify87477.html

Slide 4 - http://www.googleartproject.com/en-gb/collection/freer-gallery-of-art-smithsonian/artwork/waves-at-matsushima-tawaraya-sotatsu/326469/

Slide 5 - http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/browse/canute

Slide 8 - http://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/home/index.php?DRIS_ID=MS1209_131 "

Slide 21 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/visulogik/99768766/

Slide 22 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ogil/25304809/

Slide 28-30 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/andreiz/1089900128/

Slide 31-32 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ztephen/3923577405/

Slide 36 - http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/search?query=canute

Slide 37 - Start at http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/record/2000082153642

Slide 38 - Start at http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/record/1000128081500?

Slide 40 - http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/search?query=the%20ruler%20of%20the%20sea

Slide 41 -http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/record/2000085282188?query=canute

Slide 42 - http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/record/2000068816371

Slides 45,46 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcusq/3032678489/

Slide 47 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/epsiplatform/5579883591

Slide 60 - http://www.freezeframe.ac.uk/collection/photos-british-arctic-expedition-1875-76/ls99-3-9?mode=giant

Screenshots / Image Credits