Digital Vision for Europe and Member States MINERVAeC Workshop Belfast

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Digital Vision for Europeand Member
StatesMINERVA-eC WorkshopBelfast
David Dawson Museums, Libraries and Archives
Council
The MICHAEL Project is funded under the  European
Commission eTEN Programme
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Netful of Jewels

• The new network will be a personal cultural
  medium for the age of personal learning.
• People want museums to provide collection related
  information and they want interactive,
  participative services, too. Both are essential
  to the digital museum.
• Museum resources of all kinds must be linked to
  those from libraries, archives, universities and
  other arts, humanities and science institutions
  worldwide.

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The European Digital Library

• A political initiative part of the i2010 EU IT
  strategy
• It will be a common multilingual access point to
  Europes distributed content
• held in different places by different
  organisations
• all types of cultural material
• texts, audiovisual, museum objects, archival
  records etc
• targeted at delivering rapidly a critical mass of
  resources to the users.

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Building blocks

• The European Library (TEL) as a gateway to the
  collective resources of national libraries across
  Europe
• The work ongoing in the Michael project in
  describing and linking digital collections of
  museums, libraries and archives from different
  Member States and providing access to these
  collections

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MICHAELproject
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MICHAEL

• Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage
• now 16 countries across EU
• European portal launched
• digital collections
• websites, elearning resources
• databases, CD / DVDs
• aiming to link to education
• Curriculum Online, EU Schoolnet, JISC etc
• Sustained by a not-for-profit organisation
  MICHAEL AISBL
• Members include FR, IT, DE, PL, GR and more to
  come
• Ministries of Culture their representatives
  including MLA
• Part of the Europeana Foundation

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European Digital Library and MICHAEL
European Digital Library
MICHAEL
TEL Service Registry
ServiceRegistries
Items
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Why are Service Registries needed?

• Map of where content is and how it is managed
• Information Environment Service Registry
• Holds technical details of databases
• XML schemas, interoperability protocols,
  terminologies etc
• Enables construction of machine-to-machine
  services

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EuropeanaEuropes digital museum, library and
archive
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Europeana

• The European Digital Library, Museum and Archive
• Not-for-profit foundation
• Members include European branches of ICA ICOM,
  LIBER, CERL, CENL and MICHAEL AISBL
• Website launched in February as a maquette
• Showing how it might work in a few years time
• One or two little issues still need working on

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How Europeana is going to work
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How is Europeana going to work?

• Interoperability Working Group established by the
  Commission
• Representatives and experts from all sectors
• Discussing high-level issues
• Prototype being developed by EDLNet project
• MLA ABM-Centrum (cross-domain agency in Sweden)
  leading a workpackage to involve all stakeholders
• Supported also by MINERVA-eC and other projects

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MinervaEC

• a Thematic Network in the area of cultural,
  scientific information and scholarly content
• Supporting the creation of quality content for
  the EDL by
• Identifying centres of excellence in digitisation
• Reporting on standards
• Organising workshops
• Updating the MINERVA Technical Guidelines!!!!

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The European Digital Library
Semantic interoperability2010 functionality
2008 Search functionality
Support for semantic interoperability (eg RDF)
MARC TEL AP
EADArchives AP
SPECTRUM / CIDOC Museum AP
Scholarly PublicationsePrints AP
Other specific APs
National portals(UK PNDS, FR Guichet, DE BAM etc)
Libraries search
Archives search
Museumssearch
ePrintssearch
Search
Who, what, where, when
Controlled vocabularies
Controlled vocabularies
Controlled vocabularies
Controlled vocabularies
Controlled vocabularies
XML Harvesting
ONE institution may have both library (MARC) and
archives (EAD) databases
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Metadata storage
Content provider
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Europeana aggregator
Europeana RDF store
Content provider
Harvesting
Transfer
Content provider
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Processing
Export
Export
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• Europeana Portal
• Simple search
• Advanced search
• Faceted search
• (browsing)

Europeana index
Europeana main memory
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Information retrieval
Query
EUROPEANA SYSTEM
EXTERNAL SYSTEMS
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Enabling the EDL to promote your content

• The 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
• 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

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Strategic issues

• European Commission has asked all Member States
  to take action
• increase digitisation
• enable access
• tackle IPR issues
• enable preservation
• Culture Ministers have agreed to-
• draw up and update plans and national strategies
  for digitisation of cultural material
• set up national coordination mechanisms for
  digitisation activities, including at the
  regional and local levels, in the field of
  cultural content
• Commission established Member States Experts
  Group to enable coordination

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Practicalities

• For England
• Cultural sector content aggregated into the
  Peoples Network Discover Service infrastructure
• Currently harvests metadata of c 500,000 digital
  objects
• All MLA-funded activity (DCF, Renaissance)
• Other projects using infrastructure to deliver
  their service
• Estimated 4 million digital objects by 2008
• Integrated into the redevelopment of the 24 Hour
  Museum website and the work of Collections Trust
  with SSNs
• Working with JISC and Research sectors

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Practical support

• A range of projects funded under the eContentPlus
  programme
• EDLocal
• support for getting metadata to Europeana
• UK - Collections Trust
• Ireland Library Council
• Athena
• Museum content for Europeana
• UK Collections Trust
• Ireland National Museum

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Timetable

• April
• Selection and assessment of targets for
  harvesting completed
• Technical work on building harvester starts
• May
• 21 initial work on business models in EDLNet
• 23 - MICHAEL project conference marks end of EU
  funded project
• June
• first eContentPlus support projects begin
  (EDLocal)
• 4 - Launch of Due Diligence Guidelines on Orphan
  Works
• 23-24 - Europeana initial prototype being
  reviewed at a conference in the Hague (any
  volunteers???)
• July
• French Presidency begin reviewing progress by
  Member States
• November
• high profile launch by Commissioner Reding
• French Presidency present progress report to
  Culture Ministers Council

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Thank you

• david.dawson_at_mla.gov.uk