Will we make progress? What stands in our way? Alastair's plenary presentation at the Jisc/British Library Discovery Summit 2013 February 2013, London

1. Breaking the Waves
Alastair Dunning
(The European Library /
Europeana)
Discovery Summit
London, Feb 2013
@alastairdunning

6. “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 ....

7. ... [Thankfully]
Google mastered the
technical art of the
search.”
http://intdev.stc.org/2012/02/question-information-quest-inform/

8. But Europeana’s Trusted data from
aims are different European cultural
heritage

9. Before that - a
quick aside

10. Europeana - Europe’s cultural heritage portal
• 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

11. The European Library (TEL)
Europe’s library aggregator
• 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

12. National Museums
Aggregator
Libraries
Film & Sound
National
Aggregator Europeana
Archaeological
Heritage
Other
Archives
Cultural
Heritage

13. National ATHENA
The Aggregator
European
Library
Euro. Film
Gateway
Culture
Grid (UK) Europeana
CARARE
ApeNet Other
Aggregators

14. National ATHENA
The Aggregator
European
Library
Euro. Film
Gateway
Culture
Grid (UK) Europeana
CARARE
ApeNet Other
Aggregators

15. Italian
Spanish
National Libraries
National Library
French
National Library German National Library
British Library
and another
43 national libraries National
The Aggregator
European
Library
19 research libraries
and RLUK
Culture European
Grid (UK)

16. End of aside

17. Europeana Portal

18. Europeana API

19. Europeana Linked
Open Data

20. Europeana SPARQL
Endpoint

21. Linked Data &
aggregation of
data for others -
source and quality
of data is
paramount

22. Europeana and
TEL are testing the
waters of resource
discovery

23. Are we making
progress?
And what is impeding progress ?

24. The European Library to
release
>115m bibliographic
records to be released as
CC0 this year
API and Linked
Data to be Working with
published this year RLUK to release
as well members’
metadata as linked
data

25. 22m+ metadata
records released
as CC0 by
Europeana
c.2,200 institutions

26. Some of largest
cultural datasets in
the world

27. but ...

28. Cool URIs

29. 97% of links
resolve properly

30. 660,000 (c.3%) of
records have
broken links

31. Licencing

32. 64% of
records do not
come with
clear licensing
about the
content

34. Current licence distribution in Europeana
Europeana has launched a rights labelling campaign to improve this

35. and even when
metadata is
technically well
formed ... it might
not help user
discovery

36. Quality of
metadata ?

37. User path ?

39. Lack of
context ?

40. Multiple
records for
one item

41. The perils of
basic search

42. And of course
semantic differences

43. Much of this is
‘basics’ - licencing,
permanent URIs,
quality of metadata
intelligent URIs

44. More complex
issues such as
semantics and
clustering of
records and
relevancy ...
... are being
addressed by the
Europeana Data
Model

45. s
Europeana
enriches with
GEMET thesaurus;
…while TEL uses
GeoNames;
MACS for subject
Semium for dates;
headings; VIAF for
DBPedia;
persons, orgs;
GeoNames
and working with
OCLC on
clustering records

46. no point aggregating if you
can’t reuse

47. for europeana and tel, finding
re(users) is critical

48. Europeana dataset: 77
prototypes based on
Europeana data

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

54. How do I get
involved?

57. Europeana Network

59. Adopting open licencing Optimising data for reuse
Ensuring data currency and
Clear and documented APIs
accuracy

60. So rather than
Canute holding
back the waves ...

61. HMS
Discovery
charting new
waters.
Thank
you !

62. What is going to disrupt What changes do libraries,
us and how will we museums and archives need
to make to support better
react? resource discovery ?
There are a lot of us working
in this area; how do we work
effectively together?

63. 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=D
B_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA&pds_handle=GUEST