Presentation by Susan Reilly at UNESCO Memory of the World in the Digital Age conference, Vancouver, 2012

1. Positioning libraries in the digital
preservation landscape
Susan Reilly, LIBER
Twitter: @skreilly
Memory of the World in the Digital Age, Vancouver, 28th Sep, 2012

2. Overview
About LIBER
Drivers for digital curation (European context)
Collaboration
Sustainability
Innovation
Challenges
Conclusion
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp 2

3. LIBER: the association of European research libraries
• University, national and
other research libraries
• Over 430 members
• More than 40 countries
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp

4. Making the case for research libraries
“to support a functional network across national
boundaries in order to ensure the preservation of
European cultural heritage, to improve access to
collections in European research libraries, and to
provide more efficient information services in
Europe”

5. Making the case for research libraries
Projects:
Content
Europeana Libraries
Europeana Newspapers
Policy
MEDOANET
Infrastructure
APARSEN
AAA Study
ODE
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp

6. Digital Curation Drivers
• Digital Agenda for Europe:
• All European cultural heritage available
online by 2025
• All public domain masterpieces available in
Europeana(Digital Agenda)
• Cost= 10 billion per year over the next 10
years (Collections Trust)
• Increase in Open Access and born digital
content
• Legislation mandating the deposit of born
digital content
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp

7. Collaboration: Europeana Travel
• Digitise resources(books, maps,
photos, film) on the theme of travel
and make them available via
Europeana
• Strengthen collaboration between
CENL and LIBER
• Aggregation service for LIBER
member institutions
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp

8. Architecture for a LIBER
aggregator service for EuropeanaTravel
Institutional/Country/Consortium
Partnership
Why not OAI
merge
aggregators?
Local/National Repository
Platform and Access
OAI
OAI LIBER aggregator
TEL aggregator
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp

9. State of digital preservation practice in LIBER libraries
“under investment in skills for digital preservation….
and often a lack of written policies on the
preservation of digitised material”

10. Four networks and a project
Network libraries: LIBER, CERL, CENL
Project: Europeana Libraries
The European Library: the library
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) aggregator for Europeana
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp
Europeana: Europe's museums, libraries,
archives and audio-visual aggregator

11. Sustainability: Europeana Libraries
• A valuable resource for researchers with full-text search
capabilities
• A robust network of national and research libraries
• An efficient sustainable aggregation model for research
libraries across Europe
3,319,045 pages
598,130 books and theses
368,000 articles
848,078 images
1,200 film and video clips
34,000 mixed content objects
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp

12. Collaboration for sustainability
• Building the aggregation service
has involved…
• Consultation & articulation of value
proposition
• Business Model
• Business Plan
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp

13. Collaboration for sustainability
• but it has given us a better view of the digitisation landscape
and will deliver benefits for libraries in the future such as:
• Efficiency
• Effectiveness
• Visibility
• Credibility
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp

14. Innovation: Europeana Newspapers
• 17 partner institutions
• 3 years (2012-2015)
• Aggregation of more than 18 million newspapers
• Will use refinement methods for OCR, OLR (article
segmentation), and named entity (NER) and class
recognition
• Suvey existing collections in Europe
• Make content accessible
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp

15. Europeana Newspapers: where the content
comes from…
We are looking for
more libraries! NLE
LIBER
NLF
SUB HH
NLL
CCS
USAL
NLP
BL KB SBB ONB
UIBK NLT
BnF
UB
LFT
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp

16. Why newspapers?
“The museum (and the
newspaper) today seeks
whatever represents normal life
in its own native locality and
with infinite pains its collections
are arranged in a manner which
is natural to them in their own
habitat”
Lucy Maynard Salmon (1976) in The Newspaper and the Historian
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp

17. Making the content accessible
• OCR enables full text searching
• OLR enables more targeted searching (titles and sections)
• NER enables searching by people, place,and the discover of
new relationships between entities
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp

18. Challenges: Trust and Data Curation
• Alliance for Permanent Access to the Record of Science in
Europe Network (APARSEN)
• Work with the broader network of stakeholders to look across the
excellent work in digital preservation which is carried out in Europe
and to try to bring it together under a common vision
• Trust, Sustainability, Usability, Access
This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the
European Community http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp

19. Blue Ribbon Task Force
“Define roles and responsibilities among
stakeholders to ensure an ongoing and efficient flow
of resources to preservation throughout the digital
lifecycle.”

20. Conclusions
• DC challenge will grow for
libraries as they continue to
digitise and grow digital collections
• Collaboration facilitates economies
of scale, best practice and ultimately
benefits the end user
• Need for libraries to engage in the
broader DP dialogue to address
sustainability, define roles, and
contribute to the business case

21. Thank you for your attention!
http://www.libereurope.eu
http://www.europeana-newspapers.eu/
All images sourced from
http://www.europeana-libraries.eu/