alastair dunning, breaking the waves, the european library
TRANSCRIPT
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
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?
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