Europeana.eu: cultural collaboration across borders and domains Jon Purday Senior Communications Advisor, Europeana The 12th Annual International Conference «EVA 2009 Moscow»

Prototype portal launched in November 2008 What is Europeana.eu ? Prototype portal launched in November 2008 Public access point for European cultural and scientific heritage Links users to content digitised by libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections Content from all 27 European Union Member States Multilingual interface in 26 languages Material from over 1,000 content providers Read slide

What’s in the Europeana prototype ? Current contents: 4.5 million items 3,500,000 images: paintings, drawings, postcards, posters, photos, pictures of museum objects 935,000 texts: books, newspaper articles, manuscripts, letters 115,000 videos: movies, documentaries, TV broadcasts, public information films 13,000 sounds: cylinders, 78rpm discs, radio, field recordings This integration of media enriches the users’ experience It also enhances the content – each items gains by association with related material from different sectors, different countries The site meets the evolving expectations of users, which have been formed in a web 2 environment - that they should be able to read text, see images, hear sounds and watch video in the same space. Users expect to be able to integrate content, and they aren’t concerned what sort of institution holds it, nor which country it’s held in. It opens up new opportunities for pan-European and cross-disciplinary study and research So how did we get to this point, what’s the model that’s enabled us to bring together all this material

Securing collaboration political endorsement provider involvement Triangular model – three way involvement provides strength The Europeana prototype is a proof-of-concept project funded by the European Commission, who endorse it to the European Parliament and national Ministries of culture and education. In their turn, CLICK they reinforce our message to the cutural heritage sector who are our content providers. Politicians want to see national culture celebrated in a pan-European portal; content providers recognise that they gain credibility with their funders and policy makers by working with Europeana. The content providers are also keen to look at new ways of presenting their content, wanting to demonstrate their relevance to new generations of users They in turn influence their visitors and interest groups – they act as a channel to their users CLICK – often directly by links on their sites. Users are consulted in surveys and focus groups, and our most recent survey found not only a high level of satisfaction with the site, but also that 90% of users had visited the site before, 60% 5 times or more. Over 99% of our 3,000 respondents wanted to visit the site again. So all our results indicated a high level of loyalty and user engagement. And users’ engagement with the site reflects on the politicians, whose policies are vindicated That creates a willingness to continue funding a sustainable operational version of Europeana The outcome is a virtuous circle of collaboration. I want to look at our collaboration with the providers in more detail user engagement

Stakeholder collaboration at the top level EDL Foundation’s Board of Participants from the cutural heritage and research associations: ACE: Association Cinémathèques Européennes CENL: Conference of European National Librarians CERL: Consortium of European Research Libraries EMF: European Museum Forum EURBICA: European Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives FIAT: International Federation of Television Archives IASA: International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives ICOM Europe: International Council of Museums, Europe LIBER: Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche MICHAEL: Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe Collaboration is built into our governance at the top level The Europeana portal is a service of the EDL Foundation, set up at the start of the project as the legal entity that employs people, and submits funding bids for funding and seek sponsorship Policy is set by a Board comprising the Chairs and Presidents of the key professional member organisations Endorses Europeana’s objectives to their members, who comprise most of Europe’s cultural heritage and research institutions Communicate Europeana’s objectives to their membership Represent the specific interests of their domain at Board level

Partner collaboration at the site-building level The Europeana partner network 150+ partners from museums, libraries, archives, audiovisual collections, software developers, university research Representatives from every Member State Promotes technology and knowledge transfer across the sectors and between Member States Shares common standards and best practice Technical experts lead work groups developing use cases, data models, components etc. Network translates all parts of the interface into 26 languages The Europeana prototype was built by a core team of 6 full-time staff hosted in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Den Haag. This number has now doubled, and includes the project management, development and content team, marketing and communications They co-ordinate the work of a wide range of partners in a distributed network The 6 work package leaders manage their workgroups – each workgroup has about 15 members Work group members give their time freely and we pay travel expenses All members of the network partnership sign Formal agreement Undertake to communicate Europeana’s aims and objectives to their national and domain networks

Aggregators promote collaboration Museum A Archive A Library A Library X National Digital Library Film Archive 1 Film Archive 2 Film Archive 3 Archive X National aggregator ACE Museum X Museum 1 ICOM Europe Museum 2 CENL Europeana works with aggregators National aggregators, eg in france, and italy. Domain aggregators – film, libraries, TV in EU screen, Archives in APEnet – or Archives portal europe, and museums in Athena They integrate diverse content from smaller institutions Establish standards, harvest and map metadata Devise tools, ensure rights compliance and provide help Aggregators understand the issues in their own country or sector, and can create close collaboration with large numbers of similar content providers. Then Europeana has the relationship with the main aggregator, and not with the multiplicity of individual players. Also just launching the Council of Content Providers and Aggregators, who will elect members to our Board, giving the voice of the content provider into the centre of our policy making Let’s see what that looks like as we develop the fully operational Europeana MICHAEL Eurbica National Archive 1              EU Screen National Library 1 NL 2 NL 3 National Archive 2 FIAT National Archive 3 Television Archive 1 Television Archive 2

Collaboration and the growth of Europeana Athena Archives Portal Europe [APEnet] STERNA BHL Europe EUScreen Video Active European Film Gateway Europeana Local Europeana Travel MIMO Judaica Europeana Connect Europeana v1.0 Europeana.eu Presto Prime Arrow Next steps as we develop a fully operational site, 2 projects started this year to take Europeana’s core technology and functionality to the next stage, Europeana v1.0 Putting the content in the users’ workflow – APIs The idea of developing APIs that can be incorporated into people webspaces, into university sities, into blogs to enable users to access Europeana within their own work program is important User focus and usability Europeana Connect next make the actual search multilingual, so that a word entered in one language can be translated on the fly into other languages that the user selects. Next year we expect to launch a multilingual search in 5 languages - English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and develop a further 5 the following year: Mobile applications– so people can use it as a reference and research tool anytime, anywhere Geospatial data Semantic enrichment And around this technology core are all the aggregation projects that we saw on the previous slide And beyond them are 2 enabling projects – Arrow about copyright and a registry for rights in out of print material, and PrestoPime, which is establishing best practice in large scale film digitisation

Content providers to Europeana Major new release in 2010 will give access to 10 million items from: Athena: museum objects Archives Portal Europe [APEnet]: national archives Biodiversity Heritage Library [BHL Europe]: texts and taxonomies European Film Gateway: film, scripts, posters, stills Europeana Connect: sound recordings Europeana Travel: exploration, tourism and cartography Europeana Local: regional libraries and museums EU Screen: TV broadcasts Judaica Europeana: documentation of Jewish life in Europe’s cities Museum of Musical Instruments Online: images and audiovisual of instruments Information about all the projects contributing to Europeana: http://group.europeana.eu All of these projects are part funded by the European Commission. All are working with digitised material and automating its journey into Europeana Read slide

Rhine release Danube release This slide provides a timeline of the Europeana group of projects universe with the major releases. [CLICK] Releases are named after the major rivers of Europe – The Rhine release is scheduled for summer 2010. This release focuses mostly on Content and Functionality. It will also integrate APIs for interactions with other applications. The functional specification is currently being set. [CLICK] For the Danube release, which is scheduled in Spring 2011 the main focus is technology and architecture.

Homepage – search screen You can choose from 26 langagues in which to see the interface. I’m going to search for Stravinsky – just to give you a sense of the range of material

I get a range of results, primarily images, which range from all of Picasso’s designs for the ballet Pulcinella, 1920, and his portrait of Stravinsky from the same time. If I click on any of these, I can bring up higher resolution images

E Showing Picasso’s sketchbooks

E And I can also find photographs of Stravinsky – this one showing him in 1937 with Nadia Boulanger on a transatlantic liner on their way to America. This image has been digitised by the French national library and is part of their digital library – Gallica. One important way in which we sustain the collaboration is by being able to show the content provider’s branding. We link the user to the provider’s website, so there’s no loss of identity of the content provider.

From this same period we can hear Jean Cocteau talking about Picasso and Stravinsky in Montparnasse. This is from the Institut national de l’audiovisual in Paris

E We can also hear a number of Stravinsky pieces, and see performances. This one features the Brodsky Quartet playing Stravinsky’s concertino for string quartet. I was intrigued to discover that the Brodsky Quartet come from northern England, as I do, and studied together at the Royal Northern College of Music. They named themselves after one of the great principals of that college, Adolph Brodsky, who was a true European. Born in Russia, he taught at the Moscow conservatory, and in Leipzig, Berlin, Vienna as well as Manchester. Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Grieg all met at his house, and he founded the very first Brodsky Quartet

E dd And here they are, in an undated image, probably around 1890, from the Leipzig museum. So that’s a very brief snapshot of a search – gives you a sense of the range of Europeana, but of course, it’s very early days yet: we have been live for barely a year, and our content is projected to increase to 25 million items around 2012: at that point, the richness and diversity of the resource will be splendid Click END

Thank you jonathan.purday@bl.uk www.europeana.eu