The European digital library: integrating cross-domain content Jon Purday JISC DIGITISATION PROGRAMME, BATH,

The vision ‘The European Commission envisages the creation of a European digital library: a unique resource for Europe's distributed cultural heritage, ensuring a common access to millions of great paintings, historical writings, ancient manuscripts, diaries of the known and unknown, personal photos and national documents from Europe's libraries, archives and museums.’ Horst Forster, Director, Digital Content & Cognitive Systems Information Society Directorate, European Commission

The vision ‘JISC’s Digitisation Programme is beginning to realise some of the enormous potential of online resources in a wide variety of formats – sound, images, journals, moving pictures, census data and newspapers. The programme is not only about digitising resources but also about fostering new collaborations [and] innovative and productive partnership[s].’ Professor Sir Ron Cooke Chair, JISC

The aspects of interoperability Political & Human Tech & Semantic Users & usability Interoperability is connecting people, data and diverse systems.

The Europeana partnership Integrates the 4 cultural heritage domains: audio-visual collections archives museums libraries Comprises 85 partners representing: all EU Member States related Commission-funded projects Funded by the European Commission 2-year thematic partnership

The EDL Foundation Membership is open to associations and institutions Current members include: CENL: Conference of European National Librarians LIBER: Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche CERL: Consortium of European Research Libraries EURBICA: European Regional Branch of International Council on Archives FIAT: International Federation of Television Archives ACE: Association Cinémathèques Européennes EMF: European Museums Forum ICOM Europe: International Council of Museums, Europe MICHAEL: Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the Netherlands: project host

The statutes of the Foundation To provide access to Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage though a cross-domain portal To co-operate in the delivery and sustainability of the joint portal To stimulate initiatives to bring together existing digital content To support digitisation of Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage

The deliverable The public prototype of Europeana Launching in November 2008 Fully-functioning portal Direct access to 2 million digitised objects Content that represents all 4 domains Pan-European coverage Multilingual interface

The milestones Site demo launched 1 Feb 08 Functionality; look and feel Usability research is ongoing Beta prototype online in June 08 Content requirement questionnaire online end-Feb Access to >500,000 digital objects Technical assessment prototype Sept 08

The benefits for content providers Brings your content to wider user-groups Enables investigation in a multilingual setting Renews relationships between materials and forges new links Supports an interdisciplinary approach Builds your knowledge of interoperability issues Promotes collaboration and knowledge exchange Exposes authenticated, deeper-level resources that are less accessible to search engines

The content requirements Content holders need to provide Europeana with: identifiers, metadata files, vocabularies in SKOS form, licensing and rights information and temporary access to the original digital objects a URL that points to the original digital object standard identifiers for digital objects, and the content providers should be responsible for persistent resolution. the provided elements will be aggregated into Europeana surrogates which are the basis for Europeana functionality access to the original digital object is via a link to the content provider site Europeana will not store original objects!

The metadata OAI-PMH (Header, Metadata, About) Dublin Core unqualified (occurrence, type, encoding and vocabulary specified) Other formats are optional and a limited number only should be used with the metadataPrefix => used for full text searching Use of semantic interoperability techniques for semantic mappings and the cross-searching of descriptive metadata instead of a higher level interoperability application profile.

The standards OAI-PMH for harvesting SRU, SOAP, JSR and OpenSearch for external search and access XML for syntax SKOS, OWL/RDF(S) for semantics SPARQL for advanced search (but still discussing alternatives such as SQL, SeQL and Lucene) CIDOC/CRM and DCMI Abstract Model Metadata modelling (FRBRoo to be discussed) SAML, LDAP and OpenID for security and authentication Lots of others: WSDL, WAI, UNICODE UTF-8, XSLT, NACO, UNAPI, “See-also”, HTTP/HTTPS...

The demo

The message Connect your content to

The end Thank you Questions ?