Europeana: Collection level description

ELAG 2014

Discovering libraries’ gold through collections-level descriptions
Valentine Charles, Data Specialist at The European Library and Europeana

(See also description of talk)

Europeana work in a large scale aggregation ecosystem and now works in collaboration with Cendari. Digitisation is still only the tip of the iceberg of the content of European libraries. Digital objects are displayed attractively as they are very visual. There is also full text available. But most of this material is disconnected from one another. Mostly it is item-level description, with different levels of quality. Wouldn't it be nice to link an image to the relevant journal page?

New strategy for collection-level description. Looking at specific topics, talking to historians, surveying members. E.g. Old Slavic Manuscripts - not digitised but at least there is some description. Another example would be not so much a subject but the specific collections from a particular library, e.g. National Library of Serbia.

Collaboration with Cendari with libraries and archives, about integrating digital data on the mediaval times and the First World War. Researchers working on a project should use this data and we try to facilitate the research activity.The aim is to link the material from different libraries. An environment called Archival research guide is being built to support research. Idea is: when a researcher starts on a topic, he/she writes some paragraphs and it would be incorporated in the guide so that it becomes a narrative, which links to specific collections (the sources). Encouraged to use and re-use data directly in the research, rather than only talking about it. Tools such as NER (name-entity recognition) technology to help identify the entities used in the research or facets etc. are made available. The Archival research guides provide access points to relevant contemporary research, connect collection description to other resources via domain specific ontologies.

Beyond collection description, the most interesting is to link it to other data and other type of material. E.g. with some full text, enriching with annotations, vocabularies, NER etc. Also interested to get this data re-integrated in the various libraries. Cendari is a 4-year project, there are 2 more years to go.