Alastair Dunning, Future Directions for The European Library
1.
2. Future Directions
for The European
Library
Alastair Dunning,
Programme Manager
@alastairdunning
www.theeuropeanlibrary.org
3. Previously, The European Library
has
• Brought European National
Libraries together
• Created a shared European
catalogue
• Acted as the forerunner of
Europeana
4. But the focus has been on
• National Libraries
• Bibliographic data
• Europeana Libraries project (2011-2)
began working with research libraries
and research content
• How do we include Research
Libraries at a service level ?
5. New(ish) forms created in digital research
libraries
• Research datasets
• OA journal articles (and monographs)
• Digitisation of special collections
• Theses
• Mass book digitisation
• Grey literature
• Digitised special collections (and
descriptions)
• Open Educational Resources
6. Plenty of other significant players in this
field
• OCLC World Cat
• Google Book Search
• Google Scholar
• Microsoft Research
• Hathi Trust
• arXiv, Cessda, PubMed Central, DARIAH
• Open-AIRE (Driver), BASE
7. Special Collections
“… as non unique and common research
material becomes more accessible online, often
without the need for library mediation (e.g.
Google Books), the salience of Unique and
Distinctive Collections grows stronger still. They
can attract researchers and research funding,
and enhance the institution’s extramural
reputation … a valuable asset.”
http://www.rluk.ac.uk/files/UDC%20Project%20Plan%20revised%20post%20Board%2011%20Oct.pdf (RLUK
Unique and Distinctive Collections Project)
8. Special Collection
descriptions
“To be used effectively Unique and Distinctive
Collections must be visible and their contents
discoverable. Their existence needs to be
promoted. Collection level descriptions need to
be widely disseminated. At item level full online
cataloguing is usually essential; often more
detailed indexing may be necessary in the case
of specialist materials and discovery of content.”
http://www.rluk.ac.uk/files/UDC%20Project%20Plan%20revised%20post%20Board%2011%20Oct.pdf (RLUK
Unique and Distinctive Collections Project)
9. Special Collection
descriptions
Many collections are not known to networks of
research communities
TEL can provide a point for item and collection
descriptions of special collections
Can do this within a European context, ie shared
with similar collection descriptions of other
libraries
Provides greater institutional awareness as well
10. Digitised Collections
However, descriptions not enough … access to
full-text (or digitised item) is taken as the norm.
Therefore, where materials are digitised, TEL
offers opportunity to aggregate on a large scale
Not just special collections - books and
newspapers
Again, this can help with discovery and provide
link back to original library
Two examples – manuscripts / newspapers
13. Digitised Collections
Aggregations of full text also give opportunity for
new research uses
Digital Humanities are galvanised by existence
of such corpora
Multiple methodologies in linguistics, geography,
literature, history to exploit such text
Related opportunities for enriching texts –
annotation, entity recognition, crowdsourcing
etc.
Working with research libraries, TEL can provide
aggregation
Developing relationship with related projects
14. A European research platform
Europeana Cloud project (2013-5) puts
some of this into practice
• Ability for contributing partners to share and
retrieve content within a common space (‘a
cloud’)
• Ability for research community to build tools
on top of this content
• Europeana Research platform, led by TEL
Utilising Europeana networks and position
as part of ‘Connecting Europe Facility’
15. But special collections are far from a
library’s only contents.
TEL will aggregate any metadata from
research library.
Exposing aggregated data as linked data
and via an API
Exposing data via other sources (EBSCO,
ProQuest, ExLibris)
Aggregating full text also feasible
16. Opportunity to create links between
different formats from different sources –
digitised book and OA article
Opportunity to create ‘views’ specific for
different subject areas, particularly
humanities and social sciences
Exploring relationship between citation
patterns (DiggiCore project)
Dependent on further work on metadata
development and semantic enrichment
17. In practice …
Sustainability ... Inviting Research
Libraries to join TEL
Exposing / linking to their metadata /
content / institutional holdings
Asking Research Libraries via CERL and
LIBER to contribute to TEL strategy
Exploiting the aggregation of digitised
material – not just bibliographic records
Development of Europeana Cloud project
A Europeana Research platform