Locate the Irish Manuscripts Commission in the cultural heritage landscape: funded by DTCS under its cultural institutions section About the Commission: 80 years old, chairman James McGuire and 20 members form all over Ireland; directors of NLI, NAI and PRONI are ex-officio members
Some IMC publications including its serial publication Analecta HIbernica
IMC became involved in aggregation through IMC digitisation policy document and attendance at MSEG 2007 - 2009 In October 2009 content from Ireland on Europeana was <1% IMC asked by DTCS to act as an aggregator of content on a pilot study basis with the technical support of the Digital Humanities Observatory
During 2010 the following CIs were in a position to engage with IMC and content was provided as follows
Other institutions were not in a position to avail of the service in 2010 for various reasons but they availed of discussions with the Niall O’Leary and Bruno Voisin of the DHO
Apologies to people who use flow charts as a communication device! Broadly represents the work flow of the national aggregator PURPLE = content provider BLUE = aggregator technical services GREEN = Europeana interface
Snippet from DHO ese template
The 20 elements of the DHO template distributed to participating organisations Filled out with IMC book data
The Irish Traditional Music Archive has added 42 items including texts, images and sounds
The Chester Beatty Library has provided 188 images form its renowned image collection Chester Beatty’s library has been described as the finest collection of manuscripts and books made by a private collector in the 20th century. It includes representative samples of the world’s heritage (artistic, religious and secular) from about 2700 BC to the present century.
The National Archives made available the entire 1911 census – over 900,000 objects Classified as TEXT objects because it was adjudged that users would “read” them rather than “look at” them While census data is listed as desirable content in the Europeana literature, initially there were complaints that this particular contribution made searching for Irish place names such as “Dublin” quite a scary prospect Europeana were grateful for almost 1million objects – it helped them reach their 10 million object milestone! Europeana improved their SEARCH ENGINE and SEARCH RANKING which is now based on the completeness of records and the occurrence of certain fields & values Europeana doesn’t deal well with hierarchical objects but will address this in the future with the implementation of the EDM (Electronic Document Management)
IMC has two provided metadata for two texts to Europeana IMC is pursuing the digitisation of its back list of out of print works and it makes readable digital editions available through its own website for free
Identity - visibility of the content provider’s name in the search result SEE NEXT SLIDE Rights - I would say that there is a disconnect between what Europeana would like to see with regard to rights (Creative Commons Attribution licenses) and what the owners of cultural content are at liberty to do in terms of rights
Where Europeana:provider and Europeana:dataProvider metadata are provided the content provider and the aggregator names will both appear in the thumbnails in a search results window Clearly not the case here – sorry Grace! Also – Europeana say there like to retain this for political reasons as many of the aggregators are other European projects which need to be acknowledged
I mentioned the other issue which we have noticed in our discussions with cultural institutions and that is the issue of rights. While Europeana sees Creative Commons rights as the way forward in terms of the wider use of digital objects, it is apparent that a lot of content owners do not share that view and some are deeply constrained by copyright law in terms of what they can do with their digital objects.
The idea behind Creative Commons is that it enables the universal access to culture made possible by the internet to become legally possible Provides a “free, public and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the internet and the reality of copyright law”.