2. Large scale aggregation
and its ecosystem
The European Library collects metadata for
digital and non-digital materials from
• 48 National Libraries
• More than 50 University and Research libraries
3. According to the
ENUMERATE survey 10-
12% of content is digitised
Only 10% of the 132 million
objects held at the Library of
Congress digitised
http://www.nytimes.com/200
7/03/10/business/yourmoney
/11archive.html?
pagewanted=all&_r=1&
Digitisation still in progress…
5. Identification of the metadata fields
Enhancements of more than 500
Collection Level Descriptions
Surveys were sent to libraries members
to identify:
• new digital collections;
• special collections (digital and physical);
• physical collections;
Collection descriptions as a
strategy
7. Collaborating with a specific
community: digital humanities
Traditional Humanities users want to
search in large corpora and find special
items.
But
•Collections relevant for researchers are not
always available in a digital form
•Many collections are not known to research
communities
9. Collection descriptions for researchers
CENDARI builds a research infrastructure
that
Allows historical inquiry beginning with
research questions
Facilitates historical research processes
Supports transnational and comparative
approaches
Focusses on discovery and linking sources
with research data
10. Collection descriptions for researchers
CENDARI has built an archive directory
• 800 collection descriptions were collected for WW1
and Medieval studies
• More than 100 supplied by The European Library
11. Collaborating with a specific
community: digital humanities
Digitial humanities users
• want to exploit large corpora in new ways
• want to integrate corpora with other data
13. Integrate collection descriptions
with researchers’ studies
The Archival research guides:
• access points to relevant contemporary research
questions
• Connect collection description to others resources via
domain specific ontologies
• Combined with faceted search, annotations, note-
taking tools, NER
• linked to the community of historians
14. Collections descriptions are even more
interesting when integrated to other data
• Alignment of subjects, place names, time
period with LOD vocabularies
The European Library publishes its data
as linked data and via an API
• Data in RDF, and JSON
Beyond collection descriptions
15. Next steps
The European Library will look into connecting
even more collections to its other data
• Link with full text for instance gives opportunity for new
research uses
• Develop opportunities for enriching collection
descriptions with annotation, named entity
recognition, vocabularies enrichment…
• And incorporate the results of the collaboration with
CENDARI
CENDARI project runs for two more years so
stay tuned!
I’m going to talk about how collection descriptions can enrich users experience and more in details researchers in digital humanities work.
Rich information and interesting material is available but
is located in different services
has been developed by many projects and for different purposes
Lack of contextual information: poor titles, lack of other metadata.
The information is still not connected
Link exists between materials but are not represented doing this through collection descriptions/