Presentation by Alastair Dunning

1. Europeana Research
Alastair Dunning
The Hague, January 2013

2. What’s the problem ?
The Research Community, particularly the burgeoning
digital humanities community, are one of the obvious
natural end user groups for Europeana
Yet current Europeana.eu portal is not really a
destination site for scholars
Europeana Research is the solution to this.
So what precisely is Europeana Research ?

3. Defining Europeana Research
Um ... we don’t quite know at the moment.
But we do have some places to start and potential
options to follow

4. 1. Helping researchers find non-digitised
content
Via the European Library (the Europeana hub for libraries), we
have access to >100m bibliographic records drawn from
European national libraries
Apex (the hub for archives) is aggregating finding aids from
archives throughout the continent.
Unlike, the existing europeana.eu portal, Europeana Research
could work on make such descriptions interoperable and
allowing researchers to search through non-digitised content
For example: the current CENDARI project is gathering archival
descriptions and library metadata related to World War One and
holdings of medieval manuscripts

5. 1. Helping researchers find non-digitised
content
Pros:
Can build on existing TEL collection
Defined scholarly need
Technically not too complex (except for metadata)
Cons:
Defined scholarly need exists but is a bit niche
Ingestion of new content is slow and incremental
Metadata interoperability is complex
Needs richer metadata than present ?

6. 2. Building corpora of digitised primary
sources
But will a focus on non-digitised content meet scholarly
demand ?
Europeana Research could concentrate on collecting corpora of
related material that benefits from aggregation (full-text
documents, digging into data type datasets)
This would allow scholars much greater power in resource
discovery.
One current example: The Europeana Newspapers project will
aggregate historical newspapers and allow end users to search
through full text and metadata (similar to Chronicling America)

7. 2. Building corpora of digitised primary
sources
Pros:
Meets scholarly demand and expectations
Early ingest of important corpora could create quick wins and
visibility
Fits in with Cloud and Newspapers project
Cons:
Technical complexity, particularly in terms of storage
Different formats (e.g. newspapers, manuscripts) require
interface tweaking
Where to start ? Focus on collection certain collections at the
start may alienate certain domains
Plenty of work to curate collections

8. 3. Building tools to exploit digital content
Europeana Research could also ensure access to aggregated
content is exposed via APIs
This would allow third parties to build scholarly tools related to
such content
For example, tools that would permit the online visualisation,
transcription or analysis of metadata and content that is held
centrally by Europeana.
An example: A third party could build on a transcription tool on a
set of printed documents held in Europeana. The resulting
transcription would be added to the metadata Europeana has for
that object

9. 3. Building tools to exploit digital content
Pros:
Tools are developed and maintained by third parties. Burden of
sustainability is not on us
Can enrich content in new ways – this might also persuade
content owners to share more content with Europeana
Fits in with Cloud project
Cons:
Depends on ingest of content (i.e. slide number 2) for tools to be
effective

10. 4. Providing a safe house for in copyright
material
Much digitised content is of interest to scholars but behind rights
agreements
Europeana Research could act as a safehouse for cultural
institutions and rights holders who are happy to share their
content for research purposes but not for ‘general’ use
Europeana Research could provide the necessary trust and
authentication mechanisms to channel content to the scholarly
community (or indeed other specific communities)

11. 4. Providing a safe house for in copyright
material
Pros:
Meets definite scholarly and publishers’ need
Europeana perhaps the only body that can do this at an
international level
Partially fits in with Cloud
Cons:
May require complex technical requirements (e.g. authentication)
Might possible be for a small user group within research
community ?
Going against an open philosophy ?
Complex licensing arrangements

12. 5. Linking primary source objects with
secondary sources
Europeana Research could take the metadata from Europeana.eu
and enriches it to the links from secondary sources (e.g. journals,
monographs, theses) These enriched links are represented in an
advanced version of Europeana.eu
For example, the metadata for a painting would be enriched with
links to journal articles where that painting is mentioned
Pros : Meets scholarly need for searching over different datatypes
Cons: Complex to extract entities.
End service is nice to have but not essential.

13. 6. Hosting reference data
Europeana Research hosts thesauri, ontologies and other
reference services developed by digital humanities projects (e.g.
The Pelagios project of classical world place names,
http://pelagios-project.blogspot.nl/p/about-pelagios.html_
For example, dictionary of European historic place names could
be maintained by a third party but published by Europeana
Pros : Meets scholarly need for sustaining references sources
Europeana is one of few trusted bodies that could play this
role
Cons: Perhaps a niche demand
End service is nice to have but not essential.

14. 5. Linking primary source objects with
secondary sources
Europeana Research could take the metadata from
Europeana.eu and enriches it to the links from secondary
sources (e.g. journals, monographs, theses) These enriched
links are represented in an advanced version of Europeana.eu
For example, the metadata for a painting would be enriched with
links to journal articles where that painting is mentioned

15. The Opportunity - How we will achieve this
Europeana Cloud project - 3 year project starting in 2013
Building a shared back-end infrastructure for trusted members
from Europeana’s network of cultural heritage institutions.
It will explore some of the issues raised in this presentation
• Developing a Europeana Research platform
• Ingesting and then providing access to content not just
metadata
• Building tools on top of content and metadata
• Expanding the Europeana Data Agreement for content

16. What we need to do today – The Vision
What is our vision for Europeana Research ?
What do we want to achieve in
6 months
18 months
36 months
In the long term all the options are interesting and worth
following. But to have any kind of impact, we need to be able to
offer engaging content / metadata for researchers. Moving
quickly to achieve some early wins will be vital for Europeana
Research / TEL.

17. I hope that makes a little bit of sense