Europeana Libraries: what is the value of a library domain aggregator?

Europeana Libraries: what is the value of a library domain aggregator? Susan Reilly (LIBER)

LIBER 2012, Tartu

What this is not

• It is not about a portal

• It is not about end users

• It is not a sales pitch

It`s about sharing our motivaton for joining this project and why we thought (think) it is worthwhile....

What’s on?

• 4 networks and project

• The big idea

• Friends with benefits

• Back to the future

Four networks and a project

• Europeana Libraries is a 2-year project funded by the European Commission’s ICT-PSP programme

• Will add over 5 million digital objects to Europeana

• 19 research and university libraries are participating

• Coordinated by The European Library

• Mixture of content:

• 3,319,045 pages

• 598,130 books and theses

• 368,000 articles

• 848,078 images

• 1,200 film and video clips

• 34,000 mixed content objects

Four networks and a project

Network libraries: LIBER, CERL, CENLProject: Europeana Libraries The European Library: the library aggregator for EuropeanaEuropeana: Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual aggregator

The big Idea

Bring digital content from European

national and research libraries

to the researcher

The big idea

• Increasing amount of digital content in libraries

• Change in research behaviour, increase in cross disciplinary research

• Gap in provision of research infrastructure for the humanities

• Shrinking library budgets and more pressure to show ROI

The big idea

• All European cultural heritage available online by 2025 (Neelie Kroes)

• All public domain masterpieces available in Europeana(Digital Agenda)

• Cost= 10 billion per year over the next 10 years (Collections Trust)

• Increase in Open Access and born digital content

• Growth in systematic collaboration

• More complex research

• Less time for research (occurs in bursts)

• Some barriers:• Lack of linking between archives• Lack of standadisation of online databases and archives• Difficulties in data linking arising from the lack of standardisation,

and the inconsistencies in quality, reliability, and functionality across different resources

The big idea

• Source the content

• Aggregate it

• Improve it

• Make it available in a meaningful way

• And……

do all this in a sustainable manner

The big idea

• A valuable resource for researchers with full-text search capabilities

• A robust network of national and research libraries

• An efficient sustainable aggregation model for research libraries across Europe

This means developing the framework for a library domain aggregation

service!!!!

Creating the business model

Friends with benefits

• Efficiency

• Effectiveness

• Visibility

• Credibility

Friends with benefits

• Research and National Libraries have worked together before…..

But not through the same aggregator….

Efficiency

Visibility

Digitisation equals visibility: Prof. David Nicholas (yesterday)

Effectiveness

Credibility

Friends with benefits

• Consultation & articulation of value

proposition

• Business Model

• Business Plan

Friends with benefits

• Enabling searching of bibliographic records of texts in hard copy and metadata for related digitised texts at the same time

• Offering OCR services for providers’ digital content to support full text searching in the portal

• Pushing the data out to other

academic / research services

• Providing access to universities’

own digital repositories…and more?

Back to the future

• Some hurdles• Do we really share a common vision?• What if research libraries don’t sign up to the service?• Can we ensure that researchers use the portal?

Back to the future

• More content

• More tools/services

• More innovation

• More contact with the

reseach community

Back to the future

• Service opened up to all research libraries

• New projects for new innovation, service,and content• Europeana Newspapers www.europeananewspapers.eu• Europeana Cloud