Case Study: Europeana API Implementation in Polish Digital Libraries

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Overview

Big Idea 2

Users 2

Value Proposition 2

Channels 3

Benefits 6

Conclusions 6

Case Study: Europeana API Implementation in Polish Digital Libraries

Open Data Case Studies Workshop Paris, January 28, 2013 Marcin Werla, Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center

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Big Idea

Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) have been working with Polish cultural heritage institutions for more than 10 years. This cooperation has primarily focused on putting the institutions’ digitised collections online, mostly for educational and research use. The first outcomes of this cooperation were available online in 2002. In 2009, we started working with Europeana, appreciating its importance and strategic potential to promote Polish cultural heritage all over Europe and make it even more accessible and re-usable. In 2010, when the pilot programme for the Europeana API was announced, we had an idea that, if properly used, an automated way of accessing aggregated data could significantly increase the visibility of European cultural heritage among the users of Polish digital libraries.

Users

A study conducted in 20101 found that regular users of Polish digital libraries mostly fall into one of the following categories: amateur historians and genealogists, genealogists, local historians, academics and students. We decided to use the data available through Europeana’s API to enrich our base services, without specifically focusing on any of the above types of users, therefore also addressing incidental users who are not covered by the mentioned categories.

Value Proposition

While defining the scope of our pilot API applications, we decided that the implementation should focus on two core functions of digital libraries: searching the available collections and displaying metadata for particular digital objects. We wanted to enrich the information presented to users with data about additional but relevant objects found in Europeana. Such enrichment should be easily accessible, unintrusive and should look like a natural element of our system.

1 Górny, M., Mazurek J. (2011), “Key users of Polish digital libraries”, Electronic Library, Vol. 30 No. 4, pp. 543-556, available

at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/02640471211252238 (accessed 18 March 2013).

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Channels

We decided to use two services which are hosted and developed by PSNC:

Digital Library of Wielkopolska (DLW) – the oldest and second largest Polish digital library, established in 2002 - http://www.wbc.poznan.pl/

Digital Libraries Federation (DLF) – Polish metadata aggregator collecting information

about over 1.2 million digital objects from more than 80 digital libraries, archives and museums (including DLW), established in 2007 - http://fbc.pionier.net.pl/.

We used APIs to access information held by these libraries, in addition to the Europeana API. To make the integration of API-based extensions into these services as seamless as possible for the end-users, we assessed their workflow. We assumed that a user’s workflow starts in the DLF, where he/she is searching for interesting objects. After finding something interesting, he/she is redirected to a digital library website for a particular object, where he/she finds metadata and a link to the content. On this basis, we decided to extend DLF search results with links to search results in Europeana (using the same user query as an input to both search systems), and to extend the particular object’s results with links to associated objects in DLF and Europeana. The associations are based on API searches from DLF and Europeana, using pieces of an object’s metadata as a query. The overview of the initial data and user flow between the three systems and the flow which we wanted to achieve is depicted in the figure below.

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Finally, we implemented two widgets: ‘More results from Europeana’ for DLF and ‘See also’ for DLW. These widgets dynamically get data from the website which is then displayed to the user, the widget also sends a request with this data to the API and displays search results received from the API as a response. Screenshots below show the final result of such dynamic enrichment.

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Search results on the Polish Digital Libraries Federation website enriched with a ‘More results from Europeana’ widget based on the Europeana API.

Metadata record on the Digital Library of Wielkopolska website enriched with a ‘See also’ widget based on the Europeana API and Digital Libraries Federation API.

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Benefits

The widgets were deployed online at the start of 2011. Almost a year later, we decided to start evaluating their usefulness by analysing the traffic data gathered by Google Analytics from Europeana, DLF and DLW. The analysed period was 1 Jan 2012 – 13 June 2012. During the analysed period, the DLF website had 458,979 visits, of which 323,910 visits included the search results page. At the same time, Europeana noted 16,754 visits which were initiated from the DLF website (DLF was the referrer). This means that 5.17% of visitors who saw search results on DLF decided to click through to Europeana. Moreover, these users spent double the average time on Europeana. This clearly shows that enrichment based on the Europeana API not only directed users to an additional source of information, but also that they enjoyed this additional source. Similar analysis for the DLW website showed that at least 0.75% of visitors who saw at least one metadata record during their visits decided to check the suggested objects in Europeana. The duration of the visit was also significantly higher than the Europeana average, but not as high as the average duration of visits from the DLF. The significantly lower percentage of redirections to Europeana from DLW, compared to the DLF ratio, can probably be justified by at least one major difference between the DLW and DLF widgets. The DLW widget provides an additional feature to the metadata display website, while the DLF widget extends the core functionality of the search, thus has a higher chance of being used. Additional traffic data collection and deep analysis would be required to provide more confident explanation of that difference.

Conclusions

The aim of this case study was to describe the idea, the implementation and benefits that PSNC’s Digital Libraries Team achieved by using the Europeana API to enrich the services of Polish digital libraries. We hope that the presented material is convincing enough to encourage providers of cultural heritage web services to take a closer look at the Europeana API, and to consider implementing additional features for their systems based on this API. As a final remark, it is worth noting that it is not only data providers already cooperating with Europeana who should be aware of the many benefits of opening their data. As described in this study, service providers like Europeana and the Digital Libraries Federation are able to gain significant volumes of quality visitor traffic by opening up their data and functionality via their APIs. These are valuable benefits that could also be realised by other providers who open up their data and integrate with other services.