Discovering libraries’ gold through collection-level descriptions

1. Discovering libraries’ gold through collection-level descriptions Valentine Charles Data specialist ELAG 2014, Bath 06-2014

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. Digitisation still in progress… 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/2007/03/10/business/yourmoney/11archive.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

4. For the many digitised resources

5. Collection descriptions as a strategy • 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;

7. Collaborating with a specific community: digital humanities • Traditional Humanities users want to search in large corpora andfind special items. • But • Collections relevant forresearchers are notalwaysavailable in a digital form • Many collections are not known to research communities

8. Collection descriptions for researchers

9. Collection descriptions for researchers CENDARI builds a research infrastructure that • Allows historical inquiry beginning with research questions • Facilitates historical research processes • Supports transnationalandcomparative 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 • Digitialhumanitiesusers • want toexploit large corpora in new ways • want tointegrate corpora withother data

12. Archival research guide

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. Beyond collection descriptions • 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

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!

16. www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/ • www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/access • www.cendari.eu/ Valentine Charles Valentine.charles@kb.nl Thank you