local content in a Europeana cloud

Rob Davies, MDR Partners, Project Manager

LoCloud is funded by the European Commission's ICT Policy Support Programme

Let’s hope it doesn’t rain

• Build on success of Europeana Local and CARARE Best Practice Networks (25-30% of content in Europeana).– 4 million + new items.

• Make it easier for small/medium institutions to make good quality metadata and content available to Europeana;

• Explore and test the potential of cloud computing for aggregation, enrichment and re-use, with a special focus on geographic location.

• Bring together local history and heritage resources which are currently unevenly represented in the Europeana ‘ecosystem’,

• More coherent views of content relating to a given locality;

Main goals

1. Scientific coordinator (National Archive, Norway) and a project manager (MDR)

2. Strong group of technical partners, already important contributors to development of Europeana, including AIT, Athena RC, AVINET, IPCHS, NTUA and PSNC.

3. National and regional aggregation services or content providers who will act as pilot implementers of the cloud services; coordinate and disseminate at national level.

4. Partners with specific expertise in key aspects such as vocabularies.

• All EU Member States represented (excluding Finland, Luxembourg and Malta) plus Iceland, Norway, Serbia and Turkey.

• Start date: 1 March 2013

Consortium etc

• ‘Default’ aggregation infrastructure in the cloud for smaller content holders– Build on MINT-MORE combination used in CARARE (EDM)– Lightweight digital library– Alternative ingestion paths

• Establish guidance, training and support facilities, built around the LoCloud aggregation service.

• On line course

LoCloud: IaaS

• An enhanced aggregator service would incorporate services that operate on the metadata (repository-like services)

• Multi-step process• Long lifecycle of metadata• Need to preserve metadata • Provide added-value from all the aggregated content

An enhanced aggregator

• Metadata editing (possibly collection-wide)• Preservation services• Rights management• Enrichment services• Spatial• Thematic • …• Digital resources management (creation, cataloguing,

etc.)

Aggregator Services

An enhanced aggregation service

Data import

Pre-processing(validations,…)

Ingest (indexing,…)

Search / Browse

EditingTransformation

ExportEnrichment

• Provide cloud-based software services to enable more discoverable and interoperable content; – geolocation enrichment tools– metadata enrichment (NLP – English + Spanish) – multilingual vocabularies for local history– historic place-names ‘gazetteer’– Wikimedia and crowdsourcing

• Cloud-based testlab• A step toward distributed digital curation?

LoCloud: SaaS

Workpackage structure

Briefing, action planning in each country; state of the art in relevant cloud infrastructures; content and metadata analysis; requirements analysis

WP 1Planning, preparation and requirements

Specify, modify, test, implement core infrastructure components: MINT, MoRe, Lightweight digital library – all build on existing work

WP 2Design and implementation of aggregation infrastructure

Collaborative cloud-based testlab, involving partners and users; develop and implement a suite of SaaS: geolocation enrichment; metadata enrichment; multilingual vocabularies; historic place-names; Wikimedia and crowdsourcing

WP 3Micro services for small and medium institutions

Workpackages (2)

Regional training workshops, video, online course; documentation andhelp desk; support portal – centre of expertise; service sustainability planning with Europeana

WP 4Enabling and supporting small and medium institutions

Group of inter-related evaluation activities: infrastructure, metadata and content; impact on institutions and end users; Recommendations

WP 5Evaluation and impact assessment

Website and social media; national and international conferences and events; competition among Europe’s regions; sustainability planning; work with aggregators

WP 6Dissemination and exploitation

Coordination with Europeana Cloud developments

WP 7Management and coordination

• Move to cloud based architecture• No single point of failure• Scalability• High availability• API to access metadata & data• Build services• Allow content providers to create and catalogue their

digital resources on the aggregator

Future directions

Thank yourob.davies@mdrpartners.com