WHY AND HOWTO CONTRIBUTE TO EUROPEANA
5/8 – The University of Padova experience
This section describes the experience of an institution that provides data to Europeana through a Project Aggregator. In the context of Europeana, the term “project aggregator” refers to
“organisations that have joined a project consortium with a specific aim and purpose. Project aggregators aim to aggregate within a specific theme or by domain (single or cross)”.
Source: Europeana Professional – Aggregators and providers
For further details see the Aggregators section in the Learning Object MINT Services.
The University of Padova took part in the CIP Best Practice Network “Linked Heritage” project which stemmed from the eContentPlus “Athena” project of April 2011 and ended in September 2013. Linked Heritage products and research results are available at www.linkedheritage.org.
Read more on the Linked Heritage Project Aggregator in the the Learning Object MINT: services.
Why contribute to Europeana?
There are many reasons why the University of Padova decided to contribute to Europeana.
First of all, to make the cultural heritage of the University of Padova and the institution itself more visible through its digital collections.
In addition, we also thought it was important to contribute to Europeana through the European framework programmes and to obtain the organisational and financial support of EU-funded projects and initiatives.
This has prompted us to collect, organise and enrich metadata and other information on digitised contents which would otherwise be hidden in local databases or storage systems and therefore not available on the web.
Thus, adhering to Europeana has been valued not only as a short-, but also as a medium- and long-term investment from both cultural and economic reasons.
Another positive effect was that the Institution’s librarians, curators, archivists and researchers could improve and share their expertise and knowledge about digital library systems and especially metadata standards, modelling and management, linked data, persistent identifiers, ingestion process, ontologies and digital copyright.
Our participation in Europeana, a prestigious initiative endorsed by the European Commission, attracted other local institutions. Consequently, new, valuable and unique collections have been added to Europeana thanks to the efforts and technical ability of our University staff.
How we provided data
Partnership formal steps
The project started on 23rd April 2010 when, during a meeting in Florence, the ICCU – Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico proposed several cultural organisations to participate in a CIP Best Practice Network entitled “Linked Heritage” aimed at:
- providing large quantities of new content to Europeana, from both public and private sectors;
- enhancing the quality and richness of Europeana metadata;
- improving the functionalities available for search, retrieval and use of Europeana content;
- facilitating the dissemination and training on the key Digital Library concepts.
Evaluation of the proposal
The University of Padova Library System decided to participate in Europeana through the Linked Heritage Project Aggregator as it considered it strategical to:
- cooperate with a community operating in the field of Digital Cultural Heritage, which includes representatives of all the key stakeholder groups from 22 countries: culture ministries, government agencies, museums, libraries, and national aggregators, major research centres, publishers and small businesses;
- participate in the discussion of the thematic working groups;
- be invited to conferences, international workshops and training courses organised by Linked Heritage;
- access the deliverables, technical reports and other materials produced by Linked Heritage partners within the scope of the project;
- use the Linked Heritage tools and technologies developed during the project;
- deliver cultural content to Europeana using the MINT platform implemented for the Linked Heritage project.
The decision: first formal act
The University of Padova Library System committed to participate in the Linked Heritage project by signing the “Non-Exclusion Declaration: Certification and Declaration on Honour” document on 1st June 2010.
The Grant Agreement
The ICT PSP Grant Agreement No 270905 between the Information Society and Media Directorate-General of EC and the ICCU (coordinator) and the Linked Heritage beneficiaries was signed in January 2011.
The Grant Agreement rules all provisions related to the contractual rules relating to financial contribution and implementation of the project.
The Consortium Agreement
The purpose of this Consortium Agreement is to specify with respect to the Project the relationship among the Parties, in particular concerning the organisation of the work between the Parties, the management of the Project, supplementary responsibilities of each partner not specified in the Grant Agreement and the rights and obligations of the Parties concerning inter alia liability, access rights and dispute resolution.
The Consortium Agreement was concluded between the Linked Heritage Parties on August 2013.
Agreements on data to be provided to Europeana
Data Exchange Information (the Linked Heritage survey)
In July 2011 the “Coordination of Content” (WP6) Leaders sent all partners a survey in order to assess the digital collections that content providers described in the Description of Work (PDF), available in the Reserved Area of the Linked Heritage site.
| Country | Italy |
|---|---|
| Provider | University of Padova |
| Primary contact | Name, Surname - email |
| Technical contact | Name, Surname - email |
| Collection URL | http://phaidra.cab.unipd.it/o:4714 |
| Amount of metadata | 2094 |
| Amount of digital objects | 3748 |
| Object types | Images |
| Description | Iconoteca dei Botanici: portraits of Italian and foreigners botanists. The Botanists portrait collection includes 2,380 portraits of Italian and foreign botanists from the second half of the 17th century to the first half of the 20th century. The collection is made up of photographs (salted paper prints, albumen prints, aristotypes, platinum prints, gelatin silver prints), glass negatives, engravings, watercolours, drawings, paintings and photomechanical prints. The collection is preserved in the Padova Botanical Garden Library. Project description: http://www.bibliorto.cab.unipd.it/agenda/iconoteca-dei-botanici. |
| Metadata used | Dublin core; UNIMARC; University of Wien metadata; LOM |
| Rights | Public domain |
| Comments | Comments for rights: see terms and conditions available at: http://www.biblioorto.cab.unipd.it/in-biblioteca/dd-e-ill |
Establish a partnership between Europeana and our cultural heritage organisations
The Europeana Data Exchange Agreement (DEA) between the Europeana Foundation and the University of Padova Library Centre was signed by the director of the University of Padova Library System on 8th August 2012 and by the director of the Europeana Foundation on 26th September 2012.
As of September 2011, the Europeana Data Exchange Agreement replaced all the existing agreements between Europeana and its data providers and aggregators, included the Linked Heritage project running since April 2011.
“With regard to licensing of the resources provided by data providers to Europeana, the [new] DEA sets out two simple principles:
- For all descriptive metadata provided to Europeana, data providers grant Europeana the right to publish the metadata under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. This means that all metadata provided to Europeana can be re-used by third parties without any restrictions.
- Each digital object (and the associated preview) that is available via Europeana needs to carry a rights label that describes its copyright status. Data providers grant Europeana the right to publish previews provided to Europeana. Previews may not be re-used by third parties unless the rights label related to the object allows such re-use."
http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/data-exchange-agreement
All the Linked Heritage content providers were asked to sign the new DEA before ingestion activities.
A dedicated task force was set up by the Linked Heritage coordinators in order to support each consortium participant to find out the proper solution. More information on the Linked Heritage DEA task force, as well as on the delivery modalities of metadata can be found in the Linked Heritage Learning Object MINT Services, Licensing Content
The University of Padova used the opt-out specification as offered in the DEA Art. 4 "Use of Previews", paragraph 3, in accordance with which Europeana will not be allowed to publish URLs pointing to the Previews together with other Metadata. Therefore, Europeana will only use the Previews in accordance with paragraph 2 of the Art. 4: "Europeana is entitled to store and publish on Europeana.eu all Previews provided by the Data Provider, though only in combination with the Metadata that pertain to the same Content" (Art. 4, §2, §3, p. 4).
As the University of Padova Library System is in turn an aggregator of digital collections owned by local partners, we decided to discuss the main issues of the agreement with them in order to share awareness about the opportunities offered by the new DEA and the possible solutions.
IVSREC and the Region of Veneto signed the DEA directly with Europeana Foundation in May and in July 2013, respectively.
Technical steps
The ingestion workflow of the provided datasets into Europeana included the following steps:
- Ingestion activities: set up of the datasets for Europeana through the project aggregator technological platform MINT
- Harvesting of the provided datasets into Europeana
- Harvesting of the updated and new datasets into Europeana
A detailed description of the metadata ingestion and mapping workflow can be found in Mapping content and MINT Platform of the Learning Object MINT Services (See also the screencasts series Mapping workflow in MINT).
Conclusion
The University of Padova Library System benefitted greatly from the Best Practice Network represented by the Linked Heritage Consortium. In fact, the whole ingestion process of the digital collections provided through the University of Padova was supported by our Linked Heritage partners who shared expertise and experience on digital content aggregation, as well as the scientific and technical coordination of the project.
In our experience, these are some of the advantages for public cultural institutions providing content to Europeana through project aggregators:
- economic returns due to:
- increased visibility of the content of participating institutions;
- improvement of the technical specialisation and know-how of their staff;
- significative time savings due to:
- a coordinated approach to the ingestion activities with a common roadmap and deadlines scheduled in accordance with the aggregator coordinator;
- accurate preliminary activity planning by each content provider. This step is essential as the status of source metadata (i.e. metadata completeness) may deeply affect project timing;
- a prioritised channel which accelerate the ingestion process;
- significative cost savings due to:
- the adoption of the open source software developed by the project aggregator (the ingestion tool and the terminology management platform)
- the transmission of knowledge among Europeana content providers and aggregators
- the opportunity for library, archive and museum working groups of the same institution to share methodology and collaborate in describing digital collections.
