Education on digitisation and Europeana for small memory institutions within

the AccessIT Plus project Adam Dudczak

maneo@man.poznan.pl

ACCESS IT plus final project meeting

ACCESS IT plus

„The aim of the Access IT plus (http://accessitplus.eu) project is to help small memory institutions to develop their digital libraries and connect them to Europeana”

– Develop e-learning courses and help to create pilot digital libraries in target countries

– Project partners from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Serbia, Greece and UK

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ACCESS IT courses

• Reference ACCESS IT (http://dl.psnc.pl/moodle) e-Learning courses – “Digital repositories for small memory

institutions”

– “Cooperation with Europeana”

• Created mainly for people who work in small memory institutions

• Originally developed in English

• Based on Moodle platform

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ACCESS IT courses (2)

• First release of the courses in October 2010, second in the beginning of July 2012.

• Result of our work with institutions from Albania, B+H, Croatia, Greece, Poland, Serbia, Turkey and UK

4 ACCESS IT workshop in Veria (Greece)

ACCESS IT courses (3)

• Original (English version) available to anyone, free of any charge

• Content released under the terms of Creative Commons BY-SA-NC License

– Attribution, Share alike, Non-commercial

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Course translation and adoption

• Each partner prepared versions of the courses

– Adoption of courses content to local conditions

– Gathering local DL community in one place

• Courses are available in Albanian, Croatian, Greek, Polish, Serbian and Turkish

• Deployed in 7 countries so far.

• More 1 300 people graduated!

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Basic assumptions

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"Getting information off the internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant!"

Mitchell Kapor

Source: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

Basic assumptions

8 Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/emilyrides/6042105078/

Basic assumptions

• Course should be:

– Practical – only necessary theory illustrated with practical examples

– Non-technical - it is for librarians, not for computer programmers!

• Simple recipes for complex problems?

– Not always possible

• Use of free (Open Source if possible) tools

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Digital Repositories for small memory institutions

• It consists of 9 topics divided in 29 modules

• By the end of each topic there is a quiz

• Course participants should have basic knowledge about computers and Internet

• Structure of the course is wrapped around the general digitisation workflow

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Digital Repositories for small memory institutions

• During the course you will learn how to: – Organize digitisation workflow

– Describe objects in order to make them more accessible

– Prepare digital content for web delivery

– Promote your objects in the Internet

– Assure objects availability in long term

– Evaluate usability and accessibility of digital library website

– Cooperate with other portals i.e. Europeana

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Digital Repositories for small memory institutions

• In the course there are practical instructions showing ways to:

– Perform graphical post-processing of the images,

– Scan and deliver large images over the network

– Use Optical Character Recognition to capture text from images in order to make it searchable

– Create PDF and DjVu documents to deliver textual documents

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Digital Repositories for small memory institutions

• In the course there are practical instructions showing ways to:

– Prepare audio and video material for online presentation

– Convert audio files between various formats

– Publish digital audio-visual content in digital library

– Get access to digital library - is it necessary to create DL on you own?

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Digital Repositories for small memory institutions

• Course shows how to publish digital objects using DSpace, Greenstone and dLibra

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Digital Repositories for small memory institutions

• Things which are not in the course:

– How to install and configure digital library software

• Too many technical problems potentially involved – too technical issue.

• In case of problems with this kind of things use course Forum, ask other participants or email us.

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Cooperation with Europeana

• It is much shorter it consist of 2 topics divided into 14 modules – First module groups non-technical things related to

Europeana – More technical things were described in second topic

• By the end of each topic there is a quiz • Course is dedicated to both repository managers

and people just want to know how Europeana-related things

• For second part some technical skills might be necessary

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Cooperation with Europeana

• During the course you will learn:

– Why and how Europeana was built

– Is it worth to cooperate with Europeana

– What benefits Europeana offers to end-users

– What is metadata aggregation and why it is so important

– Basics of Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE) and Europeana Data Model (EDM)

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Cooperation with Europeana

• During the course you will learn: – How to normalize and convert your metadata to

Europeana Semantic Elements?

– How to pass your resources to Europeana?

• Course features also a few additional modules which gives more insight into: – Some more advanced issues related to metadata

aggregation

– Political background of Europeana

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Cooperation with Europeana

• Things which are not in the course: – Setting up a metadata aggregator

• In case of problems with this kind of things take a look at list of aggregation software presented in – “What should I do when there is no aggregator

near me?”

• As far as we know this is quite unique initiative – no similar courses available.

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http://dl.psnc.pl/moodle

• All tools necessary to implement digitisation workflow on a pendrive – http://digitlab.psnc.pl

• Dedicated Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu 12.04 (32bit/64bit)

• You just need a computer which will be able to boot from a pendrive

• Some exemplary documents included

• It is possible to install DigitLab as a normal system

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• DigitLab offers access to quite a few well-known and widely used FLOSS tools

– Scan Tailor, GIMP, magicktailor, DjVuLibre, gScan2PDF, ImageMagick, Tesseract

• Three (DSpace, dLibra and Greenstone) digital libraries framework installed and ready to use

• MINT as a metadata aggregation tool

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• Download from - http://digitlab.psnc.pl

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Summary

• ACCESS IT plus courses are a comperhensive, constantly updated source of knowledge about digitisation and digital libraries

• DigitLab helps to implement recipes from the courses in practice and it is a perfect solution for both trainings and day-to-day work

• We are waiting for your feedback!

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Questions?

Adam Dudczak

• Email: maneo@man.poznan.pl

• Twitter: @diglib_psnc, @maneo

• WWW:

– http://dl.psnc.pl

– http://digitlab.psnc.pl

– http://accessitplus.eu

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Thank you!