Future Directions for The European Library

www.theeuropeanlibrary.org

Alastair Dunning, Programme Manager@alastairdunning

Previously, The European Library has

• Brought European National Libraries together

• Created a shared European catalogue

• Acted as the forerunner of Europeana

But the focus has been on

• National Libraries

• Bibliographic data

• Europeana Libraries project (2011-2) began working with research libraries and research content

• How do we include Research Libraries at a service level ?

New(ish) forms created in digital research libraries

• Research datasets• OA journal articles (and monographs)• Digitisation of special collections• Theses• Mass book digitisation• Grey literature• Digitised special collections (and descriptions)• Open Educational Resources

Plenty of other significant players in this field

• OCLC World Cat

• Google Book Search

• Google Scholar

• Microsoft Research

• Hathi Trust

• arXiv, Cessda, PubMed Central, DARIAH

• Open-AIRE (Driver), BASE

Special Collections

“… as non unique and common research material becomes more accessible online, often without the need for library mediation (e.g. Google Books), the salience of Unique and Distinctive Collections grows stronger still. They can attract researchers and research funding, and enhance the institution’s extramural reputation … a valuable asset.”

http://www.rluk.ac.uk/files/UDC%20Project%20Plan%20revised%20post%20Board%2011%20Oct.pdf (RLUK Unique and Distinctive Collections Project)

Special Collection descriptions

“To be used effectively Unique and Distinctive Collections must be visible and their contents discoverable. Their existence needs to be promoted. Collection level descriptions need to be widely disseminated. At item level full online cataloguing is usually essential; often more detailed indexing may be necessary in the case of specialist materials and discovery of content.”

http://www.rluk.ac.uk/files/UDC%20Project%20Plan%20revised%20post%20Board%2011%20Oct.pdf (RLUK Unique and Distinctive Collections Project)

Special Collection descriptions

Many collections are not known to networks of research communities

TEL can provide a point for item and collection descriptions of special collections

Can do this within a European context, ie shared with similar collection descriptions of other libraries

Provides greater institutional awareness as well

Digitised Collections

However, descriptions not enough … access to full-text (or digitised item) is taken as the norm.

Therefore, where materials are digitised, TEL offers opportunity to aggregate on a large scale

Not just special collections - books and newspapers

Again, this can help with discovery and provide link back to original library

Two examples – manuscripts / newspapers

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Digitised Collections Aggregations of full text also give opportunity for

new research uses Digital Humanities are galvanised by existence

of such corpora Multiple methodologies in linguistics, geography,

literature, history to exploit such text Related opportunities for enriching texts –

annotation, entity recognition, crowdsourcing etc.

Working with research libraries, TEL can provide aggregation

Developing relationship with related projects

A European research platform

Europeana Cloud project (2013-5) puts some of this into practice• Ability for contributing partners to share and

retrieve content within a common space (‘a cloud’)

• Ability for research community to build tools on top of this content

• Europeana Research platform, led by TEL Utilising Europeana networks and position

as part of ‘Connecting Europe Facility’

But special collections are far from a library’s only contents.

TEL will aggregate any metadata from research library.

Exposing aggregated data as linked data and via an API

Exposing data via other sources (EBSCO, ProQuest, ExLibris)

Aggregating full text also feasible

Opportunity to create links between different formats from different sources – digitised book and OA article

Opportunity to create ‘views’ specific for different subject areas, particularly humanities and social sciences

Exploring relationship between citation patterns (DiggiCore project)

Dependent on further work on metadata development and semantic enrichment

In practice …

Sustainability ... Inviting Research Libraries to join TEL

Exposing / linking to their metadata / content / institutional holdings

Asking Research Libraries via CERL and LIBER to contribute to TEL strategy

Exploiting the aggregation of digitised material – not just bibliographic records

Development of Europeana Cloud project A Europeana Research platform x