Digitisation in Europe
‘Digitisation in Europe’, the very phrase sends a thrill of excitement through most people. It’s right up there with a Premiership goal or a Big Brother eviction. But what happens in Europe is important, whether you realise it or not. Most of the issues which museums are grappling with - copyright, digitisation, funding - are being addressed across Europe and in the European Commission, and their work often has a direct impact on us.
Last week I was in Luxembourg for the 4th meeting of the European Member States Expert Group on Digitisation. The purpose of the Group is to share knowledge and information about what is happening in European Member States and to work on issues of common interest.
The theme for this meeting was ‘Europeana, Europeana, Europeana’. For those of you that haven’t read my previous posts, Europeana is the European Commission’s search engine of cultural information, and it also happens to be one of the EC’s proudest achievements.
This means that any and all European funding streams which even vaguely relate to creating digital content are being diverted to drive content into Europeana. Put it this way, in the next 4 years, you won’t be able to get money from Europe (and from a number of UK funders too) unless the content you produce is available to Europeana.The drive to get metadata and thumbnail images into Europeana is even having a direct influence on the current EC Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy.
So how will the UK respond to this priority? Well, in several ways. In a formal sense, the main element of our participation in Europeana is to aggregate cultural information into the PN Discover Service, and from there to serve it up to Europeana. The Collections Trust has also agreed to participate, on behalf of the UK, in the Europeana Content Contributors Advisory Panel. This means that content which you make available to the PNDS will also automatically be made available to Europeana.
The Collections Trust is also the UK coordinator for the EuropeanaLocal and ATHENA projects. The aim of these projects is to support smaller local and regional museums in getting their content online and into Europeana. Expect to read much more about this topic on this blog soon!
Finally, the main announcement at the Luxembourg meeting was that the European Commission’s Structural Funding Programme is set to release millions of Euros into the digitisation of cultural content over the next few years. The Collections Trust is liaising with the Information Society Directorate at the Commission about these funds, and further information is to be posted here in the coming year.
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Nick. I need to devote more time to a more thought out post over on my blog about Europeana, but the general thrust of the project (and what you say in this post) worries me, as I’m sure you know.
The elevator pitch of my concern is this: Europeana is, and will continue to be an enormous black hole for a vast quantity of money and, more importantly - a vast quantity of human resource - until it takes a step back and reconsiders itself in the light of what is actually going on on the internet, rather than what cultural heritage institutions think is going on on the internet. This is not - and hasn’t been for about 5 years - about creating some kind of destination portal for heritage content (which is how Europeana currently exists, and seems to be projecting itself).
For Europeana to be successful, it *must* open an accessible API to the content stored on it. If it was me, the UK response should be - “you’re having none of our content until you provide open access to it”. I’d also question OAI-PMH.
Mike
March 3rd, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Mike, thanks for this. I think we do need to have a grown-up debate about this (and future initiatives like it) across the sector. This whole thing really comes down to whether you believe that the ends justify the means.
From the point both of view of technology orthodoxy and good web practice we all know that a destination site is a flawed concept. I am allergic to them because of the way they centralise overhead and demand artificial forms of sustenance (such as ongoing public investment).
That being the case, Europeana is as much about European politics as it is digital cultural content. As a collective endeavour it is a very important, very complex and very fine-tuned vehicle for different nations to achieve specific political agendas. For the Dutch, it is a hook to leverage public investment in digitisation. For the French and Italians, it is an opportunty to showcase domain aggregators of which they are rightly proud.
The plain fact is that the European Commission would find a distributed, open service such as the one you describe very hard to fund - no outcome, no product, no centre. So, you tell me, is it better to stay in our bedroom and insist that the thing is done right, or should we accept its limitations and jump in with both feet to try and steer it in the right direction? I favour the latter, because I think enough good will come out of the process for UK museums to make the investment worthwhile.
On the API/harvest issue - this battle was hard fought and hard won. The original concept was for a database of library OPACs, and it was really an innovation to use any kind of distributed service model. It is worth remembering that different nations are at different points on the technology curve (and we’re by no means the furthest advanced) and that Jill Cousins at Europeana has done a pretty astounding job in getting things as far advanced as they are!
So…we need to bang the drum for doing the job right, but equally we need to recognise that there is a much broader political world into which this thing fits - and it is a world which benefits our museums, even if it isn’t always obvious how!