OpenCulture

Representatives from 27 EU Member States have gathered today at the Hotel Melia in a snowy Luxembourg to attend a 2-day Strategic Briefing on Europeana, the international portal to Europe’s digital cultural heritage.

Proceedings began with a presentation from the National Library of Luxembourg, who highlighted the increasing recognition of Europeana’s importance as the ‘clearest expression of European cultural heritage online’ (according to EU Commissioner Nellie Kroes).

Even though the contribution of Luxembourgeois institutions is currently only around 30,000 digital assets, Europeana has helped Luxembourg to focus its efforts and drive the Digitisation agenda forward. The speaker concluded that all Member States must contribute to Europeana’s sustainability, and announced a financial contribution from Luxembourg to help support the ongoing costs of the service.

The next speaker was Jill Cousins from the Europeana team, setting out the agenda for the day’s events, which include workshop sessions, presentations and coffee.

“If there is one thing that defines and elevates Europe, it is culture. Culture is the fabric of life, and therefore cannot be separated from the society in which it is born.” Jill Cousins quotes Nellie Kroes’ address in Avignon earlier in November.

The purpose of today’s meeting is to address the short-term funding gap for Europeana, in the hope that it will be accepted for core funding by the Commission from 2014, and to agree the main elements of future strategy. The funding gap will amount to EUR1.2m per year to 2014, and it is hoped that we can secure national contributions from all Member States.

This seems like a big challenge, given the financial maelstrom in Europe. But in comparison to big-ticket media programmes, EUR1.2m is really nothing. Jill’s call-to-arms is to ‘fight the corner of culture’. My impression is that hearts are willing, but there’s a lot of people in this room that have come straight from laying off staff. Still, Jill’s presentation started with a collective scream, which sets the scene pretty well.

Jill was followed by Pat Manson, who has an interesting ability to make everything seem, well, fine. Pat is at the Information Society Directorate at the Commission, and gave an overview of the Digital Agenda for Europe, which forms the bigger context for the Commission’s work in this area. Specifically, it is structured around 2 mutually-supportive ‘pillars’:

• Single European market
• Activities to benefit European citizens

The Commission is aiming to deliver sustainable economic and social benefit through the use of ICT, but only where it delivers real, solid, accountable results. Europeana is described by the Commission as ‘the public Digital Library for Europe’, which represents an exceptionally strong note of support and commitment to Europeana, although the actual implementation of the sustainability model for Europeana is not yet finalised.

Pat noted the constraints on Digitisation and access to Cultural Heritage resulting from the prevailing copyright framework in Europe. She noted that the Commission did propose to take action on this, but also that any proposals on a Directive would need to take into account the findings of the Comite des Sages report (due to be delivered in January 2011).

Pat reiterated the strength of the vision behind Europeana, and the need to preserve the integrity of this vision during the next 2 years until the Commission is able to pick up the baton for its long-term sustainability. She sat down to a round of applause, but it is difficult to read the room - we have heard some of this before, but still the support at MInisterial level if not forthcoming. There is a sense emerging, though, that buying into Europeana now, during its time of need, will buy us a ticket at the table once it is adopted by the European Commission - which would be both an interesting and a powerful place to be.

Pat was followed by the incredibly eloquent Claudia Dillman of the Deutsches Filminstitut, who asked the question of how we can justify investment in Europeana at a time when economic problems are dividing European countries. The strength of Europeana, she posited, lies in its power to unify at a time of fragmentation, to give a sense of common identity (albeit with all its diversity) when people are concerned with internal issues. Fr. Dillman highlighted the Commission’s concerns about the ‘uneven’ contributions to Europeana (both financial and content). This, of course, partly reflects the fact that Germany is a key funder and early-adopter of Europeana and has not seen its investment met by other Member States in quite the way it could perhaps have expected.

Fr. Dillman announced the creation of a new German Competence Network for Digital Libraries (to be announced formally in Berlin tomorrow), driven largely by the knowledge and expertise arising from participation in Europeana. It is interesting (and correct) to see Europeana positioned as a driver for professional networking and competence in Digitisation and Digital Preservation, and the implicit value of this function should not be underestimated when considering Europeana as a prospect for investment.

Interestingly though, Fr. Dillman put a flag firmly in the ground for Europeana as a funded public good, rather than compelling it to seek commercial independence through monetising its offer. Her view is that Europeana should be funded by the European taxpayer, and not forced to explore Public/Private Partnerships, such as the potential for working with G**gle.

I find myself musing why it is that librarians most of all seem to have a problem with the PPP model for Digitisation. Of course, there are contrary voices in all sectors, but it seems to be almost universal among librarians that commerce denigrates and undermines the purity of the public benefit of libraries. I find this absolute antipathy to commerce confusing and short-sighted, but more importantly unsustainable. Libraries depend on publishing, and have coexisted in a commercial ecology for a century - the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ is one of philosophical attitude rather than economic reality. Somewhere along the value chain, someone always pays! The world of public benefaction which gave rise to the Public Library model 100 years ago is no more, and if we do not find a way of working effectively with, and benefitting from the tremendous knowledge of, the private sector, we are doing ourselves and our users a profound disservice. But it seems to be axiomatic among leading librarians that commercial Digitisation along the lines of the Google model is a bad and undesirable thing. For my part, I think success would look like a mutually productive collaboration, but then I am not a librarian!

Following Fr. Dillman is Maria Antonia Carrato, responsible for the coordination of Libraries within the Spanish Ministry for Culture. She noted that, for the first time, there is provision for Digital Libraries in the Spanish legislation, which has established a Council of Library Cooperation.

She highlighted a key initiative in Hispana (http://www.hispana.mcu.es)  - the Spanish national portal for libraries and ‘other memory institutions’ (including 100k cultural objects from 61 Spanish museums). A key goal of this initiative is to gather information about current and planned Digitisation, to avoid duplication and to support web harvesting, including harvesting into Europeana. In support of this, the Spanish Government has created a EUR2m annual budget to support Digitisation projects in Spain, even in spite of the prevailing economic climate. To support this agenda, the Spanish Government has mandated the adoption of OAI PMH aggregation for all publicly-funded digital assets in museums, archives and libraries - a key step and one which we would do well to consider in the UK!

Following the presentation from the Spanish Delegate came a representative from Ireland, speaking about how the Irish Government regards support for Europeana as an important way of connecting people with their Cultural Heritage, and thereby achieving the benefits of engagement. The Irish representative suggested that Europeana should be careful to ensure a balance between books and wider cultural material if it is to be a genuinely representative reflection of the diversity of European cultural heritage.

He also noted the problem that Ireland has ‘clogged up’ the system by putting all of its census data into Europeana, leading to a requirement for better filtering. The speaker also focussed on the significant economic benefits of participation, which are particularly important during a time of cutting back.

These presentations were followed by the first ‘strategic’ presentation from Harry Verwayen, Business Development Director at Europeana. Harry presented the Strategic Vision for Europeana, that has been developed in partnership with the network. Harry began by reviewing the progress to date, and the focus on ‘aggregation’, which is now shifting to ‘use’. He noted achievements such as the Public Domain Charter, but also that they have really only taken the first step in achieving the vision set out in 2008.

Harry mapped out the landscape of users, policymakers and content partners which make up the Europeana ‘market’, and presented the series of Europeana workshops focussed on developing a more sustainable model for the service. He presented the 3 key benefits which contributors are looking for from Europeana - Visibility, Services (to help lower costs) and Revenues (to help cover costs). He also presented the 3 priorities for users: For Europeana to be a Trusted Source, for it to provide Easy Access and, critically, ‘Re-use in my Workflow’ - the ability for users to download and integrate content into their Digital lives, rather than having to consume it on Europeana’s terms (or the terms of contributors). Finally, the priorities of policymakers: Inclusion, Leadership, Education and Economic Growth.

This is a fascinating set of outcomes - each is intuitive, each works extremely well within its context, and it seems as though they should be reconcilable. It strikes me that the same principles should hold true of our own National aggregator (http://www.culturegrid.org.uk), and that if we can only triangulate a course between these priorities, we would have a clear strategic direction.

Harry picked up on the idea that Europeana is an advertising server for European digital cultural content, and that success in this context involves not only driving traffic to contributors, but also by adding value (for example through translation) and by reaching out, beyond the portal, to embed cultural content into 3rd party services. This has led Europeana to commit to making a significant investment in their API, and to brokering content via widgets and 3rd-party relationships into large-scale consumer services. This is a great direction for Europeana to take, and a strong and positive step for the content community. He also highlighted the 1:160 ratio between hosting content on an institution’s website vs. hosting it on Flickr, and announced the proposal to broker collaboration between Oxford University and organisations in Germany to contribute German content to the Great War Archive - an outstanding way to use aggregation to foster real-world reconciliation.

Time then to break for an open discussion session, split into groups, leading into an excellent coffee break!

Back into the sessions for two very interesting sets of discussions, the first about the positioning of Europeana as a service, the second about how best to cover the EUR400k per year shortfall over the next 3 years (a cumulative total of EUR1.2m).

The main priorities from our group were:

• As an aggregator, Europeana can push for improvement in the quality and integrity of metadata
• In terms of user engagement, Europeana can push to promote usage of its API and widgets, to allow 3rd parties to build services which add value for users
• In terms of distribution, Europeana can promote the principle that content should be made available to users in their workflow (so that they can repurpose and integrate it into the digital services they already use)
• In terms of facilitiation, Europeana can promote networking between professional communities.

Several suggestions for ways to address the shortfall were put forward, most of which focussed either on the application of political leverage, or to go direct to individual institutions. The most popular option was to encourage Culture Ministers in those nations that contribute already to write to all the others to put forward a set of recommendations.

I put forward the following ideas:

• Selling a share in the future, by promising Nations that contribute now a seat at the table when Europeana is taken up for funding by the European Commission
• Looking for rich institutions which have a specific interest in European identity (such as European Banking Associations), and which might regard Europeana as a constructive investment
• Commercialising Europeana’s infrastructure by selling Digital Preservation and brokering services to complement the free-at-point-of-use service

The idea of selling shares in the future wasn’t well-received, because it would entail selling off parts of the independence and integrity of the Foundation. The alternative would always be to set up a ‘honey trap’ - a side-organisation  as an investment opportunity.

The issue of the shortfall is interesting - people have tended to regard Europeana as a funder, not a recipient. There is a powerful argument to make that a relatively small (£50k) investment would release a significantly greater return for UK cultural institutions in terms of long-term programmes from the European Commission, but this argument would need to be pursued proactively with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

In any event, the session became an interesting bidding war, with a number of countries ‘announcing’ investments of EUR20-50k, to be trumped by France who announced an investment of EUR100k in 2011.  This started to look promising, but it soon transformed into a conversation about what the ‘sustainability’ model of the service from 2014 might look like. Europeana is hoping that the Commission will fund 80-100% of its running costs, but there is a concern that this might be creating an unsustainable dependency. The Commission does not want to absolve national Governments of their responsibility in this respect, so a way will need to be found to sustain these costs which allows the Commission to invest without creating a dependency.

As part of this discussion, the fundamental value proposition of Europeana came under scrutiny, as did the question of what the assets of Europeana might be, particularly since it doesn’t own the content to which it provides access. From my perspective, it is the name and the network, and the outputs of the network in terms of skills and increased quality of metadata,  although several people suggested that there may be some value in the index of cultural metadata.

This discussion fascinates me - it’s a huge, multi-annual project representing a sunk costs of millions of Euro, and it is effectively asking itself ‘what am I for?’ It’s not quite that simple, but if there were a crystal-clear, user-focussed and intuitive value proposition then we wouldn’t be having this discussion. I also found myself wondering what analogous projects there are that perform an essentially long-now, public-good function, but funded on a national basis. Two examples spring to mind:

• The Svalbard Global Seed Vault provides an interesting long-term preservation function. The investment costs were part-supported by the EC, but the service runs on contributions from National Agencies.
• The Swiss Data Bunker at Gstaad which provides both a commercial data hosting service and a long-term preservation function for National Governments and Agencies

These things show that when you fulfil a useful function, people will pay you for it. In the case of the Global Seed Vault, part of the idea is to be able to support research into food resilience, but also to be able to re-grow the world after a cataclysmic event. I love the idea of being able to re-populate the world with Culture from Europeana apres le deluge.

Some other interesting ideas included micropayments through Europeana, or the possibility of National Aggregators charging people for access. The fundamental problem here is that it’s not clear what the core proposition is, and Europeana has to walk a tightrope between a public-benefit role and survival. There will be a way of navigating the two, but it makes life more complex.

All in all, a good but ultimately unsatisfying day. I wish I could stand up and say ‘the UK will contribute £xm!’ but there are still many questions to be asked and answered. Hopefully the short-term problem of the funding shortfall won’t distract us from the longer-term issue of what kind of business this is, and how we can ensure it is still here and used in 20 years time.