What are the EU projects supporting different parts of digitisation?
One of the challenges described in the i2010 initiative on digital libraries is digitisation. It is a key area. Firstly you have to have digital content. Then you are able to publish it in the digital repository sites and in this way make it accessible to the public. As the majority of European history and cultural heritage is in the analogue form, some funding for digitisation and improvements of digitisation processes were earmarked (workflow improvements, selection of the material to be digitised, avoiding effort duplication, etc.). In this part you will learn what kind of projects were already funded, what were their aims and results we can see today. It should give you an overall understanding of what kind of work and research is being performed today in different European countries in the domain of digitisation.
Organizational challenges
Europeana ver 2.0 (2011-2014) - It is a project under the ICT PSP Work Programme with the aim to provide the majority of the funding required to ensure the continued running and development of Europeana. Activities include efforts to: enhance content, increase and facilitate the re-use of content, develop a sustainable finance and provision model, create centralised repositories of linguistic resources, release new versions and maintain the service and its APIs, develop features and functionalities, improve the user experience by distribution of content into user environments and coordinate the network of contributing organisations.
Europeana Awareness - is a Best Practice Network, led by the Europeana Foundation, designed among others to:
- publicise Europeana to users, policy makers, politicians and cultural heritage organisations in every Member State so as to encourage the use and contribution of content, raise awareness of cultural heritage as an economic driver and promote knowledge transfer
- promote its use by a broad public for a variety of purposes including recreation and hobbies, research, learning, genealogy and tourism – engaging users via user generation of content, creation of digital stories and social networking
- develop new partnerships with 4 key sectors which are currently underexploited by Europeana: public libraries; local archival groups; broadcast organisations and open culture re-users
- further encourage cultural institutions to continue to provide content in particular
TEL - The European Library (2001-2003) – It was the first project focusing on aggregation of information about digital resources from European countries. It aimed at creating The European Library containing those materials and accessible for everyone. It was also the research project on, among others, the aggregation infrastructure (interoperability) and digitisation (content creation). It ended with success and even today you can use The European Library portal for searching in the digital collections of national libraries in Europe.
MINERVA - Ministerial Network for Valorising Activities in digitisation (2002-2005) – It aimed to create a network of government agencies responsible for cultural heritage in the Member States. This network is a common point for discussion about digitisation activities (metadata, promotion, preservation, etc.) in the field of culture and science. It gives a possibility to cooperate and harmonize programs on the national level. It was funded as a response to the Lund principles and the Lund Action Plan.DELOS - A Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries (2004-2007) – It focuses on the pan-European research about the digital libraries and activities connected with its creation, for example:
- structural architecture,
- accessibility,
- different types of objects,
- usability,
- interoperability.
It was about bringing to the reality the digital libraries as "the universal knowledge repositories and communication conduits for the future, common vehicles by which everyone will access, analyse, evaluate, enhance, and exchange all forms of information. They will be accessible at any time and from anywhere, and will offer a friendly, multi-modal, efficient, and effective interaction and exploration environment" [source]
MINERVAPLUS - Ministerial Network for Valorising Activities in digitisation (2004-2006) – It aimed at extending the MINERVA network to the new Member States. After the year 2004, the European Union was accessed by more than 10 new European countries - most of them from the former Eastern block. During this funding period the networks outcomes were heavily promoted in the series of workshops and presentations. Moreover, some handbooks were published, e.g.: 'Quality principles of cultural Web sites'.
EPOCH - Excellence in Processing Open Cultural Heritage (2004-2008) – It focused on finding out how new innovative technologies are used in the cultural heritage, how they are adopted and in what time, what the barriers are, and so on. Furthermore, it promoted those innovative solutions among heritage organisations. It also researched on different toolkits (3DKIOSK, AMA, CIMAD,etc.) which could be used to facilitate the cultural heritage usage and missions of cultural heritage institutions.
MICHAEL - Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe (2004-2008) – It was set up to promote pan-European cultural heritage by creating an online inventory with digitised materials from France, Italy and UK. One of its outcomes is a multilingual service when you can search and browse different cultural collections which are stored throughout Europe. It is mentioned in the "Commissions recommendations of [...] on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation" as a successful project whose outcomes can be used to build future services on it.
TEL-ME-MOR - The European Library - Modular Extensions for Mediating Online Resources (2005-2007) – It was funded to stimulate the New Member States (NMS) and the Associated Candidate Countries (ACC) to join the work conducted for the Information Society (ICT Policy) creation in the European Union. After 2004, more than ten countries accessed the EU. Every national library of NMS participated in this project. One of the objectives was to join expansion of TEL (The European Library) services on the NMS.EDLnet - European Digital Library Network (2007-2009) – It was the initiative of The Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) to start a thematic network on cultural heritage content - the European Digital Library Network. It aimed at finding a consensus between stakeholders and facilitate the creation of one pan-European digital library with the content not only from libraries, but also from archives and museums. The most important outcome of this project is a proposition with practical implementation of the European Digital Library, presently called Europeana. The EDLnet as a network has become a base for Europeana creation as well.
Financial challenges
TNT - THE NEANDERTHAL TOOLS (2004-2006) – It was set up to bring the data about the Neanderthal findings in Europe to one online database, thus facilitating research about the Neanderthal and promoting this scientific area. What is worth noting is that this project cooperated with the National Geographic's online portal ArchChannel to bring the knowledge about the Neanderthal to common people.
Video Active - Creating Access to Television Heritage (2006-2009) – For more than 50 years television has been an important medium in creating our culture, and many television archives in Europe contain rich cultural heritage content. Unfortunately, most of these objects are largely closed for general public. That is why the Video Active project was created. It aimed at bringing television material to the broader audience by means of the global network. The results can be seen at http://www.videoactive.eu/; for example by clicking this link you can see news from BBC about Bank holidays in UK originally broadcast in 1964.
TELplus (2007-2009) – It was funded as a follow-up for the TEL project and its aims were clearly defined: "to strengthen, expand and improve The European Library" [source]. Additionally, the European Commission set The European Digital Library as an organisational base for the Europeana creation.
Technical challenges
EUscreen - (2009-2012) With the support of FIAT/IFTA, the European Broadcasting Union and the EDL Foundation, the EUscreen Best Practice Network aims to provide access to a highly interoperable digitized collection of television material.Although content was digitized and some of it is available online, access to audiovisual archives, television in particular, remains fractured and scattered. This is due to the lack of interoperability, the non-existence of proven scenarios for the use of audiovisual material, the complexity of rights issues and the lack of contextual information.
PATHS - (2011-2013) Personalised Access to Cultural Heritage Spaces - this project was suppose to create a system that acts as an interactive, personalised tour guide through existing digital library collections.
PATHS will enable and support:
- personalised paths through digital library collections
- suggestions about items to look at and assist in their interpretation,
- users' knowledge discovery and exploration.
ISYREADET - Integrated System for Recovery and Archiving Degraded Texts (2003-2004) – The old manuscripts and archive objects are made up of old materials which are usually not long-lasting. Most of them are usually deteriorated and very sensitive to external factors today. The heritage is not yet lost, but likely to be in the near future. The ISYREADET project was set up to improve techniques for digitisation of such objects by enhancing created images of text for future use in the Optical Recognition (OCR) applications or by multi-spectral imaging for finding hidden layers of those resources.
VARIAZIONI - Collaborative Authoring of Localized Cultural Heritage Contents over the Next Generation of Mash-up Web Services (2006-2009) – It was set up to create a collaborative platform for inventory of the already existing digital audio-video materials. One of its outcomes was defining Common European Musical Metadata to enhance the description quality and facilitate interoperability. Moreover, they built the Variazioni Content Enrichment Portal to encourage some reuse and enrichment of aggregated content.
IMPACT - IMProving ACcess to Text (2008-2010) – It focuses on improving Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques for use in the mass digitisation process of cultural heritage which is happening now. Europeana is already there, but more and more content is required. This content should not only be readable for Europeana users but also for machines in order to build new functionality upon it. That is why the OCR software is so important. It converts images of books to computer-readable text. Nowadays it works mostly for standard layout and font of texts in English. The IMPACT wants to change this by improving and adjusting OCR techniques for the old historic material and different European languages.
STERNA - Semantic Web-based Thematic European Reference Network Application (2008-2010) – The digital objects are the base for digital library creation. However, an object itself is not enough for creating robust functionality. That is why the description of objects is so important. The contemporary trend in the global network is to semantically enrich data in it (Linked Data). Little by little, metadata in the text form is not enough. The STERNA project was set up to research possible ways of adapting this new trend for the European Digital Library in the field of natural science and history.
Legal challenges
COMMUNIA - The European Thematic Network on the Public Domain in the Digital Age (2007-2010) – It was set up to work on the diverge rights aspect connected to the digitised and born digital materials. In most European countries the rights law was created when there was no global network. Today new resources are created for and visible on the Internet. Therefore, the law should be adjusted to those changes. The COMMUNIA aimed at establishing a place for discussions and analysis between partners on the different rights issues (orphan works, new forms of licensing, etc.) connected with the presence on the Internet, in particular, focusing its efforts on the Public Domain issues.ARROW - Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works towards Europeana (2008-2011) – It has been estimated that there are 3 million orphan books in Europe [source]. It is an enormous number of materials which can be digitised and made available via the Internet. The ARROW project aims at defining the ways the rights can be clarified, in particular defining if a work is an orphan work or out-of-print work. One of envisaged outcomes is the registry of orphan works and out-of-print works.
Up-to-date information about Europeana related projects can be found here.