Digital Library Developments in Greece

Digital Library Developments in Greece Vangelis Banos http://vbanos.gr/, @vbanos

Digital Library Developments in Greece

1

About my work

• Current Positions:

– Research Project Manager at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, – Researcher at the National Documentation Centre of Greece, – IT Manager at the National Quality Infrastructure System of Greece, – Associate of the Future Library Greece non profit foundation, – Associate of the Veria Public Library, Greece.

• Current Projects: – Openarchives.gr – Greek Digital Libraries Search Engine, – Hellenic Aggregator for Europeana, – LoCloud, Bringing Local Content to Europeana (EU Best Practice Network), – Oaipmh.com - Digital Libraries Validation Service, – BlogForever – Web Archiving Project (FP7, EU STREP Project) – ArchiveReady.com – Website Archivability Evaluation Tool Digital Library Developments in Greece

2

Table of Contents 1. Digital Libraries in Greece, 2. Openarchives.gr - Search Greek Cultural and Scientific Digital Content, 3. Digital Library Software as a Service, 4. Digital Library Validation Service, 5. Hellenic Aggregator for Europeana, 6. LoCloud Europeana Best Practice Network, 7. Conclusions Digital Library Developments in Greece

3

Digital Libraries in Greece An overview in October 2013 according to the data from the National Documentation Centre of Greece Digital Library Developments in Greece

4

Digital Libraries in Greece • 48 Organisations – Universities / Technological Institutions, – Cultural Organisations, – Research Centres, – Public and Municipal Libraries, – Educational Bodies, – Religion and Ecclesiastical Organisations, – Scientific Societies. Digital Library Developments in Greece

5

Digital Libraries in Greece • 65 Collections – Institutional Repositories of Research Organisations – Journals – Digital Archives and Special Collections – National Archive of PhD Theses

Digital Library Developments in Greece

6

Digital Libraries in Greece Greek Collections Development 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

Digital Library Developments in Greece

2011

2012

2013 7

Digital Libraries in Greece • 453.097 Records

–Articles, Conference proceedings, Cultural journals, Ecclesiastical artifacts, – Greek sheet music, Grey literature, – Historical photographs, Historical postcards,

– Historical pictures, Financial reports, Master theses, – Manuscripts, maps, Museum – PhD theses, Research papers,

artifacts, Newspapers,

Paintings,

– Presentations, Scientific reports,

– Scientific journals, Talks, Theatrical plays, – University student reports Digital Library Developments in Greece

8

The Parthenon Frieze http://repository.parthenonfrieze.gr/

Digital Library Developments in Greece

9

National Archive of PhD Theses http://www.didaktorika.gr

Digital Library Developments in Greece

10

Veria Public Library http://medusa.libver.gr/

Digital Library Developments in Greece

11

National Technical University (NTUA) academic repository http://dspace.lib.ntua.gr/

Digital Library Developments in Greece

12

Leimonos Monastery http://84.205.233.134/library/

Digital Library Developments in Greece

13

openarchives.gr Access Greek Scientific and Cultural Digital Content

Digital Library Developments in Greece

14

Digital Library Developments in Greece

15

openarchives.gr • Openarchives.gr is the largest online portal providing a single point of access to quality Greek scientific and cultural digital content. • Content comes from organisations in Greece and Cyprus. • Started in 2006 as a personal project, • Development continues since 2011 by the National Documentation Centre of Greece. Digital Library Developments in Greece

16

openarchives.gr for users • User-friendly (desktop, smartphone, tablet access) • Single-point-of-access of all Greek digital libraries • Digitized contents that come from authoritative sources • Suitable for research, school and leisure projects • Search, Browse, Discover, Re-use quality content. Digital Library Developments in Greece

17

openarchives.gr for content providers • • • • • • • • •

Showcase their content, Reach out to gain new audience, Increase web visitors, Increase content visibility and discoverability, Participate in a large innovation network, Learn new things, Embrace new technologies, Voluntary participation, No cost. Digital Library Developments in Greece

18

openarchives.gr requirements for digital libraries • Digital library contains quality cultural or scientific content, • Digital content available to users in digital library’s website, • Digital content must have descriptive metadata, • Metadata should be encoded in Dublin Core, • Unique permanent identifiers should be assigned to each object, • Digital library must support OAI-PMH protocol, • Europeana Semantic Elements is desirable. Digital Library Developments in Greece

19

Software as a Service (SaaS) Digital Libraries National Documentation Centre of Greece

Digital Library Developments in Greece

20

SaaS Definition • Provide software as a service on the cloud – Run software and save data on central servers, – Provide service over the internet, – Enables economies of scale, higher quality and security • No need to maintain anything, • Central application of good practices and standards, • Focus on organisation goals and not running software.

– Example you may know: Gmail. Digital Library Developments in Greece

21

SaaS Digital Libraries • Achieving economies of scale in the delivery of digital libraries, using cloud computing technologies. • Organisations can create their own digital library for the storage, management and online dissemination of their digital content. • All data are stored in the cloud infrastructure of the National Documentation Centre (EKT). • During this process, EKT co-operates with institutions and organisations and offers a wide range of supplementary services (such as technical support) for the deposit, management and delivery of quality digital content. Digital Library Developments in Greece

22

SaaS Digital Libraries Benefits for Institutions • • • • • • • • •

safe long-term storage of the digital content and data, risk-proofing against physical and technical disasters, export data according to international standards, based on Open Source Software remote access and full control over the institution’s own userfriendly and easy-to-configure administrator environment, no need for software installation, upgrades and specialised technical knowledge, enhanced online visibility for the institution and its content, access to e-learning services and remote technical support, advanced search, browsing and downloading functionalities for end-users. Digital Library Developments in Greece

23

http://ebooks.liblivadia.gr/

Digital Library Developments in Greece

24

http://ebooks.serrelib.gr/

Digital Library Developments in Greece

25

Digital Libraries Validation Service Ensuring high quality metadata and content

Digital Library Developments in Greece

26

Digital Libraries have issues... • A lot of different software platforms with different features and technologies, • Invalid use of standards, • Limited performance and availability, • Limited reusability, • Problems integrating with national and international aggregators, • High maintenance and operation costs, • Many organisations with quality content but without technical expertise on digital libraries. Digital Library Developments in Greece

27

Digital Libraries Validation Service • Official tool to validate Greek Digital Libraries metadata and content. • Validation will be compulsory to receive funding in many cases. • Project duration: July 2013 - Dec 2014. • Lead by: National Documentation Centre of Greece. • Features: – Access the level of digital libraries compliance with international data and system standards, – Run performance tests, – Test interoperability with major national and international aggregators like Europeana, – Detect issues automatically, – Report issues and ways to resolve them. Digital Library Developments in Greece

28

Digital Libraries Validation Service Aims • • • • • • •

Increase the quality of digital libraries in Greece, Facilitate digital library development, Enforce data and system standards, Reduce development costs, Avoid pitfalls, Become future proof, Highlight best practices. Digital Library Developments in Greece

29

Validation examples: • Metadata – – – –

Metadata character encoding must be UTF-8, OAI-PMH protocol version >= 2.0, ESE protocol version >= 3.4.1, Dc:language values must comply with ISO639-2 • (e.g. correct: eng, invalid: English)

– Dc:date values must comply with ISO8601 • (e.g. correct: 2012-01-01, invalid: 2012, January 15th)

• Digital Content – Minimum image size and colour depth, – Minimum video quality and bitrate, – PDF must contain textual information (OCR)

Digital Library Developments in Greece

30

Digital Library Validation Workflow 1. As soon as a digital library is ready, the organisation submits an evaluation request, 2. The operator of the validation tool performs a number of evaluations over the web. 1. Download and evaluate metadata values, 2. Download and evaluate the actual contents,

3. The outcomes of the evaluation are compiled into a report which is sent to the organisation. 4. The report indicates any issues and ways to work around them. Digital Library Developments in Greece

31

Digital Library Validation Service Prototype • http://www.oaipmh.com • Current features include: – Check OAI-PMH standards compliance. – Check compliance with Dublin Core (DC) – Check compliance with Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE). – View, print or download the output of all OAI-PMH supported commands. – Detect problems with metadata records (e.g. invalid URLs, empty titles, invalid date formats etc.) – Download all records from one or more digital libraries in parallel.

Digital Library Developments in Greece

32

Digital Library Validation Service Demo

Digital Library Developments in Greece

33

Hellenic Aggregator for Europeana Access Greek Scientific and Cultural Digital Content

Digital Library Developments in Greece

34

Aggregation: a sustainable model of content delivery Horizontal Aggregators

Vertical Aggregators National Aggregators

Archives

Culture Grid

Archives Portal Europe Libraries MLAs

The European Library

Regional Aggregators Dark Aggregators Film archives

ATHENA

Flanders museums

ELocal

European Film Gateway

Museums

Mn;kl;k;klj;lkj;lkj;jh;lkj;klj;klj;k MLAs lj;klj Hellenic Digital Libraries and The Hellenic Aggregator for Europeana MLAs

Hellenic Aggregator for Europeana • A central communication point between Greek digital libraries and Europeana. • 14 digital libraries, ~150.000 records. • http://aggregator.libver.gr/ • The responsibilities of the Hellenic aggregator are: 1. To guide digital libraries and give information about technical standards they should follow 2. Collect metadata from digital libraries 3. Validate metadata, suggest solutions to possible problems 4. Encode digital library metadata according to Europeana Standards 5. Communicate with Europeana and transmit metadata Digital Library Developments in Greece

36

Metadata • Descriptive : describes object for discovery and identification e.g , , etc. • Structural : describes structure of compound objects, e.g. how pages are ordered to form chapters. • Administrative : information to help manage a resource, e.g. how it was created, file type, who can access it …

• Preservation : information needed to archive and preserve an object e.g. , • “Relational” : which other objects is the object related? Digital Library Developments in Greece

Aggregation of federated metadata OAI-server - in library Standardised library Library metadata Collection1 (in XML format)

OAI-server – in museum Standardised museum Museum metadata Museum (in XML Collection2 Collection1 format)

OAI-PMH OAI-PMH OAI-PMH

Central Repository OAI-harvester (client) Digital Library Developments in Greece

Aggregated, centralised, standardised, multilingual, multicultural, interoperable, cross-domain CH-metadata 38 as basis for Digital Library

Metadata Gathering Process 1.

As a first step, a new digital library has to be validated by Europeana Using the Hellenic Aggregator tools, the optimal metadata aggregation strategy is selected. The Hellenic Aggregator is working automatically and updates its data on a monthly basis.

2. 3.  

4.

Communicates with associated digital libraries and retrieves their metadata. Detects new records, validates them and saves them to its database.

Europeana contacts with the Hellenic Aggregator in regular intervals:  

It checks for new material, and if there is any, it is retrieved by Europeana It informs the Hellenic Aggregator for new protocols and updates (e.g. new version of ESE, new metadata records) Digital Library Developments in Greece

39

Digital Library Developments in Greece

40







Digital Library Developments in Greece

41

Extract data from HTML to ESE 

From HTML unstructured data



To ESE format!

Digital Library Developments in Greece

42

Digital Library Developments in Greece

43

LoCloud Enrich Europeana with Local Content

Digital Library Developments in Greece

44

About LoCloud • LoCloud is a Best Practice Network co-funded under the CIP ICT-PSP programme of the European Commission which will enrich the Europeana content by adding over 4 million digitised items from European cultural institutions. • 32 Partners from all around Europe. • LoCloud will support small and medium-sized institutions in making their content and metadata available to Europeana, by exploring the potential of cloud computing Technologies. • A cloud-based technology infrastructure will enable the aggregation of local content and a number of microservices will help to reduce technical, semantic and skills barriers and to render the content more discoverable and interoperable.

Digital Library Developments in Greece

45

LoCloud is supporting small and medium institutions: • Making their content and metadata available to Europeana, by using the cloud to provide services and tools which help to reduce technical, semantic and skills barriers. • Making available cloud-based software services which enable them to render their content more discoverable and interoperable; • Enabling smaller institution types such as house museums, which currently fall outside most aggregation infrastructures, to contribute their content to Europeana. • Exploring and trial a cloud based architecture as a scalable platform for Europeana metadata aggregation and harvesting with higher efficiency and reduced maintenance costs. • Provide guidance, training and support facilities to serve the needs of content providers. Digital Library Developments in Greece 46

1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

LoCloud Activities

Identify standard metadata export formats which are commonly used by small and medium cultural institutions. Develop and implement metadata transformation and aggregation tools in the cloud (MINT and MoRe) Develop and test a number of key cloud-based micro-services (SaaS) useful to enrich metadata and improve quality for the benefit of Europeana users. – Geolocation, Vocabularies, Historic place names, authority files. Provide training, support and guidance relevant to the needs of small and medium sized cultural institutions and aggregators. Evaluate and assess the impact of this work, including the benefits of cloud services. Carry out an intensive dissemination programme targeting smaller institutions and their aggregators right across Europe. Plan the sustainability and transferability of the above approach in the framework of the Europeana Consortium. Digital Library Developments in Greece 47

Conclusions • Greek Digital Libraries are doing very well. – Openarchives.gr, Digital Library SaaS, Digital Library Validator, – Hellenic Aggregator for Europeana, LoCloud

• Future goals – Enable small institutions go online, – Automate and speed up digital library creation, – Improve quality of metadata and content, – Promote content to all audiences, – Promote content to Europeana. Digital Library Developments in Greece

48

Thank you! • Discussion • More information: – http://vbanos.gr/, Twitter: @vbanos – http://openarchives.gr/ – http://oaipmh.com/ – http://www.epset.gr/ – http://www.ekt.gr/ – http://locloud.eu/ – http://www.futurelibrary.gr/ Digital Library Developments in Greece

49