An introduction to the Channels work package in the Europeana Sounds project at the project kick-off, February 17-18 2014. This work package will make a major contribution to developing a generic Europeana Channels Engine and in doing so create a number of audio content related channels for e.g. music, oral history, ambient sounds and animal sounds.

1. WP4 Channels Development
David Haskiya 2014-02-17

2. Table of Contents
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Some Channels work package basics
Why do we develop Channels?
What are Channels?
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Definitions
Examples and benchmarks
Sketches
How do we develop the Channels?
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User-centred design process
More on the how in the separate session!

3. Work package basics I
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Goal: To design and develop sounds related channels
Task 4.1 User experience research and design
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Starts: M2 (but in reality it just did)
Participants: Europeana, Sound and Vision, Austrian Institute
of Technology
Sub-contracted designers and usability experts, User Advisory
Panel
First year milestones
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M8: Product brief and Development plan
M9: Audio Channels, first prototype (internal only)
M12: Audio Channels, second prototype (alpha)

4. Work package basics II
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Task 4.2 Channels development
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Starts: M6
Participants: Europeana, Sound and Vision,National Technical
University of Athens, Austrian Institute of Technology, Net 7,
We Are What We Do
First year milestones
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M8: Prouduct brief and Product plan
M9: Audio Channels, first prototype (internal only)
M12: Audio Channels, second prototype (alpha)

5. Why do we develop
Channels?
John Battelle describes this in his book, The Search:
Domain-specific search solutions focus on one area of knowledge,
creating customized search experiences, that because of the domain's
limited corpus and clear relationships between concepts, provide
extremely relevant results for searchers

6. Primary reason
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For the benefit of our users
Offering the benefits of vertical search
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Optimize user experience by aligning segmented content,
content specific features and communities of interest
Greater precision due to more limited scope
Leverage domain knowledge including vocabularies and
authority files
Support specific and unique tasks
Other segmentation dimensions possible?
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Channels per country or language?
Channels per institution/data provider or even per user?
Orthogonal to Channels per content segment seprate
between modes: standard and expert/researcher modes

7. Secondary reasons
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For the benefit of Europeana Network partners
A Channels Engine turns transforms the portal to
collaborative publication platform
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From provide, publish (and forget?) to create, collaborate and
refine
To bring economies of scale and improve sustainability
of thematic aggregation projects
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To use European funding more rationally, sustainably and
taking advantage of the economies of scale by funding a
Channels Enginge and Platform rather than multiple thematic
standalone portal that all need to ensure sustainability on their
own

8. What is a Channel?

9. Definition - generic
Channels are segmented sub-portals made available on
the Europeana platform. Segmentation is based on
themes of content and within a Channel the user will
search and browse within that theme of content only.
User will have access to advanced browse capabilities
based on thematically appropriate types, subjects and
authorities (creators).
Set-up by the Europeana Office and groups of Network
partners in collaboration Channels will be skinned to
differentiate them from both the generic portal and other
channels and can also offer functionalities specific to the
theme of the Channel.
While hosted by Europeana Channels are embeddable in
their entirety on other sites.

10. ...and in more detail
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Exploration by browsing and filtering based
thematically appropriate vocabularies
Direct access to full media in the portal
Ability for users to remix, tag and annotate records
and media
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User created sets and annotations
Access to thematically relevant Creator pages and
Subject pages
Access to thematically relevant editorial content
(blog, social media feeds) and curated exhibitions
Other features can be added incrementally
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And also be specific per channel, certain featuresonly make
sense dependent on the theme

11. Channel specific branding and
visual design
Only Channel owners content

12. Branding
Statistics
Filtered
content
Social

13. Branding
Social
Filtered content
User
interactions

14. Group members
Branding
Selected content

15. Hypothetical definition – The Music Channel
The Music Channel is the first of many Europeana
Channels. It's a dedicated area on our portal for
professional and non-professional music afficionados
alike. On the Channel you can find and access our very
best collections of music, sheet music and other
music-related content. You can add your own notes and
tags to a piece of music and to sheet music, create and
share your own playlists and browse our interactive
dictionary of music genres, composers and
musicians.
The Music Channel is created and maintained by the
Europeana Sounds project which includes some of
Europe's top music archives. The Channel is available in
30 European languages.

16. Sketches of a music
channel

17. Branded channel
with its own blurb
Vocabulary&
Authority based
browse
Thematic metadata
games available!?
Channel specific
social feeds

18. Authority
enriched results
Vocabulary
based facets

19. Playable,
taggable,
shareable,
embeddable
audio
User created
playlists
Semantically
similar objects

20. Content can be in
multiple channels

21. Higher demands on content
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Should include direct media links or standard compliant
players
Must be classified into consistent types and/or subjects
supported by multi-lingual vocabularies
Must include references to Agents defined by authority
files
Should include Timespan and Named period metadata
Should include geodata (must for ambient sound)
Should contain rich free text descriptions
In short: Channel content should conform to the
highest standards of metadata quality in Europeana

22. How do we design the
channels?

23. How do we design the channels?
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By using a User Centred Design Methodology
By iterating design-test-protype-test-design-testprototype... until our Channels concept is razor sharp
(and then continue that cycle throughout the project)
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I've given you a number of design hypotheses about Channels
in this presentation. They will be tested. Some of them will not
pass the test and be discarded, others will be modified, new
hyoptheses will arise.
We will take help from User Experience and Usability experts,
sub-contract resources have been dedicated for this purpose
The Work Package will be reinforced by contracted
external UX and Usability experts

24. We're kicked-off!

25. Thank you!
Questions? Comments?