Part of the PARTHENOS Training module "Introduction to Collaborations in Research Infrastructures", available from http://training.parthenos-project.eu/

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Collaborations with Collection Holding
Institutes
ESU Leipzig, 2016
Dr Jennifer Edmond
Trinity College Dublin

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Working with Collections/Collections Holding Institutions
If Museums, Libraries and Archives already exist, why do
we need Research Infrastructures doing things with source
material (data)?

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Sources of Culture Clash within and between RIs and CHIs
Problem 1: Goals, mission, motivations
Problem 2: Data and Metadata
Problem 3: Wildly different levels of digital preparedness
Problem 4: Structures, Hierarchies and (Analogue) Knowledge Organisation
Frameworks
Problem 5: Risks and Trust

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Problem 1: Researchers are from Mars, Librarians from Venus?
Leopold von Ranke. History of the Latin and Teutonic
nations, 1494-1535 (1824). Claim to fame: writing
history ‘as it actually was.’
Antonio Panizzi, 91 Rules to be Observed in
Preparing and Entering Titles (1841). Claim to fame:
denying Thomas Carlyle access to uncatalogued
materials
Sir Anthony Panizzi. Photograph by Elliott & Fry. Wellcome Library, London.
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY
4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Researchers are from Mars, Librarians from Venus?
Historian: Emphasis on veracity, completeness, accessibility and
comprehensibility, of sources, so as pull them together, verify them and
create from them the required or desired record of the fleeting, transitory
events of the past. Driven by a research question (‘academic freedom’),
incentivised to invoke a broad intellectual context.
Information specialist: Emphasis on provenance, completeness and
material condition of sources so as to preserve them and make them
maximally usable for the long term. Driven by existing or developing
collections landscape, often limited by resources and institutional mission
(eg. national or thematic focus)

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This didn’t use to be a problem…
LIBRARY
MUSEUM
ARCHIVE

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Problem 2: Data, Metadata, Licenses
Everyone in an RI project will want data.
Everyone will want something different.
Well formed, internally coherent
metadata?
Clean, machine-readable structured or
unstructured data?
Meaningful transcribed full text of
original sources?
Movie Time! Data and Metadata

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Problem 2: Data, Metadata, Licenses
A few standards…
- Dublin Core
- Library Holdings: Marc 21, METS
- Collections: ISAD-G/EAD
- Institutions: ISDIAH/EAG
- Europeana: ESE, EDM
- Text Elements: TEI
- Basics: ISO 3166-1-alpha-2, ISO 639-1
- Vocabularies: Getty Thesauri
- LOD: VIAF, DBPedia
- Licenses: CC0/CC BY
- AND MANY MANY OTHERS…
(which may be changed at will, over time)

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The Result??
From XKCD, Reused under CC-A-NC 2.5, Original at: http://xkcd.com/927/

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Trying for Common Ground

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HELP?
- CENDARI Approach (Documentation)
- http://www.cendari.eu/sites/default/files/CENDARI_D6.2%20Guidelines%20for
%20applying%20the%20schema.pdf
- PARTHENOS Standards Survival Kit (Information, in development)
- MINT (Orientation)
- https://github.com/mint-ntua/Mint-Athena
- Open Refine (Implementation)
- http://openrefine.org/
But also, Education… (DARIAH Open History and the ‘inside out’ archive)

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Why be ‘inside out’? Talking to CHIs about the
value of reusable standards
Because it’s the ‘right
thing to do’?
Because you will gain
impact and visibility?
Because it’s what
your users want?
Because it’s good for
you?
Because it’s
inevitable?
Because you can use
other people’s stuff?
DARIAH Open History:

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Problem 3: A tale of two archives
BNF (or other)
Hungarian State
Archives (or other)
- Levels of cataloguing/conservation
- Levels of digitisation
- Quality of on-line presence
- Levels of standardisation
- Levels of organisations
- Levels of political orientation
toward openness
- Levels of tacit versus open
knowledge
- Levels of individual versus
institutional control over
access/discoverability
Does this mean one collection is less
relevant/important than the other?

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Europeana/TEL
(REST API; CC0)
Museo Storico della Guerra
di Rovereto
(Pencils, Interviews)
Rahvusarhiiv (EE)
(Download; CC-0/CC-BY-SA)
American JDC Archives
(WebDav, CC-BY-NC)
Archives UK
(OAI/PMH/SRU; CC-BY)
Istituto Centrale per gli
Archivi (LOD via SPARQL )
CENDARI White Book of Archives:
A tale of six more archives!

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Problem 4: Three People You May Need in Any CHI
(with apologies for the stereotypes!)
I know what is is I know how it works I can say yes

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Problem 5: Why trust an RI? Things a CHI may/should ask about
Resource
implications
Sharing of
transformations
Data licensing
Credit
Data longevity
Data
reuse/abuse/profit
model

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CENDARI Approach to Building Trust
Minimal effort from
CHI
No barrier on our
side to sharing
CC-BY, but flexible CC-BY but also FAQs,
Checklist, Workflow
DARIAH MOU Clear Data Agreement
and License
CENDARI White Book of Archives: http://www.cendari.eu/thematic-research-guides/white-book-archives

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You will have help…
Policy environment for Opening Access to Cultural Data
§ Council Conclusions on the Transition towards an Open Science
System http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-8791-
2016-INIT/en/pdf
§ Recommendations for the Transition to Open Access in Austria
https://zenodo.org/record/34079#.V4KeMzXGtjY
§ German Council for Scientific Information Infrastructures (RfII)
http://www.rfii.de/?wpdmdl=2009

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Changing Paradigms?
• API availability and usage (By researchers? By research librarians? By
intermediaries)?
• Scraper technology (Ethics? Right to Mine?)
• Historians want ‘big data,’ but aren’t necessarily on a trajectory to get it
o digitising and contextualising everything would be hugely resource intensive (maybe
impossible, see E. Kwakkel’s work)
o need to feel they have ‘completeness’
o data to narrative approach in tension with narrative to data approach (SESHAT)
o appropriate provenance means different things to different users
o could we invent new, hybrid models of augmented IR?

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Question Time…
www.parthenos-project.eu
Jennifer Edmond
Trinity College Dublin
edmondj@tcd.ie www.tcd.ie