1) The document discusses Europeana Libraries, a 2-year project adding over 5 million digital objects from 19 research and university libraries to Europeana. 2) The project aims to bring digital content from European libraries to researchers by developing an efficient and sustainable framework for a library domain aggregation service. 3) Benefits of the library aggregation include increased efficiency, effectiveness, visibility and credibility for participating libraries through collaboration and a common portal for researchers.

1. Europeana Libraries: what
is the value of a library
domain aggregator?
Susan Reilly (LIBER)
LIBER 2012, Tartu

2. What’s on?
• 4 networks and project
• The big idea
• Friends with benefits
• Back to the future

3. Four networks and a project
• Europeana Libraries is a 2-year • Mixture of content:
project funded by the European
Commission’s ICT-PSP programme
• 3,319,045 pages
• Will add over 5 million digital objects
to Europeana • 598,130 books and theses
• 19 research and university libraries
are participating • 368,000 articles
• Coordinated by The European • 848,078 images
Library
• 1,200 film and video clips
• 34,000 mixed content objects

4. Four networks and a project
Network libraries: LIBER, CERL, CENL
Project: Europeana Libraries
The European Library: the library
aggregator for Europeana
Europeana: Europe's museums, libraries,
archives and audio-visual aggregator

5. The big Idea
Bring digital content from European
national and research libraries
to the researcher

6. The big idea
• Increasing amount of digital
content in libraries
• Change in research
behaviour, increase in cross
disciplinary research
• Gap in provision of research
infrastructure for the
humanitiies
• Shrinking library budgets and
more pressure to show ROI

7. The big idea
• All European cultural heritage available
online by 2025 (Neelie Kroes)
• All public domain masterpieces available
in Europeana(Digital Agenda)
• Cost= 10 billion per year over the next 10
years (Collections Trust)
• Increase in Open Access and born digital
content

8. • Growth in systematic collaboration
• More complex research
• Less time for research (occurs in bursts)
• Some barriers:
• Lack of linking between archives
• Lack of standadisation of online databases
and archives
• Difficulties in data linking arising from the lack of standardisation,
and the inconsistencies in quality, reliability, and functionality
across different resources

9. The big idea
• Source the content
• Aggregate it
• Improve it
• Make it available in a meaningful way
• And……
do all this in a sustainable manner

10. The big idea
• A valuable resource for researchers with full-text search
capabilities
• A robust network of national and research libraries
• An efficient sustainable aggregation model for research
libraries across Europe
This means
developing the
framework for a
library domain
aggregation
service!
!!!

11. Friends with benefits
• Efficiency
• Effectiveness
• Visibility
• Credibility

12. Friends with benefits
• Research and National Libraries have worked together
before…..
But not
through the
same
aggregator….

13. Friends with benefits

15. Friends with benefits

16. Friends with benefits

17. Friends with benefits
• Consultation & articulation of value
proposition
• Business Model
• Business Plan

18. Friends with benefits
• Enabling searching of bibliographic records of texts in hard
copy and metadata for related digitised texts at the same
time
• Offering OCR services for providers’ digital content to
support full text searching in the portal
• Pushing the data out to other
academic / research services
• Providing access to universities’
own digital repositories
…and more?

19. Back to the future
• Some hurdles
• Do we really share
a common vision?
• What if research libraries
don’t sign up to the service?
• Can we ensure that
researchers use the portal?

20. Back to the future
• More content
• More tools/services
• More innovation
• More contact with the
reseach community

21. Back to the future
• Service opened up to all research libraries
• New project for new innovation and service
• Europeana Newspapers www.europeananewspapers.eu
• Europeana Cloud