Europeana Business Plan 2013 – Facilitate and Aggregate Workshops

On Wednesday, the Europeana Professional blog reported on the first two of four interactive Business Plan Workshops that were held at the Europeana Offices in the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) in The Hague from 25-28 September.  Today’s blog looks at what happened at the final two workshops: Facilitate and Aggregate.

Day Three: Facilitate

Europeana’s strategic ambition for Facilitation is to ‘Support the cultural heritage sector through knowledge transfer, innovation and advocacy’.

The topic for this workshop was: ‘What are the most important priorities in terms of positioning Europeana as the Network facilitator?’

To explore this, the group discussed some of the topics that are currently on the horizon for the Facilitation track: Network positioning, sustainability, Cultural Commons, interoperability and rights labelling, business models and legal framework for Cloud development and knowledge transfer.  

Some reflections from the group:

‘The questions that we need to ask ourselves are: What happens when we stop investing in Facilitation? What opportunities do we miss?’
Erwin Verbruggen (Netherlands Sound and Vision Institute)

‘Ownership and labor need to be shared with the Network. This will transform an office of 30 into a movement of over 500.’
Nick Poole (Collections Trust)

‘In light of the current recession it will become even more important to pool resources to cut costs. This notion is important to underpin Europeana’s position as a Core Services Platform.’
Frederic Herrera (www.protonlabs.co)

‘Knowledge exchange should be about the ‘Why, What and How’. This calls for very concrete actions and examples.’
Marco Streefkerk (DEN Foundation)

The group suggested amongst other things, that the ‘big picture’ needs to start to become more concrete, as does the scope of the Cultural Commons, and that metrics for success should be defined. The Europeana Foundation should continue with the ‘practical stuff’ and produce clear case studies of its value, and continue to build trust by encouraging mutuality. On the legal side, all metadata needs correct rights labeling, the legal framework should be developed to accommodate content and the Cloud, and the Europeana Data Model (EDM) should be promoted as a standard. The group suggested that Europeana Linked Open Data could be made interoperable with Google Knowledge Graph.

Day Four: Aggregate

Europeana’s strategic ambition for Aggregation is to ‘build the open trusted source for European cultural heritage content.’

The question discussed at this workshop was: ‘How can we improve the quality of Europeana metadata?’

The group discussed specific aspects of metadata improvement. Reflections included acknowledgement that the support of the partner network is crucial in the endeavour to improve metadata. Therefore Europeana needs to continue to support the aggregator infrastructure with tools, training and information. Workshops on the Europeana Data Model would be useful as would more documentation about rights labelling. The Europeana Inside project will be key as it is developing a connection kit and management tools. Further support and resources would be beneficial for both the Mint metadata-mapping tool and Persistent Identifiers work. In 2013 we will focus specifically on improving some of the more critical metadata fields such as rights/location/time and the lack of previews.

‘We could re-use a lot of the tools, platforms and standards that already exist to lower the investment costs.’
Workshop contributor.

It is proposed that an Aggregator Forum be established to enable aggregators on both domain and country levels to share best practices. This forum would be able to support many of the recommendations made by the workshop group.

We would like to thank everyone who attended and contributed to these workshops. They were inspiring and incredibly useful. We look forward to continuing the conversation online and offline in the coming weeks.