New widget searches Europeana, DPLA and Polish Libraries

Four members of the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center Digital Libraries Team - Marcin Mielnicki, Ola Nowak, Krzysztof Sielski and Marcin Werla - have created a widget called 'CHContext' that uses the Europeana API. We asked Marcin Werla to tell us all about it.

The widget in use on the Veria Central Public Library blog (top right)

What does your new widget do?

The widget allows you to enrich your website with links to items from Europeana (or the Digital Public Library of America or the Polish Digital Libraries Federation). The selection of links is based on an element of your choice. It can be anything – for example the title of a blog post, or a blog post's tags. Or if you want to enrich a books catalogue, you may choose one of the elements of a book description as the input for the widget.

Who should use the widget and where can they find it?

The widget can be used by anyone who has a website, but I think it may be especially valuable for cultural heritage institutions which would like to enrich their online catalogues or websites with links to Europeana. It may also be useful for bloggers who are writing about culture and related topics. For example, one of the first users of the widget was Szukamy, a Polish service similar to the Public Domain Review. They use our widget to automatically provide links to heritage materials which are related to their posts.

The widget in use on Szukamy (right).

The widget comes in two variants. For use on any website, you should use the pure JavaScript version, which is available at Github. If you are running a WordPress-based site you can use the WordPress edition of our plugin. Just search for 'Europeana' in the new plugins section of the admin panel of your blog. Or download the plugin here.

What made you set up the widget?

The initial idea came from a workshop organised last year as a part of the Europeana Awareness project, where we were trying to find new ways to promote Europeana among public libraries. One of the promising directions was to promote the use of the Europeana API, so we tried to design and develop quite a generic widget, one that would work with different sites maintained by public libraries all over the Europe.

How long did it take to set up?

It was about a week of fun for Marcin, Ola and Krzysztof to make the JavaScript version of the plugin with support for the three data sources mentioned above. And an extra three days for me to develop the WordPress version of the widget based on their work.

The widget in use on a Polish cookery blog (bottom right).

Why is the Europeana API useful to you?

During our previous experiments, we found that users of our digital library services really are using links to Europeana materials that we provide automatically thanks to the use of the API. So the main benefit for us from using the Europeana API is that we can provide a more valuable service to our users, based on the open data aggregated by Europeana.

Do you have any other plans to use the Europeana API?

I have an idea to create an application for browsing Europeana based entirely on search facets. The same idea can also be developed further to make simple 'Europeana analytics' allowing you to find answers to questions like 'What’s the distribution of content language from Polish Europeana data providers?' or 'How often are different licence types used by particular Europeana data providers?', etc. But this is at the ideas stage at the moment.

Anything else you’d like to to tell us?

We hope that readers of this blog will find our widgets useful and we are looking forward for any comments on how we can improve them.