What aggregators think about Europeana Cloud

The Europeana Cloud project is currently developing a shared infrastructure with 3 specific aggregators (The European Library, The Polish Library Digital Federation and Europeana itself). But the ambition is to build eCloud as a sustainable service that can cater for the data management needs of other aggregators who provide to Europeana

As part of Europeana Aggregators’ Forum in May 2014, the Europeana Cloud project hosted a workshop to explore what these other aggregators might benefits and difficulties they might see in such a service.

Delegates representing aggregators from the Latvia, Germany, the UK, Spain and the Czech Republic were amongst those present.

In order of frequency, some of the key benefits cited by the delegates were

1. Data storage / management - The ability for aggregators to have a better system for storing and managing their data
2. Aggregation to Europeana - The potential for eCloud to provide a clear process for aggregation to Europeana
3. Greater potential for re-use of metadata and content - The possibility for data to be published once and then re-used many times
4. Enrichment Tools - The potential for tools to be built on top of Europeana Cloud that will help to improve metadata quality for multiple aggregators
5. Costs - A shared infrastructure will save costs

And the potential problems were

1. Data Policy - If eCloud permits aggregators to share data in different formats and quality, will it not just end up containing poor quality data?
2. Costs / Sustainability - What happens to the shared eCloud if Europeana stops or changes direction?
3. Management and Governance - Difficult to work out precise roles of data providers, aggregators and Europeana in a shared system
4. Aggregation to Europeana - Will eCloud actually add an extra layer of bureaucracy in sharing data?
5. Understanding of the eCloud Concept - the concept of 'cloud in general is nebulous, and difficult to define in context of other Cloud services.

During the second half of the project (August 2014 - January 2016), there will be more structured dialogue with the aggregators to help develop Europeana Cloud. This will help provider further information on the issues and help address the potential problems. By the end of 2015, Europeana will be in the position to deliver its shared infrastructure as a service to help all aggregators.