Abstract

In the World Wide Web, a very large number of resources is made available through digital libraries. The existence of many individual digital libraries, maintained by different organizations, brings challenges to the discoverability, sharing and reuse of the resources. A widely-used approach is metadata aggregation, where centralized efforts like Europeana facilitate the discoverability and use of the resources by collecting their associated metadata. The cultural heritage domain embraced the aggregation approach while, at the same time, the technological landscape kept evolving. Nowadays, cultural heritage institutions are increasingly applying technologies designed for the wider interoperability on the Web. This paper presents a study of the current application by cultural heritage data providers of technological solutions in use for making structured metadata available for re-use in the Internet. We investigated the use of both linked data and technologies related with indexing of resources by Internet search engines. We have conducted a harvesting experiment of the landing pages from websites of digital libraries that participate in Europeana, and collected statistics about the usage these particular technologies. These technologies allow for representing structured data within HTML, or for structured data to be referred to by links within HTML or through HTTP headers capabilities. We conclude with a discussion of future work for establishing a solution for cultural heritage aggregation based on the current situation and the available technologies.

Highlights

  • We would like to acknowledge the supporting work by Antoine Isaac and Valentine Charles, from the Europeana Foundation, for their reviews and discussions regarding our work

  • 21 The results of this experiment make it evident that in spite of the numerous activities, in cultural heritage, for making available linked data, reaching it through automated means based on the WWW is no yet feasible

  • The digital object entry pages, whose links are sent to Europeana, could not be automatically linked to their respective linked data representations, since they did not support linked data through content negotiation, and the structured metadata we found encoded within the HTML pages was very limited, or even non-existent in the majority of cases

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Summary

Introduction

For those already implementing these technologies in their digital libraries, the process for sharing their data with CH aggregators would become extremely simple. For those that do not yet have these technologies in use, implementing the technical requirements for CH aggregation would be more rewarding, since discoverability through Internet search engines would come as a valuable extra benefit

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