Uncovering cultural heritage through collaboration

Abstract

The article describes the history of The European Library from project to operational service. It concentrates on the collaborative organizational model that has contributed to its success to date. This success has led to the European Union making available funds and backing The European Library as the horse to lead the European Digital Library Initiative, called Europeana. The paper describes how the lessons learnt in The European Library during the past 2 years of operational service will be applied to create a new cross domain portal covering museums, archives, libraries and audio visual archives. The paper will also touch on the need to collaborate at technical and semantic levels as well as human and political ones. Within libraries, efforts have been made to standardize data and formats to make item level searching across National Libraries feasible. This has made web searching feasible, via The European Library, for many records and items that cannot be retrieved by the big search engines, but has left the user with essentially a library system. The National Libraries are therefore finding ways to make this data more accessible and more open. OAI-PMH harvesting and a wiki approach to the building and sharing of collection descriptions are contributing to this accessibility. The paper does not cover the technical developments in any great detail, but will mention where the use of certain technologies have helped or hindered the development of the site. In the future, The European Library will also make use of research and developments for Europeana, such as object reuse exchange, interoperability, multilingual search and retrieval, and the ranking of search results, but these will not be covered here. The national libraries have learnt a great deal by sharing and collaborating in the construction and maintenance of The European Library. To date this has been a greater return on the national libraries’ investment than the additional visitors or users of their data. This peer group collaboration is being further attempted in the creation of a crosscultural sector portal, Europeana, into which The European Library will feed.