The Europeana ecosystem and the role of libraries

Jill Cousins

The Researcher of Tomorrow, Europeana Libraries Final Conference, Madrid, December 4, 2012

“Ecosystems only survive if you deliver more value than

you capture” (Tim O’Reilly)

History

People have many ways to find and use digital Cultural and Scientific Heritage

End User

End User

Access to Cultural Heritage

End User

Access to Cultural Heritagescholar

wikipedia

search

books

Commons

Public(Europe)

Private

Community

Europeana

EFG

APEx

Royal Library

sound & vision

national archive

(Netherlands)

bibliothéque national

(France)Public(national)

culture.fr

The European Library

EUScreen

These can be seen as different spheres in a universe...

Publicly funded

Support Digital Agenda for Europe

Open Data Philosophy

Europeana

EU Screen

APEx

The European Library

EFG

Each with their own characteristics

The Business

Model

Which dictate the ‘logic of value creation’ (or business model)

Europeana’s had very much been ‘supply driven’

APEx Europeana

InA

University

Computense

The EuropeanLibrary

Royal Dutch LIbrary

Nati

onal A

rchiv

e

2008-2011

Europeana acts as a super aggregator with a network of suppliers on whom it is dependent

We needed to change our perspective

To the demand side

It is clear that aggregation is still necessary and that it is valuable creating standards, interoperability, wide resource

access etc

But the a single portal cannot cater to the needs of wildly differing customer segments...

Who have their own workflows and preferences for accessing information

So we needed to switch to being able to distribute - placing content wherever the user is and whenever they want it

The key to being able to make the switch from Aggregator to Distributor serving the user wherever they are was

changing the licensing framework

CC0Open contentPaid contentCorrect rights labels

Europeana now also acts as a super distributor

CC0Open contentPaid contentCorrect rights labels

Is this a true ecosystem?

In this ‘linear model’, there is not enough sense of shared ownership and cooperation -

Is Europeana giving more than it receives?

CC0Open contentPaid contentCorrect rights labels

We are all trying to distribute to same markets, creating conflict, competition and confusion in the same publicly

funded part of the ecosystem

And there is tension between single domain/cross domain

Drafting solutions

Europeana is a way to make our collective cultural heritage available and re-usable to foster cultural diversity and economic growth

It is comprised of hundreds of institutions and individuals that subscribe to this ideal, the Europeana Network or ecosystem.

They are giving to make something better, bigger, more useful.

Can we rethink Europeana as a more collaborative, distributed model?

should we redefine Europeana as the collective wish to make our cultural heritage available for all to power social and economic growth?

Where all the partners contribute to the cloud (metadata, (open) content, software, knowledge)

with a collectively owned infrastructure (Cloud)

Everyone is invited to act as a distributor by building services for users on top

GLAM

Researc

h

And Europeana Foundation acts as the facilitator of this collectively owned Europeana ecosystem

Licensing

Framework

EDM

Business

models

Open

Labs

Knowledge sharing

Funded by the Connecting Europe Facility

content providers &

aggregators

In this cloud we can develop new services such as Europeana Research that is used by Researchers and take a portion of the cake via CEF funding of the

cloud infrastructure but still compete for projects.

Portal

VE

Apps

Channels API

E-Research

with

14-18/fashio

n/...

with

TEL/DARIA

H/CLARIN

The role of libraries

To continue to pioneer access to digital

material

To organise content, create collections for users

To turn TEL into Europeana

Research

To ensure interoperability &

enforce standards

To make users aware of valuable

resources

To digitise and preserve material for future generations

To lead the way in cooperation & become

greater than the sum of each part

To support/be part of the ecosystem