The LoCloud lightweight digital library and alternative content sources

Adam Dudczak PSNC, Digital Libraries Team

LoCloud is funded by the European Commission's ICT Policy Support Programme

User stories

• LoCloud Lightweight Digital Library – L3D

• Let’s start with a few stories…

Story of a small library

• Small public library from Poland would like to share some of their assets with the Internet users

– They do not have any IT expertise or staff

– They have one old scanner and a budget digital camera

– They’ve heard about YouTube, Flickr etc.

– They’ve never heard about Europeana

Story of a small library (2)

• Collections consists of:

– Old photographs of the neighborhood

– Scans of the archival issues of local newspaper

– A few interviews with the oldest members of the community

– Movies from festival which took place two weeks ago

• Metadata

– What is metadata?

– Ah… you mean bibliographic information?

Story of a small library (3)

• They’ve heard that creation of a digital archive requires expert knowledge and some IT expertise

Required L3D features

• L3D should be very easy for basic use

– Ideally: no IT staff required to start, just as for other popular cloud services like Flickr or Youtube.

• Facilitates creation of high quality metadata

– Without necessity to be EDM/Carare/LIDO semantic web savvy

• Supports a way to deposit and retrieve at least 4 basic objects types

– Photographs, textual documents (multiple pages) and audio-visual content

Required L3D features

• L3D should offer multilingual interface to increase accessibility of collections

– Small inst. does not resources to do that.

Local history archives

• Examples here

http:// archiwa.org

Local history archives

• Examples here

http:// archiwa.org

Story of a digital archive (1)

• Medium sized institution from Greece has their own digital repository

– Their resources are visible in Europeana (thanks to Hellenic aggregator)

– They have an IT guy who is helping them with a server which hosts their repository

– Server is getting old and too slow to handle traffic. They need to think about buying a new one.

– They would like to cut the cost of maintenance

Story of a digital archive (2)

• Theirs collection consists of many items digitised during various projects

• Items from this collection were linked by several journalists and scholars

• Their metadata is in most cases compliant with Dublin Core/ESE standard

– It is exposed through OAI-PMH interface

• They’ve customized their website quite heavily

Required L3D features

• L3D should be more affordable than self-hosted digital library

• Support for migration from major digital libraries systems would be appreciated – URLs from the old system should also work after

migration (this is out of the scope of L3D to large extent)

• L3D-based digital library should be able to handle significant traffic

• Look and Feel of the archive’s website should be customizable

Story of a family archivist

• A British family would like to create an online archive dedicated to its history

– Grandfather was a famous poet

– They have memorabilia which are even 100 year old!

• They have never heard about digital libraries

– Lack of knowledge about GLAM standards

– Significant amount of objects with restricted access

• Not all things available to the public

Story of a family archivist

• Metadata

– What is metadata? ….

– YouTube does not require that…

– But yes, we have information about author and a year

• Apart from items like photos they have also some articles i.e. family tree

Required L3D features

• L3D should be simple as Flickr

– After creation of the account people can just upload objects

– Maybe instead of Wikimedia app we should consider ingestion scenarios with Flickr?

• Assure that useful metadata can be created by this kind of users

• L3D should allow to restrict access to given resources

– Not all information about family history should be public

L3D potential user groups

http://www.polishairforce.pl/

L3D potential user groups

http://www.polishairforce.pl/

Audio archive of Kcynia city

• Examples here

http:// www.dzwiekowearchiwum.kcynia.pl

Audio archive of Kcynia city

http:// www.dzwiekowearchiwum.kcynia.pl

Audio archive of Kcynia city

http:// www.dzwiekowearchiwum.kcynia.pl

All available metadata

Story of a professional

• A renowned art photographer would like to promote his works through Europeana

• His works documents cultural heritage monuments

• He has his own online portfolio where he sells printed works

– It would be great if Europeana would link to his portfolio in order to attract new customers

• Photographer does not have knowledge about IT or GLAM standards

Required L3D features

• L3D should facilitate creation of high quality GLAM metadata even for people who does not know about these standards

• Metadata may contain links to other websites relevant for given entity

• L3D should support batch upload as the user would like to move from his own portfolio to the new L3D-based repository

Story of PSNC

• PSNC is a large research and development institution which helps to build digital libraries since 2002

• It has significant computational/storage and network capacity and offers access to various services i.e. scientific TV, national data store and Polish national aggregator Digital Libraries Federation

• Some of the smaller libraries suffer from lack of IT resources.

• PSNC would like to offer digital library as a service to these small libraries

Story of a PSNC (2)

• PSNC needs a flexible, reliable framework which can be used to set up several instances of a digital library

• PSNC is cooperating with Europeana Foundation on a few other projects like eCloud

– eCloud will create a FLOSS components which will be a foundation of scalable, cloud infrastructure

Required L3D features

• Scalability

– Capability to handle traffic coming to several instances of a digital repository

• Installation manual which would describe what is needed to deploy L3D

• L3D should be able to work on top of eCloud infrastructure (?)

Significant L3D features

• Affordable – Test SaaS model for a small and medium digital libraries

• Very easy for basic use – Ideally: no IT staff required for basic use, just as for other popular

cloud services like Dropbox, Evernote etc.

• Supporting creation of high quality metadata – Geolocation, machine readable dates, controlled vocabularies

• With reasonably adjustable look & feel – To allow more unique user interface … but to avoid usability failures

• Provided with documentation and (optional) support in local language

• Out-of-the-box integrated with a LoCloud aggregation infrastructure

• …

L3D potential user groups

• Potential of small and medium memory institutions

L3D potential user groups

http://fbc.pionier.net.pl

L3D potential user groups

http://archiwa.org/

How small is small?

• We need more knowledge about size of small/medium institutions

• In order to assess what do we need:

– Fully fledged digital library?

– Or maybe semantically enriched Flickr with support for PDF files?

• Do you know any small institutions which might be interested in development and usage of L3D?

L3D potential user groups

• Small and medium memory institutions – Lack of IT support and… lack of resources in general

• Institutions with a working repository – Looking for a way to cut costs

• Hobbyists and professionals – Lack of knowledge about digital library standards and

Europeana

• Large supporting organizations (NRENs, domain aggregators) – Interested in supporting small organizations in given

domain/country

• End-users – Lack of understanding for poor user interface ;-)

Features according to DOW

• Definition and management of metadata schemas and digital library collections,

• Content upload/ingestion and metadata cataloguing (supported by authorities management and mapping mechanisms),

• Content and metadata indexing, binary/media data stream management,

• Search/browsing features for presenting the contents of the digital library,

• A record metadata and content preview (in various formats / schemas),

• Users/access control, • Workflow engine (e.g. handle ingest / curation workflows), • An export module (e.g. XML/RDF/OAI-PMH/METS/OAI-ORE)

Adding new object

Adding new object (2)

Adding new object (3)

Adding metadata

• Different metadata wizards for different object types

• Questions related to content of the object

– What dates are relevant for this object?

– Where the item was created?

– Who created this item?

– What is this item about?

– Does it relate to any event?

• Underneath the whole LoCloud machinery should be asked to disambiguate values and get the semantics

Adding new object (4)

Metadata customization

Adding files

Features summary

• Presented mockups proudly powered by Omeka (http://omeka.org)

• List of features still needs to be decided

• We are open to your suggestions.

L3D launch and hosting

• PSNC should launch a digital library SaaS service on top of L3D after the November 2014 (Month 21)

• We are planning to use components developed as a part of eCloud project

• As the final version would be available by month 21 we would like to deliver something useful as soon as possible

New name

• LoCloud Lightweight Digital Library system is a very long name, all ideas for a new name are welcome…

• When it comes to L3D some people have associations with well-known drags ;-)

• Help us to come up with a good name

Discussion

Open issues

• What are other possible/needed scenarios?

• What features are missing?

Open issues

• How to make creation of metadata simple and on the other hand facilitate creation of useful, discoverable objects?

Open issues

• Which content types are the most relevant?

• Maybe instead of Wikimedia application we should look for new content on Flickr?

Open issues

• How many of you have your own repository?

• Which repository software should be supported for migration in the first place?

Open issues

• Do you know any small institutions which might be interested in testing L3D?

– We are looking for feedback and this kind of institutions would be the best

Thank you maneo@man.poznan.pl

LoCloud is funded by the European Commission's ICT Policy Support Programme

The views and opinions expressed in this presentation are the sole responsibility of the

authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of

the European Commission.

Funding