Aimed at Strengthening, Extending and Improving

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• Aimed at Strengthening, Extending and Improving
• The European Library Service
• Maristella Agosti - University of Padua, Italy

5th Italian Research Conference on Digital
Libraries IRCDL 2009 Padua, Italy - 29-30 January
2009
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Background

• A Targeted Project funded under the eContentplus
  Programme and coordinated by the National Library
  of Estonia
• Aimed at strengthening, extending and improving
  The European Library service as regards content,
  usability and accessibility
• A major building block towards the creation of
  the Europeana, the European digital library
• Creating true added-value to European and
  worldwide citizens as well as to the partner
  national libraries from Europe
• Started in October 2007 - Will last 27 months

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The European Library www.TheEuropeanLibrary.org

• A single access point to the resources of the
  National Libraries of Europe
• Owned by CENL Conference of European National
  Librarians
• http//www.cenl.org/
• Acknowledged by the EC as the organisational
  structure for the creation of Europeana

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Europeana - the European digital library EU
vision

• ..a unique resource for Europe's distributed
  cultural heritage, ensuring a common access to
  millions of great paintings, historical writings,
  ancient manuscripts, diaries of the known and
  unknown, personal photos and national documents
  from Europe's libraries, archives and museums.
• Horst Forster, Director, Digital Content
  Cognitive Systems
• Information Society Directorate, European
  Commission
• 'A digital library that is a single, direct and
  multilingual access point to the European
  cultural heritage.
• European Parliament, 27 September 2007

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Implementing the EU vision

• 1. TEL-ME-MOR
• 2. EDLproject
• 3. TELplus
• 4. EDLnet (Europeana)
• EDL Foundation legal entity to sustain Europeana

Expanding and improving The European Library
Completed

• Becoming Cross Domain

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TELplus - Partners

• National Library of Norway
• National Library of Spain
• National Library of Portugal
• National Library of Romania
• National Library of Bulgaria
• Austrian Research Centers GmbH
• University of Padua
• National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
• Slovak National Library
• Free University of Amsterdam
• National Library of Sweden
• National Library of Poland
• Technical University of Lisbon

• National Library of Estonia CO-ORDINATOR
• Eremo srl , Italy
• German National Library
• National and University Library of Slovenia
• National Library of the Czech Republic
• National Library of the Netherlands The
  European Library Office
• Central National Library of Florence
• Austrian National Library
• National and University Library of Iceland
• National Library of Latvia
• National Library of Lithuania
• National Library of Hungary
• French National Library

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Objectives

• To improve and add content by
• OCRing important digitised material
• Making data OAI compliant
• Adds collections from Bulgaria Romania.
• To improve access usability by
• improving presentation of search results
• Web Services
• User Personalisation

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Activities (workpackages)

• WP1 OCRing previously digitised material
• Leader Austrian National Library
• WP2 Improving the usability of The European
  Library through OAI PMH compliancy
• Leader Technical University of Lisbon
• WP3 Improving accessibility
• Leader French National Library
• WP4 Integrating services with the European
  Library portal
• Leader National Library of the Netherlands
  The European Library Office
• WP5 User personalisation services log file
  analysis and use of annotations.
• Leader University of Padua
• WP6 Extending membership of The European Library
  to the national libraries of Bulgaria, and
  Romania
• Leader National Library of the Netherlands
  The European Library Office
• WP7 Dissemination
• Leader Eremo srl
• WP8 Management and Coordination
• Coordinated by the National Library of Estonia.
  Scientific management by Eremo srl

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Work in progress OCR Usability

• Digitised images available for OCR surveyed
• Existing OCR practices investigated
• Concrete material for OCR identified for all
  project partners
• OCR good practice recommendations written
• Most partner libraries are producing OCR-ed
  full-texts
• OAI-PMH implementation tools guidelines
  compiled
• All partners created their implementation plans
  to make their catalogue and digital collections
  harvestable by OAI-PMH. Some started their
  OAI-PMH implementation.

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Work in progress Accessibility

• State of the art of semantic and multilingual
  engines or tools for digital libraries
• Use cases and mock-up for user tests of
  functionalities improving access to OCRed
  collections through use of texts.
• Call for tenders for development of a full text
  search engine prototype on multilingual OCRred
  European collections
• Analysis of re-use of MACS mappings between
  different vocabularies to improve multi-lingual
  access to heterogeneous collections
• Subject heading lists for English, German and
  French National Libraries converted to standard
  semantic web format
• Work on automatic semantic alignment of these
  vocabularies began
• Vocabularies converted to semantic web format

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Work in progress Integrating services

• First version of service description model
  created
• Testportal based on original TEL portal developed
• List of potentially useful services for
  integration into The European Library compiled
• New services being created (annotation,
  thesaurus, etc.)

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Work in progress User personalisation services

• Report on user requirements of the target library
  services
• Preliminary suggestions to improve presentation
  of search results on TEL portal results derived
  from users studies
• Results on the analysis of TEL registered users
• Design of an integrated database containing all
  the available TEL logs
• Study of the correlation between information
  gathered by the questionnaires and the actual
  behaviour of users when browsing
• Focused study on the users of the Facebook
  portal, who have installed the mini-library
  widget
• Initial study on user modelling and profiling

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Log analysis

• Design of an integrated database containing all
  the available logs and data (from start of the
  project)
• HTTP logs
• action logs
• data collected through the questionnaires
• database of registered user
• Possibility of analysing activities of each user
  who interact with the TEL portal

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Profile buildingUser modeling and profiling

• Feedback sources
• Registration data (country, profession,
  interests)
• History (saved queries)
• Favorites (saved records)
• Logs (query logs and web logs)
• User model
• Preference types keyword, collection, personal
  info
• Various profile levels personal, national,
  aggregate

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Personalized search and alerting
notificationSpecification of Personalization
services

• Personalized Search
• Personalized context-aware collection ranking
• Query expansion suggestion
• Recommendations and Notifications
• Query based collection recommendation
• Subscribed queries - RSS feed based
  notifications
• General Notifications/Announcements

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Alerting
Query Suggestion
Collection Recommendation
Collection Reranking
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Annotation Sharing
Image Annotation Frontend
Video Annotation Frontend
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Architecture of Annotation Backend
Annotation Sharing
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Main expected outcomes

• More than 20m. pages from the national libraries
  of Austria, Czech Rep., Estonia, Spain, France,
  Hungary, Iceland, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland,
  Slovenia, and Slovakia OCRed and fully searchable
  via The European Library
• OAI-PMH access implemented by the national
  libraries of Estonia, Slovenia, Latvia, Hungary,
  Portugal, France, Poland, Slovakia and Iceland
• Romanian and Bulgarian national libraries
  collections available through The European
  Library portal
• A prototype search engine able to deal with
  full-text search
• Implementation of new services (e.g. annotation
  and tagging, thesauri- enabled search, zooming to
  images etc.)
• Extensive investigation of user requirements for
  the implementation of personalised services

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Impact

• Enlargement of The European Library
• Addition of new content processing of millions
  of existing digital materials to become more
  accessible and usable
• Cross-European provision of multilingual cultural
  and scientific content
• Added-value service to citizens and researchers
  worldwide
• A portal better responding to user needs enabling
  faster search and retrieval of more relevant
  results personalised working environment and
  services integrated with day-to-day working
  procedures
• A building block component of strategic
  importance for Europeana
• Contributing to the creation of the European
  digital library by significantly increasing
  content and by advancing research and development

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• TELplus
• Thank You