Aligning library-domain metadata with the Europeana Data Model

Sally Chambers and Valentine Charles

Europeana (www.europeana.eu) provides access to the digital content from libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual collections across Europe. In Summer 2010, the first operational version of Europeana was launched, which currently provides access to over 15 million digital objects.

In Europeana’s first phase of development, a metadata set, entitled Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE), a Dublin Core-based application profile, was developed to foster metadata interoperability between libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual collections. As Europeana matures, a more sophisticated data model that fully utilises the richness of domain-level metadata and facilitates the participation of Europeana in the semantic web was needed.   The Europeana Data Model (EDM) is an open, cross-domain semantic web-based framework for structuring the data that Europeana will be ingesting, managing and publishing. 

This presentation will provide delegates with a technical introduction to the Europeana Data Model.  It will then explore how metadata from libraries (e.g. MARC21, UNIMARC, MODS / METS and Dublin Core-based application profiles, such as the Europeana Semantic Elements) is being aligned with the EDM, whilst ensuring that full richness of the original metadata is retained.  It will examine how the library metadata can be further enriched by using knowledge sources such as name and subject authority files.  Finally, it will investigate whether this alignment to EDM will facilitate libraries participating in the Linked Open Data cloud.

References

• Europeana Libraries project
• Definition of the Europeana Data Model elements, v5.2 
• Europeana Data Model Primer
• Europeana Semantic Elements specification, v. 3.3.1

elag2011_Chambers (59,06 MB)

elag2011_Chambers.m4v (52,36 MB)

ELAG2011_presentation (9,16 MB)