Project description

Europeana is a digital service infrastructure (abbreviated to DSI) of the European Union. ‘Europeana DSI-4’ was a project commissioned by the European Commission with the remit of operating, maintaining and further developing the Europeana DSI. When the project launched in September 2018, the project consortium comprised 24 partners under the management of the Europeana Foundation; by the end of the current project-funding phase in August 2020, three partners had left the project.

The German National Library participated in Europeana DSI-4, as it did in the preceding DSI-3 project, in its capacity as the home of the Technology, Development, Service Department at the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library - DDB), which is in turn Europeana’s national aggregator for Germany.

The work for this project focused on the realisation of Metis, the new tool for implementing and controlling Europeana’s transformation and ingestion processes, and the preparations for the ingestion of full texts from the ‘German Newspaper Portal’ DFG project. The German National Library was also involved in the relaunch of Europeana Newspapers, a special section of the Europeana Collections portal, and the further development of cutting-edge technologies for the provision and use of high-resolution images (particularly IIIF).

Newspaper Portal prototype and pilot collections

• Development of a prototype for the future national Newspaper Portal and the expansion of the DDB ingestion pipeline.
• The acquisition, processing and transformation of historical newspaper collections that are not yet contained in the Europeana Newspaper Collection. For the launch of the National Newspaper Portal in early 2021, several thousand editions of at least 10 major newspapers will be available.

Results in the development of Metis

• As part of the “Europeana Common Culture” project, the DDB has developed a concept for the expansion of the Metis infrastructure to include a software component for automated data clearing by the aggregators, together with a preview. Using the DDB’s internal budget, the implementation of this software was financed, tested and adopted by the Europeana Foundation in the context of a partnership contract.

The DDB is a member of the Metis User Group, set up in accordance with DSI-4’s Milestone MS3.

Results in the area of needs analysis

• Assessment of existing portals and data-processing pipelines for digitised historical newspapers, and full-text indexing in particular
• User analysis for research interests and content preferences with the aid of an online survey and user interviews.

• Workshops on the use of digitised historical newspapers in academia

  • To mark the establishment of the National Research Data Infrastructure in Germany, the demands made on the DDB’s architecture when answering research questions in the field of Digital Humanities via the typical steps – corpus formation, corpus description, provision of access to the respective corpus – were discussed with technical experts from the DDB’s competence network, and a recommendation report drawn up for the committees of the DNB.
  • Repeated feedback from the academic support group on the objectives pursued in the establishment of the National Newspaper Portal.
  • Maintenance of academic contacts via involvement in various Digital Humanities working groups

Results in the area of mapping and IIIF

• Development of a standard mapping procedure for METS/Alto newspaper metadata and full texts.
• Analysis of the Europeana IIIF infrastructure, full-text presentation in the Europeana Portal and the upstream ingestion workflow.
• Development of a concept for the ingestion and presentation of high-resolution digitised newspapers with full texts using IIIF Image and Presentation APIs and transmission to Europeana.

Project framework

Funding body

European Commission

Coordination

Europeana Foundation

Partners

The consortium that will be operating and developing the Europeana DSI for the duration of the project consists of 24 partners. It is coordinated by the Europeana Foundation.

• Stichting Europeana (EF)
• AIT Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesellschaft mbH (AIT-Graz)
• AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH (AIT-Vienna)
• Archives Portal Europe Foundation (APEF)
• Athena Research and Innovation Center in Information Communication and Knowledge Technologies (AthenaRC)
• The British Library Board (BL)
• Connecting Archaeology and Architecture in Europe (CARARE)
• CLARIN ERIC
• Stichting Digitaal Erfgoed Nederland (DEN)
• German Film Institute – DIF e. V. (DIF)
• German National Library (DNB)
• Europeana Fashion International Association (eFashion)
• EUN Partnership AISBL
• Euroclio European Association of History Educators
• Facts & Files Historical Research Institute Berlin (F&F)
• INESC-ID, Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores - Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa
• Stichting Nederland Kennisland
• James Lovegrove SPRL
• Michael Culture AISBL (MCA)
• Stichting Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (NISV)
• National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)
• International Consortium for Photographic Heritage Photoconsortium (PhotoCons)
• Instytut Chemii Bioorganicznej Polskiej Akademii Nauk – Poznańskie Centrum Superkomputerowo-Sieciowe (PSNC)
• Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK)

Duration

1 September 2018 to 31 August 2020

Contact

Gerke Dunkhase
g.dunkhase@dnb.de

Further information

Preceding project: Europeana DSI-3

German Digital Library