Tutorial 3

Aggregation and reuse of digital objects' metadata from distributed digital libraries

The number of distributed digital repositories (and digital objects) is increasing rapidly. Such growth gives new opportunities for initiatives using the distributed metadata to create novel network services with content and functionality not possible to achieve before. European examples of such initiatives are Europeana and DART-Europe.

The PIONIER Network Digital Libraries Federation (DLF) developed by PSNC Digital Libraries Team is also similar service, but besides the creation of new services on the basis of the aggregated metadata, the DLF also allows the further reuse of aggregated metadata in external services like Europeana. In this context the DLF plays the role of Polish national metadata aggregator. During the development of the DLF we had to face several types of problems, such as different metadata schemas used in aggregated digital libraries, lack of controlled vocabularies or coding standards, lack of fully compliant OAI-PMH interfaces or even the aggregation of the metadata from repositories with valuable resources but without any dedicated metadata interfaces. We also had to solve different organizational and policy issues and be prepared to cooperate with external services interested only in some subset of aggregated objects basing on their type, subject, language, licensing policy etc. With this tutorial we would like to share the experience we have gained during the development of the PIONIER Network Digital Libraries Federation and participation in the EuropeanaLocal project.

The tutorial will have the following outline:

• The concept of metadata aggregation, possible use scenarios and benefits from the metadata aggregation (not only for the cultural heritage domain), basics of the OAI-PMH protocol with practical examples.

• Europeana as the largest metadata aggregator in Europe - short introduction to Europeana, discussion on different aspects of cooperation with Europeana.

• Presentation of 3 metadata aggregation case studies from European countries (based on the EuropeanaLocal project).

• Detailed presentation of the PIONIER Network Digital Libraries Federation for the point of view of its administrators.

• Practical exercises with tools for metadata aggregation.

The tutorial's target audience consists of practitioners interested in the creation of national or regional metadata aggregators. The need of the creation of such aggregators is stressed by the Europeana related projects and the CIP ICT Policy Support Programme (the objective 2.2 is titled "European Digital Library – aggregating digital content in Europeana").

Presenters

Cezary Mazurek, Ph.D., is the Head of the Network Services Department at Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center.  He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Poznan University of Technology in 2004. His research expertise and experience include a wide variety of advanced network services including digital libraries, interactive television, videoconferencing, telemedicine, data and information management and access to grid services. He has been the manager of numerous national and international projects in those fields. He is the author or co-author of over 100 papers in professional journals and conference proceedings.

Marcin Werla, M.Sc. Eng., is the leader of the Digital Libraries Team in the PSNC Network Services Department. He works on the development of dLibra Digital Library Framework, Digital Libraries Federation service and also participated in several European projects and national research and development projects in the field of digital libraries. Marcin is also the main organizer of the annual national "Digital Libraries" workshop and "Polish Digital Libraries" Conference held by PSNC. His professional interests include interoperability and architecture of digital libraries and management of software development projects. He has authored or co-authored several dozen papers in conference proceedings and professional journals.