Experiences from the Europeana regia project - Herzog August ...

Cataloguing manuscripts in an
international context
Experiences from the Europeana regia project
Torsten Schaßan – Encodage de documents – Caen – 2012, March 30

• „A digital cooperative library of roal manuscripts in
Medieval and Renaissance Europe“
• Co-funded by the European Commission (ICT-PSP, 50%)
• Jan 2010 - June 2012
• 5 partners
Europeana Regia: partners
– BnF Bibliothèque nationale de France (and many municipal
libraries)
– BSB Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich
– BHUV Biblioteca historica, Universitat de Valencia
– HAB Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel
– KBR Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Brussels
Torsten Schaßan – Encodage de documents – Caen – 2012, March 30
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• 3 collections
ER: collections + formats
– Bibliotheca Carolina (8 th /9 th cent., 425 mss)
– The Library of King Charles V of France (14 th cent., 167 mss)
– The library of the Aragonese Kings of Naples (15 th cent., 282
mss)
• Information in 6 languages
– Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish
• Descriptions in 5 formats
– MARC, EAD, TEI, MAB, MXML (=format of the German
national manuscript database Manuscripta Mediaevalia)
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1.Management
2.Specification of metadata
3.Integration of metadata
4.Digitisation
5.Integration of images
6.Dissemination
Workpackages
WP leaders: Bnf 1+6, HAB 2+3, BSB 4+5
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WP2 Specification of metadata
• This work package aims at consolidating the list and
format of metadata to be used by each participant.
– formats
– level of metadata
– quality of metadata
– organise ingestion format
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D2.1 State of the art in metadata
• global survey of cataloguing and metadata standards
• obtain a matched OAI extraction despite the different
formats used in libraries (EAD and TEI e.g.)
– BNF: EAD
– KBR: local DB, had to decide upon the format (=TEI)
– BSB: MAB → METS/MODS, MXML → TEI
– HAB: TEI
– BHUV: MARC-XML
– Lyons: special data, with mapping to MODS
• quality and amount of metadata varied heavily
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D2.2 Minimum metadata
• Which information about a manuscript is necessary as
a very short overview and sufficient for basic
orientation?
– the manuscript identifiers (actual and former shelf marks,
hosting institution or possessors)
– a summary title
– basic historical information (date of origin, place of origin,
previous owners)
– basic material information (material of the support, number of
leaves, size of leaves)
– introductory bibliographical information
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D2.2 Minimum metadata
• Europeana‘s view (according to ESE v3.2):
– Obligatory: europeana:rights
– Strongly recommended
• dc:title
• dcterms:alternative
• dc:creator
• dc:date
• dc:contributor
• dcterms:created
• dcterms:issued
– Consider, how your data will perform in response to „who“, „what“,
„where“, and „when“ queries
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D2.2 „Academic“ metadata
• All information besides this minimum level is - together
with the minimum level - what is called "academic
metadata" in the project, and will have to be added in a
second step.
• The project partners will make sure that very important
bits of information (authors names, standardized titles
of the contained texts) are accurately provided.
• References to norm data like VIAF will be included in
the descriptions.
• These special metadata will be translated in the
relevant languages.
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D2.3 Vademecum for librarians
• study of the existing descriptions (printed catalogues,
card files, computer files)
• selection of common metadata to be provided by each
participant, formalised in a guideline for librarians and
academic staff
• description of the format of metadata, in TEI, EAD and
MARC
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D2.4 Attractive Guidelines
• Guidelines (were intended to) cover the areas
– Content aggregation, metadata, image processing
– Now: description of the project, the partners, the collections,
minimum metadata, and user's requirements
• They (were intended to) address an external audience
– Librarians, scholars, professionals
– Now: interested public
• „Technical description“ (former D2.1 – D2.3) will be
published separately
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WP3 Integration of metadata
• Integration of the existing (minimum or academic)
metadata in each library’s system,
• Description of the digital object with a table of contents
editor or image–related XML file, to update the
metadata according to recent research (i.e. : date,
patron, artist, origin)
• Eventually providing more detailed information in other
internet resources
• Ingestion of data in Europeana
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WP3 Progress on Metadata
• Librarians will enter the minimum existing data in each library’s
system, as a first step, in order to make these metadata
immediately available for Europeana.
• Metadata will be updated and (if necessary) amended, following
a scheme that will allow improved access to the digital copy and
agreed among the project partners.
• Full descriptions of the manuscripts will be accessible in
specialized databases, e.g. Manuscripta Mediaevalia.
• As far as possible this information should be made available to
Europeana.
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Mapping data: General rules
• Map as many of the original source elements as possible to the
available ESE elements
• If this is not possible, leave it unmapped or consider using
• If possible use one of the more specific refinements
• Consider how to meet expectations of the user and the
functionality of the system best
• Consider how the data would perform in response to “who, what,
where and when” queries. This therefore encompasses names,
types, places and dates relevant to the object and what it depicts
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WP2 vs. WP3
• WP2 = Theoretical foundation (Me)
• WP3 = Practical implementation (Stefanie Gehrke)
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Local presentation: HAB
Torsten Schaßan – Encodage de documents – Caen – 2012, March 30
Wolfenbütteler
Buchspiegel

Europeana: Search result
Torsten Schaßan – Encodage de documents – Caen – 2012, March 30
Wolfenbütteler
Buchspiegel

Europeana: Detail view
Torsten Schaßan – Encodage de documents – Caen – 2012, March 30
Wolfenbütteler
Buchspiegel

europeanaregia.eu: Homepage
Torsten Schaßan – Encodage de documents – Caen – 2012, March 30
Wolfenbütteler
Buchspiegel

europeanaregia.eu: byRepository -
HAB
Torsten Schaßan – Encodage de documents – Caen – 2012, March 30
Wolfenbütteler
Buchspiegel

europeanaregia.eu: ms detail
Torsten Schaßan – Encodage de documents – Caen – 2012, March 30
Wolfenbütteler
Buchspiegel

Decisions: customise + delivery
• All institutions needed to adapt their cataloguing
formats
– Customise the ENRICH-TEI schema, adapt TEI, adapt
AMREMM
• Aggregation via TEL (The European Library)
– obligatory: rights declaration → tei:availability
– obligatory: thumbnail → tei:pubPlace/tei:ptr
– needed: project / collection → tei:projectDesc
• Delivery of ESE, preparation for EDM
– EDM still under construction, but possibility “to represent”
manuscript data
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Local Decisions: Theory
• One TEI file for the manuscript, referencing the
facsimile and resources (descriptions, websites, etc.)
– Only „minimum“ metadata, ready to export to Europeana
– Will be updated
– = metadata, to be stored in
• One TEI file for each description
– As rich description as it has been originally
– Will stay as it is, as it represents an „historical“ document
– = data, to be stored in
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• TEL hasn't dealt with TEI themselves
– Crosswalk had to be implemented → we supplied XSLTs
• How to
Mapping: Practice
– make sure every institution submits the same set of
information?
– make similar information from different formats look
alike?
• Refinement of the mapping table prepared in WP2
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Decisions: translate + harmonise
• Translation
– Some of the basic categories can be translated
(semi-)automatically (names, dates, etc)
– In order to „avoid“ translation, use latin names and text-titles
• Harmonisation
– Done during transformation (e.g. via OAI-MPH) respectively
during processing by aggregator
→ break with habits: in TEL summary title contains shelfmark
• Normalisation, semantic quality
– Norm data like VIAF, TGN, etc. shall be applied wherever
possible
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• Subject classification
– In order to allow for browsing through repositories, subject
classification would be helpful → special index entries?
• Ontologies
Wish-list
– Norm vocabulary would be helpful, e.g. for bindings,
decoration, muscial notation, scripts, etc.
→ cf. Europeana Regia's TEI customisation
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• The project has seen many changes
– Implement workflows for the first time (digitisation + metadata
- KBR; OAI for mss → HAB; norm data → BHUV, KBR)
– Adaptations (AMREMM – BHUV)
– Delivery to Europeana → aggregation through TEL
– Adapt export formats → harmonisation through TEL
• Adaptation of OAI difficult for BnF/BSB → selection by TEL
– ESE → EDM
Chan(c|g)es
– Copyright status: RR-F → CC0
– Organise multilingual access ourselves → europeanaregia.eu
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Conclusions I
• Cataloguing in a world of electronic publication and
distribution, portals, and the need to exchange data
needs to take into account
– Data formats (local practices)
– Publication paths (in print, electronic)
– Mapping paths (generalisation of data types)
– even: arranging data (position of kinds of data in the
character stream)
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• Additonally, some bits of information need to be
encoded (more) explicitely
– e.g. textual language
Conclusions II
• Data tends to sit in multiple places
– Each of them with special views, interests
– Still: the most up-to-date and complete information will be
available usually from local presentations
• Until the realisation of the Semantic Web (and having
solved some copyright issues) we might do with slim
descriptions in portals and the richness in local (i.e.
specialised) presentations.
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• http://www.europeanaregia.eu
• http://www.europeana.eu
• http://www.hab.de
References
• http://diglib.hab.de/?db=mss
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AMREMM Descriptive Cataloguing of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Earlymodern
Manuscripts
EDM Europeana Data Model
ENRICH European Networking Resources and Information concerning Cultural
Heritage
07_GoogleBooks_Blick-ins-
Buch_Suchergebnis
ESE Europeana Semantic Elements
MAB Maschinelles Austauschformat für Bibliotheken
OAI-PMH Open Archives Initiative, Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
PND (GND) Personennamendatei (→ Gemeinsame Normdatei)
TEL The European Library
Glossary
TGN Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Names
VIAF Virtual International Authority File
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