Why European project might not work out the end users want them
Posted: March 6, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized 2 Comments »One of main projects I am involved in my new job at The European Library is helping create the interface for an EU project called provide A Gateway to European Newspapers (worth around 5.16m Euros).
It sounds like an obvious and very worthwhile project – taking the OCRd and scanned newspaper collections of the numerous libraries in Europe (including the Netherlands, Germany, France, Austria, Serbia and also Turkey), improving the quality of that OCRd text and then placing them in a centralised index. Instead of having to search over more than 10 different archives, the end user can search over one. The benefits are obvious.
Other excellent websites such as the Australian Trove or the US Chronicling America point the way in creating such an aggregated service; and this is what The European Library is attempting to do as part of this project
However, the actual reality of the situation with the European project is a little different.
Whilst there are considerable technical challenges in marking up articles, refining text and indexing 18 million pages of newspapers, the real issue is political.
For some of the individual libraries that are contributing content to the project, there is the fear that any central service will draw users away from their own national based services for making digitised newspapers accessible.
Thus there is an understandable reluctance on the behalf of the libraries to make their images available elsewhere for cross-searching. For some involved in the project, part of their library’s income from their relevant governments, and possibly even their jobs, depend on the success of their newspaper (or broader digital content) platforms.
So while all interested European citizens, in fact any interested party around the world, would obviously gain much advantage from a sophisticated aggregated interface, allowing full text searching and displaying images from multiple newspaper collections, things may not transpire so easily.
The project is young, having started in February 2012 and due to last three years. There is still time for debate and discussion, and for different approaches to delivering digital content to evolve.
It may be that an increasing push towards libraries exposing their content via APIs may help. Rather than an aggregating service having to centrally store screen resolution versions of the images, it could simply display the images held at the local libraries. This might not guarantee more traffic to a library’s *platform*, but it would definitely guarantee more use of their *digitised content*
We shall see.
What an interesting dynamic. It reminds me a little bit of the dilemmas that publishers face in considering whether to participate in indexed discovery services (such as Summon, EDS, Primo Central). In these cases, whether only metadata or also full text is deposited with the discovery service, the promise is that link traffic will be sent to the publisher. In other words, it is more than just an API, because material is deposited, but it is less than a platform of its own, because usage is driven to the publisher’s platform by link.
Understandably, publishers have been differently interested in participating. Some see an opportunity to drive traffic to their materials, while others may perceive such a model to drive traffic away from them, in the long run. In some cases, financial or other incentives may be used to align interests and encourage publisher participation. It is not really a very well understood landscape.
It sounds in your last full paragraph that you may be considering a move away from a central model towards something that operates more like one of these indexed discovery services. I wonder in that case whether interests will be aligned or whether, as with publishers, certain libraries will still see challenges in such a model.
We really a mental shift here. It doesn’t matter *where* you content is viewed as long as you can count it. Whether it’s viewed on the own website, in the TEL-portal, uploaded on Wikimedia COmmons, tumblered, pinned, etc. Is 100 000 views of a photo on Flickr worth less to a GLAM’s governement funders than 1000 views on the same photo at insertgenericlibraryname.org? I don’t think so.
The Internet is the platform, not the individual GLAM-website. If all your activities are about pulling traffic back to your own site by limiting your content’s usability on other sites you’ll ultimately (or even in the short-term) lose audience.
So as aggregators and API-service providers we need to create simple tools for our partners to get those usage stats.