Development of a New Format EDM for Metadata Ingestion in Europeana

Nataša Dakić ; Jelena Andonovski

Review of the National Center for Digitization, Tome 23 (2013) no. 1.

Résumé

Europeana provides access to the digital content from libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual collections across Europe. Project called "Europeana Libraries: Aggregating digital content from Europe’s libraries" was launched in January 2011, with the aim that in two years build a library-domain aggregator by which millions of new digital objects will become visible and accessible to end users. By involving in this project  University library ''Svetozar Markovic'' in Belgrade has got the opportunity to present Europe and the rest of the world its valuable collections in digital form: the collection of Alexander the Great and the collection of oriental manuscripts. Europeana also harvests and indexes the descriptive metadata associated with the digital objects. Format called The Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE) is the metadata set developed for the prototype version of Europeana and it is a Dublin Core-based application profile. It contains all 15 basic elements, as well as 22 qualifiers from Dublin Core. Additionally, it also contains 13 completely new elements that were created for Europeana. However, the launching of the new standard, which is under construction, is planned at the end of the 2011 because it was realized that the existing ESE schema is not semantically sufficient to describe the digital content that is presented through Europeana. This new model is named EDM (Europeana Data Model) and is based on semantic web techniques. The search interface to Europeana based on such techniques is named Thought Lab. EDM is aimed at being an integration medium for collecting, connecting and enriching the descriptions provided by Europeana content providers. To achieve this goals EDM uses set of elements which can be divided in two categories: the elements re-used from other namespaces, and the elements introduced by EDM. The paper will explain in detail the principles of the model and elements used in it.