Europeana Libraries at LIBER Conference in Barcelona

Europeana Libraries took centre stage in June, when members of the project hosted a workshop at LIBER’s 40th Annual Conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Over 50 professionals from libraries across Europe attended the workshop, which included presentations from:

• Jon Purday, WP6 - Download Powerpoint or PDF
• Marian Lefferts, WP2 and CERL - Download Powerpoint or PDF
• Sylvia van Peteghem, University of Gent - Download Powerpoint or PDF
• Gunnar Sahlin, CENL -  Download Powerpoint or PDF
• Mel Collier, WP2’s Business Planning Group and Leuven University - Download Powerpoint or PDF

The workshop participants learned how Europeana Libraries will put 5 million objects online from Europe’s leading research libraries over the coming two years, and how the project will provide value for the libraries who join the service. This included the results of a poll that asked university and national libraries which features they would value most from a joint library portal.

The respondents said it was most critical that any service should provide access to their own digital repositories. Other high-priority services included:

• Offering Optical Character Recognition services for providers’ digital content to support full text searching in the portal
• Pushing the data out to other academic and research services such as Primo Central and Summon
• Enriching metadata (e.g. using the opportunities offered by Linked Open Data) and returning it to contributing libraries

This was followed by a discussion on business models, and how to best create a service that will provide real value for libraries and aggregators.

In addition to the workshop, factsheets promoting the Europeana Libraries project were distributed to all 400 conference attendees.