Repositioning, Realignment, and the Researcher Friedel Grant (The European Library), Susan Reilly (LIBER), Aubéry Escande (The European Library)

Why are we here?

5 million digital objects from research libraries

+

Millions of bibliographic records, digital objects and full-text pages from national

libraries

=A new one-stop-shop for

digital humanities and social science researchers

The First Step: Getting To Know The Researcher

“If you give an audience a chance, they will do half your acting for you.”

–William Hazlitt (English writer)

How did we ‘meet the audience’?

• Conferences & Workshops• Group discussions• Online Networking (Twitter, blogs)

What We Learned

• Gather a critical and contextual mass of content.

“The humanities community needs a critical mass of digital resources and needs common tools, services, and repositories if they are to move beyond ‘boutique projects’

to a solid foundation of theory and method.” –Christine L. Borgman, Presidential Chair in Information Studies, UCLA

• Information must be easy to cite and reuse.

• Put it in their workflow.

Part 2: Realignment: building the Europeana Libraries Partnership

Susan Reilly (LIBER)

Portrait of an unknown male scholar, http://www.vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=86386

Making it happen- the partnership

Consortium of European Research Libraries

Conference of European National Libraries

Europeana Foundation

Association of European Research Libraries

What the project will achieve

• A valuable resource for researchers with full-text search capabilities

• A robust network of national and research libraries• An efficient sustainable aggregation model for research

libraries across EuropeThis means

developing the framework for a library domainaggregation

service!!!!

Getting there: using the same hymn sheet

• Create a sustainable business model• Create standards for best practice• Communicate value of Europeana Librariesto research librariesandto researchers• Develop dedicated portal

Creating the business model

Modelling the aggregator landscape

Domain

Online presence

Data quality

No. of subscribers

Country

Funding model

Level of aggregation

by Paul Williams http://www.flickr.com/photos/16056465@N00/6418238995

Scenario building: what should the service look like?

• Funding• Services• Service delivery• Content acquisition

We were locked in a room…

Validation of value propositions

• We keep asking….• Enabling searching of bibliographic records of texts in hard copy

and metadata for related digitised texts at the same time• Offering OCR services for providers’ digital content to support full

text searching in the portal • Pushing the data out to other academic / research services• Providing access to universities’ own digital repositories…and more?

The business model

Best scenario Value propositions Costings

by Josh Roulston http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshroulston/93236851/sizes/z/in/photostream /

Getting to the finishing line

• Governance requirements • Governance agreement • IPR requirements specification (full text delivery) • Business and network development plan