Abstract
In the World Wide Web, a very large number of resources is made available through digital libraries. The existence of many individual digital libraries, maintained by different organizations, brings challenges to the discoverability and usage of the resources. A widely-used approach is metadata aggregation, where centralized efforts like Europeana facilitate the discoverability and use of the resources by collecting their associated metadata. This paper focuses on metadata aggregation in the domain of cultural heritage, where OAI-PMH has been the adopted solution. However, the technological landscape around us has changed. With recent technological accomplishments, the motivation for adopting OAI-PMH is not as clear as it used to be. In this paper, we present the first results in attempting to rethink Europeana’s technological approach for metadata aggregation, to make the operation of the aggregation network more efficient and lower the technical barriers for data providers. We (Europeana and data providers) report on case studies that trialled the application of some of the most promising technologies, exploring several solutions based on the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and Sitemaps. The solutions were trialled successfully and leveraged on existing technology and knowledge in cultural heritage, with low implementation barriers. The future challenges lie in choosing among the several possibilities and standardize solution(s). Europeana will proceed with recommendations for its network and is actively working within the IIIF community to achieve this goal.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Source: http://statistics.europeana.eu/europeana [consulted on 27th of April 2017].
- 2.
International Image Interoperability Framework - http://iiif.io/#international-image-interoperability-framework.
- 3.
Sitemaps XML format: https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
The source code of the prototypes developed in the case studies is openly available at https://github.com/nfreire/Open-Data-Acquisition-Framework.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
Metadata Object Descriptive Schema (MODS) is a schema for a bibliographic element set: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/.
- 14.
- 15.
IIIF Presentation Ontology: http://iiif.io/api/presentation/2.
- 16.
- 17.
References
Lagoze, C., Van de Sompel, H., Nelson, M., Warner, S.: The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, Version 2.0 (2002), http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/openarchivesprotocol.htm
Van de Sompel, H., Nelson, M.L.: Reminiscing About 15 Years of Interoperability Efforts. D-Lib Mag. 21(11/12) (2015). doi:10.1045/november2015-vandesompel, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november15/vandesompel/11vandesompel.html
Berners-Lee, T.: Linked Data Design Issues. W3C-Internal Document (2006), http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
Kenneth, L., Richardson, L., Ruby, S.: Restful Web Services. O’Reilly (2007)
Freire, N., Manguinhas, H., Isaac, A., Robson, G., Howard, J.B.: Web technologies: a survey of their applicability to metadata aggregation in cultural heritage. In: 21st International Conference on Electronic Publishing (2017)
Snydman, S., Sanderson, R., Cramer, T.: The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF): A community & technology approach for web-based images. In: Archiving 2015 (2015), http://purl.stanford.edu/df650pk4327
NISO. “ResourceSync Framework Specification”, National Information Standards Organization (2014), http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/12904/z39-99-2014_resourcesync.pdf
Klein, M., Van de Sompel, H.: Extending sitemaps for ResourceSync. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2013), pp. 277–280. ACM, New York (2013). Doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2467696.2467733
Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Modul, J., Frystyk, H., Masinter, L., Leach, P., Berners-Lee, T.: Hypertext Transfer Protocol—HTTP/1.1. Network Working Group. The Internet Society. Request for Comments: 2616 (1999) https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html
Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the supporting work by Valentine Charles, from the Europeana Foundation, in the analysis of metadata samples collected during the case studies, and the IIIF community in general for the criticism and discussions of our work. This work was partially supported by Portuguese national funds through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) with reference UID/CEC/50021/2013, and by the European Commission under the Connecting Europe Facility, telecommunications sector, grant agreement number CEF-TC-2015-1-01.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Freire, N., Robson, G., Howard, J.B., Manguinhas, H., Isaac, A. (2017). Metadata Aggregation: Assessing the Application of IIIF and Sitemaps Within Cultural Heritage. In: Kamps, J., Tsakonas, G., Manolopoulos, Y., Iliadis, L., Karydis, I. (eds) Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. TPDL 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10450. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67008-9_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67008-9_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-67007-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-67008-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)