EDLocal – The Start of A New Project
From next week onwards also local and regional cultural institutions from across Europe will work with EDL Foundation. Together they will find ways through which the institutions can easily make their content available to Europeana. Or to use the official terminology – the projects aims to improve the interoperability of the digital content held by these institutions and to make it accessible through the Europeana service of the European Digital Library and to other services.
Okay let’s think about this…All these different institutions hold an enormeous amount of digital resources. In fact, they give access to an amazing amount of material of all types, cultures and languages. And now with EDLocal access will also given via Europeana. Let me give you a figure: EDLocal will make over 20 million items available to Europeana.
A few more details
EDLocal is a so-called ‘Best Practice Network’, an eContentplus project that falls under the digital libraries inititiative. The project will run for three years. It builds on existing multiplier networks of local institutions to bring together a consortium that represents 27 countries with broad ranging experience of the cultural sector, digital libraries, standards and aggregation services.
The expected results include the establishment of a network of regional repositories that are highly interoperable with Europeana, an integrated Europeana-EDLocal prototype service and the development of thematic areas for Europeana services which integrate content from both the national and the local/regional level.
The element of “improving interoperability” entails the use of Europeana’s infrastructures, tools and standards (OAI-PMH repositories and Europeana Metadata Application Profiles initially, but moving forward to semantic web technologies later).
Rob Davies (MDR Partners) is Scientific Coordinator of the EDLocal Best Practice Network. (NB: The photo of mister Davies has been copied from this page)
About “Best Practice Networks“
The EU explains on one of her websites that these networks “should combine a consensus building and awareness raising function with implementation in a real-life context of the solutions discussed. Their main objective is to promote the adoption of standards and specifications for making digital content in Europe more accessible and usable.” Continue reading at the FAQ 2008 page of eContentplus projects
