Ευάγγελος Μπάνος

Open Archives Engine is a software platform which makes it easy for every organization or community to create their own custom search portal. Unify your existing OAI-PMH compliant digital repositories or web applications into a single search portal.

QQML 2010

Alexandros Koulouris1,4 Emmanouel Garoufallou2,4 and Evangelos Banos3,4

1 Department of Librarianship and Information Systems, Technological Educational Institute (T.E.I.) of Athens, Agiou Spyridonos Str., 12210 Egaleo, Athens, Greece, koulouris.a@gmail.com, akoul@teiath.gr

2 Department of Library Science and Information Systems, Technological Educational Institution (T.E.I.) of Thessaloniki, P.O. BOX 141, 57400 Thessaloniki, Greece, garoufallou@yahoo.co.uk, mgarou@libd.teithe.gr

3 Evangelos Banos, Openarchives.gr, vbanos@gmail.com

4 Veria Central Public Library, 8, Ellis Str., P.O. BOX 236, 59100 Veria, Greece

Abstract: EuropeanaLocal is a best practice network project, which will help Europeana to enhance its content and service by applying automated metadata harvesting among distributed
repositories. Greek content providers and its metadata aggregator, the Veria Central Public Library (VCPL), are in a testing metadata harvesting period, in the framework of EuropeanaLocal. This paper analyzes the practices that the Greek Institutional Repositories follow in order to transform their metadata schemas to European Semantic Elements (ESE) profile and to export this profile through OAI-PMH to the VCPL aggregator. In addition, it describes the way in which the VCPL aggregates the ESE exported metadata output. Finally, it emphasizes on the transformation and aggregation tools that have been launched on a local level, before Europeana disseminates its official ones.

Keywords: Europeana, EuropeanaLocal, Public Libraries, Cultural Content, Digital Projects, Interoperability, Repositories, Harvesting, Metadata, European Semantic Elements

Παρουσίαση: http://helios-eie.ekt.gr/EIE/handle/10442/8383

Conference Link: http://conf.ellak.gr/2010/?p=155

Interoperability of digital libraries is a problem of great complexity but also of immense – and increasing – significance. Huge investments in digitizing legacy cultural heritage material and organising new digital born content can be exploited in more efficient ways through interoperable, open systems.
This presentation concerns pragmatic approaches on achieving interoperability in digital libraries and repositories based on relevant experiences of the authors in real-life, large scale, successful use cases such as: (a) the establishment – within the EuropeanaLocal project – of a national aggregator, harvesting digital content (more than 170000 records) from various repositories across the country to incorporate it into Europeana, the single portal / gateway to distributed European cultural heritage resources developed as an initiative of the European Commission, (b) the development and operation of openarchives.gr, a single, unified search engine over Greek digital libraries and repositories that currently indexes metadata from 39 systems (more than 340000 records) and (c) the inclusion of content (roughly 40000 items) from disparate data sources to Pandektis, a thematic repository of cultural heritage and humanities material and Helios – the institutional repository of the National Hellenic Research Foundation.
Experiences from the aforementioned case studies will be presented. Among others, these concern the successful utilisation of FLOSS platforms as well as the creation of new FLOSS software, such as the DSpace plugin for Europeana Semantic Elements
(http://vbanos.gr/?p=189), whose development and enhancement has experienced the benefits of collaborative contributions within the Greek digital library community, something that would have been almost impossible if it had not been for FLOSS. Furthermore, the support of open standards and protocols will be elaborated as a crucial aspect of accomplishing interoperability. Relevant standards concern knowledge and metadata representation in different environments (e.g., Dublin Core, Europeana Semantic Elements, MODS, MARC, RDF, OWL) as well as protocols and approaches for content search and retrieval (e.g., OAI-PMH, SRU/W, Z39.50, OpenSearch, OAI-ORE, Linked Data). Besides allowing applications like content aggregation and unified search, supporting open standards and protocols enables the availability of material in digital libraries as re-usable open data that can be freely utilised by developer communities for the creation of advanced, cross-system value-added services, mash-ups and for exploitation in many other types of applications. Approaches and methods for developers to re-use freely available digital
libraries content will be also described.

Ομιλητής: Νίκος Χούσος, Κωνσταντίνος Σταμάτης, Εύη Σαχίνη (EKT), Ευάγγελος Μπάνος (οpenarchives.gr), Αλέξανδρος Κουλούρης (ΤΕΙ Αθήνας), Ιωάννης Τροχόπουλος (Δημόσια Κεντρική Βιβλιοθήκη Βέροιας)