Why, how and when can DRI members add content to Europeana, to widen and deepen engagement with it?
Why, How and When?
Did you know that the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) works with Europeana to make Irish content available to even wider audiences? Millions of cultural heritage items from all over Europe are already available on this platform, with Europeana working in various ways to share and promote them globally. DRI aggregates – in other words ‘collects and helps to prepare data and metadata’ – content from our Irish members and provides it to Europeana. As a result, Europeana’s collections now include rich Irish content ranging from the Fáilte Ireland Tourism Photographic Collection to the Cork LGBT Archive.
On Europeana, you might find a painting of Bray Head by Gabriel Beranger provided by the Royal Irish Academy. On the same platform, you can watch videos from the Border Roads to Peace and Reconciliation project from Monaghan County Council. These resources are situated alongside cultural heritage content from Germany, the UK, Sweden, Greece and many other countries. This gathering of diverse content together in one place creates interesting connections, which have been used to inform Europeana’s series of thematic Collections, online exhibitions, features, and blogs.
In 2019, DRI and Dublin City Library and Archives celebrated aggregating the large Jacob’s Biscuit Factory Photographic Collection to Europeana. These 3,227 objects relate to one of Ireland’s most recognisable brands, with over 150 years of history in Dublin. Some of these fascinating images helped to illuminate the history of the factory in a Europeana blog. The full collection can now be explored on Europeana, as can several others that have been aggregated since, such as the Cork LGBT Archive and material from the Royal Irish Academy Library.
DRI Membership Manager Lisa Griffith explains more about the benefits of Europeana for our members:
Aggregation to Europeana not only increases the audience of DRI member collections, it alters the engagement with them as well. When you aggregate collections to Europeana, they are displayed alongside other thematic and historically-relevant items from all over Europe. This means that researchers and members of the public who use Europeana can examine the overlap with these items. This allows us a greater understanding of how and where we have connected and influenced each other in the past as well as how we are regionally unique. Europeana creates a new setting for collections and so creates a new context in which they can be understood.
So, when digital content is preserved on DRI, it can be accessed, browsed, and downloaded alongside and in relation to Irish data from a range of arts, humanities, social sciences, and cultural heritage sources. Once it is aggregated to Europeana, as Lisa states above, it becomes situated within a much wider European context.
How does content get aggregated to Europeana? Kathryn Cassidy, Software Engineer at DRI, outlines the process:
It’s actually not at all complicated to get your content into Europeana. If you’ve done the work to deposit material to DRI you’re likely most of the way there. When you contact DRI to request aggregation, we will take a look at your metadata, and let you know if any changes are needed before we can send your content to Europeana. This review typically takes a few weeks, and we might make some recommendations for small changes that can be made to the metadata to help bring it to a higher quality tier on the Europeana Publishing Framework. The higher the quality tier, the more ways that your content can be highlighted and featured on the Europeana platform, so it’s usually worth doing a little bit of work to bring the tier up.
Once that’s done, your collection will be submitted to the Europeana Data Publishing Services team who will schedule the aggregation according to their workload. It can take a couple of months from first requesting aggregation to having your content published on Europeana, so it’s best to factor that into your planning.
If you are a DRI member and would like to request aggregation to Europeana, you can do this by emailing Lisa Griffith at members@dri.ie. You will then be guided through the process, from reviewing your metadata to the collection being published on Europeana.
More DRI collections are due to be aggregated to Europeana in the coming months and we look forward to seeing them reach even larger and wider audiences. You can read more about Europeana, its content and metadata requirements, and licensing on Europeana in the DRI and Europeana factsheet: https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.v9807p04r
Images:
Cow. by Fáilte Ireland – Dublin City Library and Archive, Ireland – CC BY-NC-ND.
https://www.europeana.eu/en/item/438/_1z4108846
View of Bray-head, County of Wicklow, 11 miles from Dublin […] by Beranger, Gabriel, ca.1729-1817 – Royal Irish Academy, Ireland – CC0.
https://www.europeana.eu/en/item/15409/_0287df87j
