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December 02, 2008
Europeana overload
A new multimedia library overwhelmed the system (also to note here- records are kept three languages: French, English and German). Europeana does not incorporate the content, only the metadata associated with the records. The metadata from the various collections have been incorporated into a qualified Dublin Core records to provide a coherent searching mechanism. The record will include a thumbnail of an image, or a sample of an audio clip, or a film still, while providing a permanent link to the complete digital object from the particular hosting institution.
Many of the sample records given in the test site seem to have minimal metadata, though the incorporation of tagging could create some interesting scenarios for a database of this size. Searches can be refined by the type of digital material (text, image, audio, video), though also by these user assigned tags. I think once this is opened up to the public users, it will become apparent if these tags are useful in limiting or enhancing searches (or not). In the Beta version, the library has also made five broad themes to the content; City, Crime & Punishment, Travel & Tourism, Music, Social Life. I thought this was curious, since it was a broad separation of content which would likely be referred to and searched as in a specific manner (title, keyword, author), though I feel will also give some insights into how people refer the specific, individual within these themes (or is this troublesome, since Travel & Tourism would likely also fall under the City theme?)
In some of the documentation of Europeana (Technical Requirements Questionnaire, Specification of Metadata, etc.), these themes have been used to provide a method of adding "value" to the search for the user. This could be valuable if the user is conscious of the subcategories of further dissemination (for example, under 'Cities' there are ten subcategories which include 'Trade and industry', 'Pox, Cholera and the Plague', 'Riot and Disorder'). I could envision these acting more as online galleries or collections of material usually separated by place (their respective collection) into a broader arena. There seems to also be potential of advanced searching and community collections that could provide some different applications for the user. The next version of the site is said to be up in a few weeks.
Update (12/30/08): A test site is up and running, though limiting users during peak times. A quick search on Marcel Duchamp yielded over 500 results, mainly from image collections. (Very exciting to this art history major...) One of the handiest menus to limit the search within the search is by date, which also displays the number of hits per year. Most of the hits for this search ended up being from the same content provider (http://www.culture.fr/collections ) I for one am looking forward to the development of this site.
Posted by vad17 at December 2, 2008 09:35 PM
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