Jitendra katiyar
European digital libraries urged to find new ways of displaying online access
Internet libraries and portals need to find new ways of offering access
to digital collections that go beyond the traditional "search box",
speakers have told a major gathering of more than 250 developers,
researchers and creators of digital content.
"The search box is illegible if I don't know what is in the collection," George Oates, of the consultancy firm Good, Form & Spectacle and an expert in internet design, told the second "Europeana Tech" conference, organised in February at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris by Europeana, the European digital platform for cultural heritage.
Europeana, www.europeana.eu - a Globethics.net partner - collects and provides online access to tens of millions of digitised items from libraries, archives, audio-visual collections and museums across the continent. Seb Chan, director of digital and emerging technologies at Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, underlined that interfaces should not feel like a database.
"Search is a niche solution to a broad problem. People do not visit museums to perform a search," he said. Instead, online content should offer a rich, detailed and connected experience.
Conference speakers and participants explored tools and approaches that could make this happen, examining issues such as data quality and modelling, multilingualism, discovery, content re-use and open source development.
Other conference speakers included Ruth Nicholls, managing director of Young Rewired State, which organises "Hackathons" for young people, Chris Welty of Google Research, Andy Neale, Director of Digital NZ, and Ted Fons of OCLC, the not-for-profit library cataloguing organisation.
Globethics.net was represented at the Paris conference by Stephen Brown, Programme Director Online Libraries and Digital Innovation.
Jill Cousins, Executive Director of the Europeana Foundation, is a member of the Globethics.net Board of Foundation.
European library website launches with new look
Europeana Professional, the common website for projects linked to
Globethics.net partner Europeana, has been relaunched with a new look.
The website features global navigation that unites all of Europeana's
products, a new visual design, better social media sharing options on
the blog, and responsive design for mobile and tablet users.