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Weekly News Digest
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August 23, 2012 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks.
CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.
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OCLC and Europeana Work to Improve ‘Similar Object’ Browsing
OCLC and Europeana are collaborating to investigate ways of creating semantic links among the millions of digital objects that are accessible online through Europeana.eu in order to improve “similar object” browsing.Europeana is Europe’s digital library, archive, and museum. The Europeana platform and network of experts facilitate research and knowledge exchange between librarians, curators, and archivists, and link them with digital innovators and the creative industries. Europeana currently gives people access to more than 24 million books, paintings, films, recordings, photographs, and archival records from 2,200 partner organizations, through an interface in 29 languages. Because aggregating metadata from these heterogeneous collections leads to quality issues such as duplication, uneven granularity of the object descriptions, ambiguity between original and derivative versions of the same object, etc., Europeana and OCLC Research are working together on innovation pilots to identify and create semantic links between objects that are connected. Examples of this include translated copies of the same publication; a painting and a photograph of that painting; different editions of one book; or a collection of letters that belong to the same archive. OCLC Research has extensive experience and expertise in metadata quality improvement techniques and methods, such as duplicate detection and clustering of similar metadata records around FRBR-entity-relationships, reproductions and originals, and different cataloguing languages. In addition, OCLC Research is currently experimenting with the automated enhancement of records with links to the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) and other Linked Data elements. The data quality improvement and enrichment efforts of OCLC are part of its philosophy to “make the metadata work harder for libraries” and to enhance the end-user experience. The collaboration between Europeana and OCLC Research will benefit both organizations and their partners, offering new opportunities for data enrichment. The outcomes of the research project will feed into the implementation of the Europeana Data Model (EDM), which is designed to improve the browsing experience of the visitors of Europeana.eu. In addition, the piloting of OCLC Research data clustering and enrichment methods and techniques will inform follow-up activities in more innovative directions and opportunities to develop new data services for third parties. The team members working on the research project are all based in the Netherlands. Europeana team members include Antoine Isaac, scientific coordinator; Valentine Charles, ingestion specialist; and Nuno Freire, interoperability architect. OCLC Research team members include Titia van der Werf, senior program officer; Shenghui Wang, research scientist; and Rob Koopman, Innovation Lab architect. More information OCLC Research and Europeana Innovation Pilots Activity Page
Europeana
Europeana Data Model
Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) Source: OCLC
Send correspondence concerning the Weekly News Digest to NewsBreaks Editor
Brandi Scardilli
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