Our Priorities

We want to make Europe’s rich archaeological and architectural heritage easier for people to discover and more rewarding to use Our emphasis is on quality of content and metadata over quantity Monitoring the quality is an important part of the process.

What do we mean by quality?

The Europeana Publishing Framework specifies requirements for content and metadata, these covers:

• The link provided to the content, the format and resolution of the content, or to the content in a viewer or web-page
• Rights labelling
• The metadata to include and how to support search by subject, place, date and agents
• Title and description
• Labelling the language of the metadata

How do we monitor quality?

Monitoring happens throughout the content workflow. As you progress through the content, work flow quality issues may be identified. Remember there are people at CARARE available to help!

Actions: Mapping

MINT allows you to map the fields in your datasets to elements in the target scheme. MINT will tell you if your mapping is valid according to the rules of the schema This means that a field is mapped to every mandatory element.

Actions: Transformation

Your mapping produces an XSLT which can be used to transform all the records in your set to the target scheme. Validating the transformed dataset shows whether there are any invalid items. This means individual records miss mandatory data.

Actions: Review your dataset and the mapping

Reviewing the invalid items should show which data is missing. Common
issues include missing data in a mandatory element. All records must contain:

• Description OR title
• Subject, type, spatial OR temporal
• edm:isShownAt OR edm:isShownBy
• edm:rights, edm:provider and edm:dataProvider

Sometimes it is possible to fulfill the requirements by editing the mapping, sometimes you will need to go back to your database.

Think about the quality!

Common mistakes that affect data quality:

• Adding unuseful data to a field to fulfil a mandatory requirement - n/a, unknown, tbc. (whether in the mapping or the source database)
• Double mapping a field to fulfil a mandatory requirement

Try to add value and improve the quality

• Process what you can now and make an update to add the missing records once they have been improved at home.

MORe quality monitoring

In the CARARE aggregation service content is ingested on MORe (either directly or from MINT)

Metadata is transformed to EDM on ingestion and records are validated against the EDM schema rules

EDM records are available to preview

MORe: Content analysis - images

Review the resolution and type of image-based content and their tier status

Consider enrichment

You can improve the quality of your metadata by running an enrichment

service, for example to:

• Add language labels to your metadata
• Find place names
• Add geographic coordinates
• Run vocabulary matching services
• Add broad subject concepts

Publishing

Once you’ve taken your dataset through all of the steps and you’re happy with the results you can ‘publish’ (or send the data to Europeana for ingestion).

This may not be the end of the quality monitoring story

• The project will be monitoring your content as it goes through to publication
• Ingestion by Europeana can also result in queries and requests for improvement

Publishing is a cycle

Publishing in Europeana is not a one-off event. The workflow has stages, checks and opportunities to go back and improve your content and metadata.

Once you’ve published your collection successfully in Europeana, you can come back to CARARE and make an update to add new content or to make improvements.

Contact us! We’re here to help

Remember CARARE has a helpdesk. We can give one-to-one support with metadata mapping, enrichment, use of vocabularies, geocoding, Europeana’s publishing frameworks and rights labels.

We can offer support with use of the aggregation services MINT and MORe, and with publishing to Europeana.

Acknowledgements

These training materials were developed in collaboration with the Europeana Archaeology project and with funding by the European Commission under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Telecom Programme.