Royal Library of Belgium

Sven Lieber

Hi everyone,

did you ever wonder how FAIR data is put into practice? This week I went
down the rabbit hole and what I brought back is the start of a new
series to **unravel the many FAIR data initiatives**. There are also
some good news for (Belgian) FAIR data in my work update!

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❓ This week I have read that *Europeana* is preparing the *ECHOES*
proposal to respond to a **€ 110 million** call for a *European
Collaborative Cloud for Europe's cultural heritage*, because they are
also coordinating the complementary *Common European Data Space for
Cultural Heritage*. **Wait, what ...? What does this even mean? And what
are all these acronyms?** Let's find out in the new *FAIR Buzzword
Bingo* series, where I will focus on one initiative per week. Today:
Europeana.

🏢 While working with book translations in the
[BELTRANS](https://www.kbr.be/en/projects/beltrans/) project, we often
have to deal with so-called authority data. That is for example data
about *contributors* and *places* related to book translations. As you
might have guessed, there are possibly different data sources with maybe
contradicting data. To avoid this and to have a single trustworthy data
source in the future for Belgian authority data, we submitted the
**research infrastructure project** ***MetaBelgica*** **that got
accepted!**

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# ❓ FAIR Buzzword Bingo: Europeana {#fair-buzzword-bingo-europeana}

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There are already countless intertwined research and infrastructure
initiatives in the cultural heritage field, even more beyond it. While I
went down the rabbit hole I thought it would be nice if I make a
*series* out of it. Every week I will focus on one of the many FAIR
data-related initiatives, **this week
[Europeana](https://www.europeana.eu/en).**

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Europeana logo, [CC BY-SA
4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia
Commons

**Europeana** ([Q234110](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q234110)) is a
web portal with which you can discover **millions** of cultural heritage
images and texts that are provided by over **4,000 institutions** across
Europe. The data is collected not directly, but via a network of
aggregators. Like this you are able to discover cultural heritage
collections since 2008, Europeana's inception date.

Did you know that **cultural tourism** represents up to **40%** of all
tourism in Europe? And that the cultural and creative industries
contribute **3.95% of total EU value added (€ 477 billion)**?
([source](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-proposes-common-european-data-space-cultural-heritage))
In order to accelerate the digitization of cultural heritage assets, the
European Commission launched the **Common** ***European Data Space for
Cultural Heritage***, for which Europeana will be at the basis.

Last but not least, cultural heritage institutions need to be supported
so they can benefit in the digital age. Umbrella organizations such as
the [Network of European Museum Organisations
NEMO](https://www.ne-mo.org/) were advocating for a cloud solution,
according to *Christian Ehler* from the European Parliament. Eventually,
under funding of the Horizon Europe programme, there was a call for a
**European Collaborative Cloud for Europe's Cultural Heritage**.

*Christian Ehler* argues further that

> the cloud is a big equalizer for museums in deprived areas of Europe
> that currently are happy that they hold up operations.

And this is the context in which Europeana wants to submit a proposal
together with various partners (from which I will cover a few in future
editions). That joint proposal is called **European Cloud for Heritage
OpEn Science (ECHOES)**. They imagine it the following way:

> Through the Cloud, \[an international group of researchers\] could
> have access to online tools and/ or develop applications that would
> facilitate their joint work: from exchanging datasets and data files,
> to accessing collaborative workspaces and workgroups, as well as
> having direct interaction possibilities, along with storing data under
> European jurisdiction.

[Read
here](https://pro.europeana.eu/post/europeana-initiative-responds-to-call-for-a-european-collaborative-cloud-for-cultural-heritage)
about Europeana's upcoming proposal or check out the press conference
introducing the call for the cloud solution.

[Watch the launch of the cloud
call](https://audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/en/video/I-226882?lg=INT){.button
.primary}

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# 🏢 Work updates {#work-updates}

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## MetaBelgica

It is one thing to *publish* FAIR data, but it is another thing of
*working with* FAIR data. As a consumer who gets FAIR data from
different sources, you may still have to combine it somehow. And what if
the different data sources contradict each other? Which data source is
more authoritative?

Imagine the following use case:

The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Belgium has an [online
record](http://balat.kikirpa.be/object/7602) about the painting the
*marriage of Joseph and Maria*, which contains information about the
painter *Rogier Van der Weyden*. At the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR),
there is also a
[record](https://opac.kbr.be/LIBRARY/doc/AUTHORITY/13971128) about the
same painter, yet both entities are maintained at both institutions at
the same time and with different spelling variants (*Rogier Van der
Weyden* or *Rogier de la Pasture*). Due to the **uncoordinated creation
and maintenance of Belgian entities, (inter)national users of our
catalogues experience a gap in knowledge on these authorities**, they
need a single trustworthy data source about Belgian entities!

At KBR, we therefore teamed up with the *Royal Museums of Fine Arts*,
the *Royal Museums of Art and History* and the *Royal Institute for
Cultural Heritage* to create a single trustworthy data source for
cultural heritage authority data (persons, organizations, time and
locations): the *MetaBelgica* platform. **The project got accepted!**
The platform will run on the Open Source Wikibase software that is also
used by Wikidata. The project did not start yet, but be sure that I will
talk about it again once it did.

[Basic MetaBelgica
info](https://www.belspo.be/belspo/impuls/project_en.stm#MetaBelgica){.button
.primary}

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That's it for this week of the FAIR Data Digest. I hope you found the
content interesting. Don't forget to share or subscribe. See you next
week!

Sven

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Hi everyone,  did you ever wonder how FAIR data is put into practice? This week I went down the rabbit hole and what I brought back is the start of a new series to
<strong>
 unravel the many FAIR data initiatives
</strong>
. There are also some good news for (Belgian) FAIR data in my work update!

Rogue Scholar Posts

FAIR Data Digest #5