The technical aspects of the implementation of the Europeana Inside project in the Hungarian
National Museum
Sz.Fejes Ildikó
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Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Országos Muzeológiai Módszer
Berger Ágoston
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Monguz KFT
Simon András
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Monguz KFT
Lengyel Monika
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Monguz KFT
The Europeana project launched in 2008 aims to aggregate the digital cultural heritage of the members of the European Union and provide them to a wide range of internet users. Since its launch, thousands of cultural institutions have contributed to Europeana and its content, from large, internationally recognized institutions to regional collections.
The building of tematic aggregators ran into a number of problems, mainly stemming from the huge need of human resources. This led to a demand for tighter integration and better automation with existing systems. The Europeana Inside project was created to get software suppliers to get more involved with integrating their systems with Europeana. The project’s main goal is to develop a common open source software component named the Europeana Connection Kit (ECK). The main purpose of the ECK is to enable easy integration of existing and future integrated collection management systems (ICMS) with the Europeana Network, thus making better automation possible.
Monguz Ltd. is participating in the project as a technical partner both independently and as a partner of the Hungarian National Museum and the Petőfi Literary Museum. Our main goal is to integrate Qulto ICMS (in particular, its core component, Qulto Libraries/Qulto Museums) with the ECK to enable metadata exchange for memory institutions using Qulto with Europeana with minimal costs.
Besides Qulto-ECK integration we participate in the development of a number of modules of the ECK. Our R&D team is leading the development of the ECK Preview Module responsible for providing web-based previews of newly uploaded records assisted by Semantika (Slovenia) and Knowledge Integration (UK). We develop the Validation Module providing early validation for new records in cooperation with Semantika, assisted by K-Int, and we assist Semantika in the testing of the persistent ID generation module (PID Generation Module) they are developing.
One of the most important steps in the integration of Qulto to the ECK is the completion of LIDO support in Qulto Museums in cooperation with the Hungarian National Museum and the Petőfi Literary Museum.
The prepairing of the data is the main element of data upload. This work can be fullfilled only by using integerated collection management systems with standardized solutions, workflow and data architecture. For this reason was chosen the Huntéka CMS by the Hungarian Nationa Museum (HNM) following the choice the Petőfi Literar museum (PIM). According to the success of using the Huntéka data architecture by contributing the metarecords of the PIM to former EU data providing projects, now the swift migration of the database of the HNM was the most problematic milestone of our work. One of the most difficult points of the migration was the difference of the data structure conception of the MARC and the inner format of the MUNYÍR, (the former CMS of the National Museum) especially the missing conception of authority data, and the lack of the absolute identifying of them in the system. An extra difficulty of the prepairing of the inventory data to be mapped to Europeana is the possibility of defining datafields by the users, especially because these fields were defined separately in the various collections of the museum, creating redundant data types, name, and functions this way. This migration is completed with the correncting of the mistakes of the Dataease (the former system of the HNM) - MUNYÍR migration prepared for nine years, and the allocating, moving of the full text data and image files, the prepairing of these files for service, and the maintenance of them.