CARARE - D4.5: CARARE Technical Workshops Report (Final)

Executive Summary

CARARE will make available to Europeana content from the archaeology, geo-information and 3D domains and includes a wide range of content provider institutions.

The project will establish a central information space, the CARARE Repository, where metadata on digital objects held by content provider partners will be ingested, transformed to the Europeana Data Model and subsequently passed on to the Europeana team to be ingested into the Europeana information space.

To achieve the information flow necessary to meet this goal, content provider partners must perform a series of steps:

1. Extract metadata from their local collection management systems
2. Establish a web service capable of transporting the metadata
3. Ingest their metadata into the CARARE repository using the MINT tool

CARARE partners are cultural heritage professionals with varying degrees of knowledge about technical issues and a training program was therefore devised to facilitate the smooth implementation of the above steps.

The workshops provided presentations and hands-on training in topics including but not limited to: XML, databases, metadata extraction, metadata normalization, metadata enrichment, OAI-PMH, installation and configuration of Repox, management and harvesting of repositories, ingestion and mapping of metadata.

Three workshops were held during the spring of 2011 at different locations in Europe to minimize travel and time costs for partners. Following the summer holidays, a “refresher” workshop was provided during in September 2011. The latter workshop also introduced the proceedings of the CARARE metadata repository which had advanced considerably at this stage.

Workshops were attended by all CARARE partners.