Europeana Conference 2022: Feedback session (Researchers)

(from Research Futures session, Europeana 2022 conference)

During Europeana 2022 conference, Robin Boast’s Research Futures session on the final day inspired extensive dynamic audience input on their experience using Europeana.eu.

Below are the raw notes taken by Julie Van Oyen, mostly based on audience members who spoke up during the session:

Sebastian M. with suggestions for features on the website to better find items; experimentation (example of opening a box in an archive)

Dev (Jama Poulsen) - can't find what he's looking for (SPARQL) Would like to access items specifically by dates and country.
Erik Buelinckx - you used to be able to find europeana on google but now you can't (his org has added 150000 items); utilising wikidata a lot; what's happening with the links breaking on the europeana side (what does he mean by this)
SEO & accessing from search engines (google)If I search the collections, how do I know if I've seen everything, how much there is in total, should I leave europeana and go to the provider websites (Heleen hillbrink)Liesbeth van wijk (leiden library) - the threshold for adding items to europeana is quite high, so only a small fraction of their items can be on there; we're slowly getting there (and that's why they need to come to our library site to see everything)Newspapers
Hannah question: Why don't they go to our site for newspapers?
Chose dutch delver collection (a better place, and it's familiar to her) (Heleen)
Improving search (more intuitive) (Raul Gomez Hernandez)
(Randi cecchine)- AV resources; transcription tools for searching and using these? (Examples of USA platforms that do this? Claria media suite?? using ai to describe av content; Close reading and distant reading research methods in media studies; working more closely with scholars would be great for the scholars
Hugo is interested in how they use google to search europeana content.
(Nelson Breto) historic blg 3d scan (notre dame example) - resilience and safety of physical items
Sebastian M. Ontological insecurity around where I can find the full text; going to the og site alleviates this; can I watch videos? Can I transcribe/search within? Can I VR it? Without having to go to the original and downloading the full thing. I want to "work" w the objects at europeana
Hannah question: How many are creating accounts? more than half
Hannah question: Very low usage of user galleries (what was her name)
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Lorna Hughes (one of the speakers)- inviting people to think about research in wider contexts; consider the europeana ecosystem (all of the offers- items/content itself, tools for delivering it, and methods for doing that); what can we do to help??
Eccch (European cloud for collaborative cultural heritage); making a formal call for small working groups to work on adding to the data space - call for europeana research projects every year from 2018-21, they have some of these past projects on the site(send Hannah the europeana research community)
Tom miles from British LibraryHugo wants to know what features we could use on galleries to invite people to use them more
Robin - not enough communication between europeana teams; and between europeana and users;
Milena Dobreva - asking about data space
Jama Poulsen - wikidata has a sparkle I terrace that is working, with good documentation, and wikis where people can ask questions; that's how devs might "build galleries"
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"Research hackathon" - Gloria agrees it's a good idea, but that we should definitely reach out to universities;
Heleen: improve what we have so far first (ie: broken links, errors, etc)Lorna: collaborating with other systems (Clarion or Baria?) Who understand researchers needs
Raul Gomez h. Involve [professors] in Participatory sessions; aka people who will spread the word about Europeana, the students will hear from them...a "signposting" problem
Steven Clayssens - europeana research community would be onboard for a hackathon