The EHRI Portal and the EHRI (Mobile) Data Integration Lab

What Can They Do for You and Your Institution?

Herminio García González

herminio.garciagonzalez@kazernedossin.eu

@herminio_gg

Introduction

• EHRI (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure)
• Strengthen Trans-national Holocaust research, commemoration and education
• Challenge: wide dispersal of sources
• EHRI portal

What is the EHRI portal?

• EHRI portal
• Aggregator for Holocaust holdings
• Search engine
• Country reports
• Archival institutions information
• Collections’ descriptions (multilingual)
• Thesauri

Benefits for the users

• Centralised access to Holocaust resources
• Very easy and straightforward for researchers
• Multilinguality
• Additional resources (controlled vocabularies, open data, etc.)
• Contextualisation

OK, but, what are the benefits for my institution?

Let’s see the challenges!

We do not reach a big audience

• The EHRI portal offers a unique promotion opportunity
• Contact information about your institution is provided
• Only collections metadata is shown
• The material and data rest on your system
• We provide a link back to your system

We are not confident with the shape of our data

• By integrating/sharing your metadata
• Internal: You’ll look to your data from other perspective
• External: People outside your organisation is going to give feedback
• It is a work in progress!
• Everybody is always working in updating the data!
• You can always update the data as many times as you want

We are technically not able to share anything

• Technology could be the biggest barrier for some institutions
• Consultancy on technological aspects
• Open Source solutions
• Improve your workflow
• Expertise in other areas also available
• Digitisation, legal, etc.

We are not well connected to others

• EHRI is also a community
• Your metadata will be contextualised and linked
• Topics and multilinguality (via thesauri)
• Copy/original links

So, how can we integrate our metadata?

Data integration in the EHRI portal

• Two main ways:
• Manual (you can edit your own data)
• Archival Institutions
• Little set of collections
• More time invested in automation than in introducing them manually
• Automatic
• Big set of collections
• Impossible to do it manually
• Great benefit of doing it automatically -> Sustainability
• We offer tools to integrate the data

Tools for integrating the data

😱😨😨😨

Introducing the…

• EHRI (mobile) data integration lab
• Data integration as a service
• Encapsulate all the data integration endeavors
• Single point of communication
• Minimises (as much as possible) your workload to be represented in the EHRI portal
• Assist you technically in all your difficulties

When dealing with data integration

• We’ll talk with you to search the better strategy
• Fitting your needs and capabilities
• We’ll do the data integration for you
• No need to worry about coding or scary stuff
• We’ll assist you during the whole process
• Explaining all the process and solving your doubts
• Can travel to your institution if necessary

Some motivational examples

Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros - Arquivo Histórico Diplomático (PT)

• OAI-PMH endpoint
• Harvesting the Holocaust relevant set and establishing a sustainable connection
• Two errors found in the process
• OAI-PMH implementation bug
• Data mistakes in one collection
• Data in Dublin Core format
• Converting to EAD
• 10929 items imported
• Now, their collections are also available in EAD through the EHRI portal
• Workload on institution side
• Mail exchange
• Fixing the two errors

Czech Institutions

• 27 institutions already listed in the EHRI portal
• Limited data on collections available
• Existing Excel file used for Yerusha import
• Conversion from Excel to EAD
• 144 new collections imported
• Workload on institution side
• Fix some typos in the data and review the result

Read more about this process

Fritz Bauer Institut (DE)

• A German case
• Using FAUST (wide-used in German institutions)
• EAD export but with non-valid format
• “Fixing” the EAD
• 18 collections imported in German and English, more coming in the future…
• Workload on institution side
• Mail exchange
• Exporting the data from FAUST
• Supervision of the results

Do you want to integrate your data in the EHRI portal?

Contact us by filling the form!

OR

https://forms.gle/YFCEhJzkEkSVT7yt9

One more thing…

EHRI is evolving and consequently the data in the EHRI portal too

A sneak peak into the future of data integration in EHRI

Linked (Open) Data

• Records in Context will supersede EAD as the “de facto” format at some point
• Graph vs tree
• Interlinking
• Data on the Holocaust is not interconnected and grows in siloed databases and projects!!!!
• Interconnecting would foster new and previously unexpected uses

Linked Open Data - Institution

Linked Open Data - Archival description

What does this mean for my institution?

• Your institution’s data shared with EHRI will be automatically available as LOD
• Connecting you with other databases and institutions
• Pointing back to your institution’s data
• Federated data integration!!!
• EHRI could be in the future an authority control entity or hub

EHRI services

• EHRI offers more services that you can take advantage of
• And more yet to come
• Example: Vocabularies Matching Tool
• Devised to link access points to thesauri terms in the EHRI portal
• But developed in a generic way to link keywords to vocabularies under SKOS

Vocabularies Matching Tool (VMT)

Wrapping up

• Integrating your data in the EHRI portal
• More visibility
• An external feedback on your metadata
• Links & Community
• EHRI (Mobile) Data Integration lab
• You don’t have to deal with technical issues
• All the mapping process will be done for you
• We can assist you in situ