 The last part, presenting a project that is completely the opposite end of the spectrum to that, to which my colleagues here have presented. But before I start, can I just ask people, because I'm not familiar with you guys, who here has heard of Europeana, if you can? Excellent. So who here is a content provider, who provides metadata to Europeana? Not bad! I know there's at least two of you. Who are project partners in Europeana Cloud? One. Okay. The other one must not be here today. Okay. We have one. Just Danny, he's the guy you go to when you have a question after I've gone. Okay. So you guys know who Europeana are. That makes my job a lot easier. I'm going to talk to you today about Europeana Cloud, which is one project, one of two big projects that Europeana are running over the next couple of years. And Europeana Cloud is about developing a sustainable infrastructure that delivers efficiencies in publishing metadata and also making access to that metadata better for our users. What we've done is we've run a series of workshops. We're nine months into a three-year project and we've run a series of workshops to identify what our requirements are. And there's loads of stuff we don't know. So what we did is we had an illustrator come into our final workshop and draw some pictures about how far we have come. So the things that we know and what we still need to explore. So the things that we don't know. And what I'm going to do is just talk to you, talk you through these pictures. So the first thing is, as you all know, back in 2008, Europeana was an aggregator. We focused on aggregating content, bringing in metadata, making it available through 2010. Moving on to 2012, we made our metadata available under a CC0 licence. So nice and open, reusable, no restrictions. And I think, does that mean there's no database rights? I wasn't entirely clear. Lucy's not here. We waived our database rights. So excellent. We don't have some of those issues. So that takes you all the way through to where we are today. We currently publish 29.6 million metadata, sorry, digital objects that can be found through metadata. So we're nearly at that 30 million mark, which is actually our target for 2015. So we're way ahead of ourselves and we're really pleased about that. But for us, there's a lot more that we need to try and achieve. So when we start looking forward to 2015, which is the next step in our corporate strategy, we're looking at providing a digital infrastructure service. The European Commission calls it a core service platform. And so what we have to do is try and think about what does that look like? Does that mean that Europeana just puts itself into the cloud and becomes a platform? That sounds nice in general, but there's obviously a lot more to it than that. We need to identify what the challenges are that we're facing. And one of the things that we do understand is that our users, the people who access the metadata, say that they need better and more direct access to the metadata and the content, and that they'd like a better overall user experience. I don't know how many of you have gone to the main portal, europeana.eu and looked for a digital object, searching through the portal. It's great if you're looking for something specific, but if you're looking to download a large amount of metadata or access a range of digital objects, it has its limitations. And so we need to do more work on that. And the Europeana Cloud project gives us the mechanism in which to do that. We also have to look at the supply side of the equation and look at the aggregators and the data providers who provide us with the metadata. At the moment, they're still trying to decide what their role is in the future in Europeana, in Europeana Cloud, and what they want and how this all works, which makes writing requirements quite challenging because if you don't know what your problems are, you can't really solve them. So to try and meet all of these challenges, Europeana Cloud was born. We're nine months into the project. We've run the workshops, which have got these wonderful figures we like imagery. We find it very difficult within the office to try and understand these abstract concepts without having an image like this. So in the middle you see the two-sided funnel. This is Europeana. On the left-hand side, on the far side, you have all the data providers and the aggregators who are feeding the funnel. And then on this side, you have all the users. So whether you're a researcher, a scientific community, or in English what we call Joblogs, just wanting to find a nice picture that they can use for free, then you're on the right-hand side over here. Okay, so as I said, we're still in the process of defining exactly what Europeana Cloud is. We've gotten as far as it's a cloud-based infrastructure. We know that we're going to use it to aggregate and to store metadata. We're still discussing whether that should store content as well or even offer storage facilities for content. We know that we will publish an open platform to allow people to build tools and services on top of the infrastructure to provide the users with this better access points that they've all been describing that they want. We've also gotten as far as describing eight what we call high-level principles, which determine the very early shape of Europeana Cloud. I'm not sure if you can read that. The first one is that Europeana Cloud will be open, and this is a good thing, that it's really there to serve the needs of cultural heritage institutions to publish their metadata to make their digital objects more findable, more searchable, more usable. We want the service to be cheaper. We want it to be better than existing services, and we want it to be faster. Sometimes Europeana portal is quite slow. We also want to make it sustainable. This is quite an important aspect of the project because obviously Europeana are based on at the moment a collection of project fundings from the European Commission. We are in the process of applying for central European funds, and that is an ongoing conversation with the commission. We are lobbying very hard to raise awareness of the benefits of making and supporting the publication of cultural heritage online. If you see the hashtag ALECULTURE anywhere, that is us. If you ever tweet things, please bun ALECULTURE on the end because it does great things for our metrics, and it helps us to go to the commission and say, look at all these people that support the exchange and sharing the publication of cultural heritage items. Moving down to the fifth point, one of the important aspects for us about Europeana Cloud, and in fact Europeana is that we are a community. We are a network organisation, so for us we should be governed by a community-led governance structure. Over the past few years, we have worked on developing a set of principles, common-based principles, which we believe that Europeana should be led by, and those will form bases of our governance structure. That's about it for now. I've covered storage and access for metadata and content. We also want to try and use standardised existing protocols where we can, and make sure that we have a simple and legal framework within which everyone can operate. So these share some of the values of Europeana as they currently stand. However, of course, there's so much stuff we don't know at the moment, it's crazy. We've actually got these six big questions, these are things that after these workshops, we had loads of people come along, read the descriptions of work, read the principles, talk about what they wanted as stakeholders in the Europeana Cloud project, and they came out, we came out of the workshops with these really big questions that we still needed to understand the answers better. So we wanted to understand what the value proposition would be. What does this actually mean for me? What problem does this solve? We need to look at the sustainability. How do we pay for this? Now, in reality, we'd like the commission to fund the core infrastructure, but all the additional services on top, we're looking at other models for. So as a user, you might pay to access some of the tools and services, and that will contribute towards the sustainability of providing those tools and services. I like the idea that was mentioned earlier about, at a certain point of funding, you then have access to participating in the government structure. I think that would certainly encourage, well, hopefully be able to encourage a lot of people to contribute to this. Thirdly, what are we storing and how does it get there? This is our biggest and most urgent question, which I'll go on to explain a little bit more, but we have a question about, do we store just metadata, or do we store content, or do we stand somewhere in the middle and include full text items in there? We're having some good conversations with the European Library about what they need from this. Fourthly, looking at the government structure, who decides what and who is responsible for what. Because we don't really have this service model and an idea of exactly what the product delivers, it's very difficult for us to put more detail to the government structures and models that we need to develop to run this. We also need to look at how we organise the interface, how we provide access to this metadata that's currently available through Europeana.eu, and then also what you can do with it. So on what terms you can access things that are stored and made available via the cloud. For example, one of the key features of Europeana Cloud is to address, as a pilot that comes out of the project, is to address the research community with a platform called Europeana Research Platform. It is poorly defined as what I have just been explaining to you here, but the idea is that it will allow better access to the research community because via the Europeana portal we will be able to ingest more metadata that is available specifically for research purposes, but not to other people. So you will have open access for research purposes, but if you just want to post it on Facebook or put it on a mug, then they say no thanks. So these are the issues that I have just described, the storage issues, the platform issues, the framework issues. Then we have the question, the final question that is our burning question at the moment, which is, well we've got this cloud infrastructure, where does Europeana fit in this? So we have four scenarios that we need to work through. This is the first one. This one says that metadata is provided through Europeana, as it normally is, content stays with the institutions. Secondly, metadata through Europeana, content stored with an aggregator. Then a slight change on that is that metadata is provided via aggregators to the cloud and that the content is provided directly to the cloud by the institutions. Then there is a bad numbering on this, I am afraid. Metadata and content is put straight into the cloud and the idea would be that Europeana would just be a user of that. This four massive scenario is that we need to consider as kind of a burning question. The next stages after that are really just looking at Europeana research, what that looks like, what community that really serves. So I really hope that some of you will come forward, maybe speak to Rob later or to me, I am around for the rest of the day, and talk to us about what you need. There are opportunities for all of you to participate and to give your examples of what you need from Europeana Cloud, and we would be really, really happy to listen to you. I have given you an overview of a project which is nine months in but still quite early days. It is a challenging project, we are really enjoying working on it and we really appreciate some input from this community here.