Linked Heritage Glossary

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) can refer to all the information associated with a real object, including its location, or to any of its potential surrogates, e.g. digital images, a museum collection where it belongs, research documents referring to it and other services. PIDs may be applied to real objects as well as to more abstract concepts like services, transformation issues, aggregation or disaggregation of objects and organizations.

PID functional requirements are the following: uniqueness, persistency, resolvability, reliability, authoritativeness, flexibility, interoperability and cost effectiveness.

Noted persistent identifier systems include: Archival Resource Keys (ARKs), Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs), Uniform Resource Names (URNs), and Extensible Resource Identifiers (XRIs)

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning objects: Persistent Identifier: What if? and Persistent Identifiers: Commercial and heritage views.

See also: Interoperability

A preview, or thumbnail preview image, is a reduced size or length audio and/or visual representation of content, in the form of one or more images, text files, audio files, and/or moving images.

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning object MINT Services and, for Europeana purposes, the document Europeana Portal Image Policy.

See also: Content, Content provider, Data Exchange Agreement (DEA), Data set, Digital object

In the context of the Linked Heritage Project, by private sector (interchangeable with commercial sector) it is meant any organisations involved in creating and selling a media product such as: book publishing, recorded music, film and tv, photography.

Work package 4 (WP4) Public Private Partnership (WP Leader: EDItEUR, United Kingdom) was entitled to investigate the potential for including commercial products in the Europeana Portal, adding the gift shop to European Union's GLAM Web sites, and to explore the state of the art in the management of metadata in the private sector (For further information, see: Linked Heritage: outline of the work packages).

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning objects: Public-Private Partnership with Europeana and Why and how to contribute to Europeana.

By public domain it is meant any content, metadata or other subject matter not protected by Intellectual Property Rights and/or subject to a waiver of Intellectual Property Rights (See: DEA, Art. 1 Definitions).

Europeana has worked with Creative Commons to develop a simple mark that indicates that a work is in the public domain - the Public Domain Mark (PDM). Note that PDM and CC0 Public Domain Dedication state different rights: PDM can be applied to objects that are not subject to copyright either because copyright has expired (e.g. the author died many years ago) or because the object was never subject to such rights and is therefore in the public domain; the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication can be applied to objects or data that is subject to copyright but where the rights holder wants to waive the rights and dedicate the object to the public domain. It can only be applied by the rights holder or someone who is authorised by the rights holder. CC0 is specifically designed for use with (meta) data sets and is unlikely to be used as a rights statement describing content. In the context of Europeana, CC0 is primarily used to ensure that metadata can be used without any restrictions. The CC0 waiver is automatically applied to all metadata that is being provided to Europeana.

Explore further: Europeana and the Public Domain

See also: CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication, Data Exchange Agreement (DEA)

See: Preview

The person who associated a work with the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

According to Europeana Data Exchange Agreement, data providers grant Europeana the right to publish the metadata under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. This means that all metadata provided to Europeana can be re-used by third parties without any restrictions.

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning objects: Why and how to contribute to Europeana and MINT Services.

See also: Data Exchange Agreement (DEA)

In the context of the Europeana aggregation landscape, a content provider (or data provider) is any organisation that provides digital content accessible via Europeana making available metadata, a thumbnail and a link pointing to a digital object on the provider's Web site. Europeana only ingests and indexes the institution's metadata, while the digital objects remain by the original institution.

See: Europeana Professional: Providers' FAQs and Linked Heritage's Content aggregation: tools & guidelines.

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning objects: Why and how to contribute to Europeana and MINT Services.

See also: Aggregator, Cultural / Public heritage institution, Data Exchange Agreement (DEA), Mapping, Metadata, MINT, Preview, Private sector

The terms under which Europeana and its users can make use of previews and descriptive metadata are established by the Europeana Data Exchange Agreement (DEA). The DEA is the central component of the Europeana Licensing Framework. It structures the relationship between Europeana and its data providers. As of 1 July 2012, the DEA replaced all the existing agreements between Europeana and its data providers and aggregators.

The DEA sets out two simple principles:

1) For all descriptive metadata provided to Europeana, data providers grant Europeana the right to publish the metadata under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. This means that all metadata provided to Europeana can be re-used by third parties without any restrictions.

2) Each digital object (and the associated preview) that is available via Europeana needs to carry a rights label that describes its copyright status. Data providers grant Europeana the right to publish previews provided to Europeana. Previews may not be re-used by third parties unless the rights label related to the object allows such re-use (See: Europeana Available Rights Statements).

Source: Europeana Professional - Data Exchange Agreement

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning objects: Why and how to contribute to Europeana and MINT Services. For a commercial perspective, see also: Public-Private Partnership with Europeana.

See: Data Exchange Agreement (DEA)

A digital object is an entity in which one or more content files and their corresponding metadata are united, physically and/or logically, through the use of a digital wrapper. Digital objects (or digital materials) refer to any item that is available digitally.

In the context of the Europeana aggregation landscape, digital objects can be generally referred to as content. Any data about content is encoded into metadata. According to Europeana Data Exchange Agreement, each digital object (and the associated preview) that is available via Europeana needs to carry a rights label that describes its copyright status. Data providers grant Europeana the right to publish previews provided to Europeana. Previews may not be re-used by third parties unless the rights label related to the object allows such re-use (See: Europeana Available Rights Statements).

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning object: Digitisation life cycle

See also: Content, Data, Data Exchange Agreement (DEA), Metadata