On April 29-30th the University of Innsbruck hosted a workshop for Europeana Newspapers Project partners on structural metadata. The main focus of the workshop was to present and discuss the main concepts of structural metadata. One important aim thereby is to describe (historic) newspapers as good and complete as possible to achieve a perfect digital representation. During practical sessions the participants of this workshop (almost all partner libraries were represented) tried to apply these concepts on their own material. Thereby further questions arose which were collected and discussed and will be integrated in next releases.
Another part of the workshop was the presentation of the ‘Structify tool’ – a tool with the purpose of structuring plain full-text. After giving a short explanation on how to use the tool all partners had the possibility to try it out. This way the developers of the tool got valuable user feedback on how to extend and revise this first prototype version and the partners got an impression on how this tool could help in the future. The first stable release of Structify is planned to be in August 2014.
At the end of the workshop and after lots of fruitful discussions the next steps were decided:
- There is a need for real world examples on that topic, easy as well as difficult ones
- Fine tuning of concepts
- For real decisions another workshop is recommended – almost all partners would be interested in that.