We want good quality data and we want it now!

Europeana is only as good as its data. That’s why improving data quality is our number one priority for the next five years. And it’s why you’ll hear us bring up the subject time and again. 

Members of the Europeana Network are working together as a Task Force to look at metadata quality. And EuropeanaTech, our research and development community, are always investigating how to assess and enrich data to make Europeana work better for both data partners and our audiences. 

The EuropeanaTech conference held in Paris earlier this year took data quality as one of its main themes. Many of you joined in discussions on the subject. We’ve been digesting the wide range of ideas and points of view raised and today, we’re happy to share two resulting publications with you.

EuropeanaTech Insight is a brand-new online journal designed to share work and research from the EuropeanaTech community. This special issue focuses on data quality, in particular, the work of members who presented at the conference. Read EuropeanaTech Insight.

In addition, we invite you to read our publication ‘We want better data quality now’. It is an honest account of the roundtable discussion on data quality held at EuropeanaTech 2015. Several dozen bright and enthusiastic EuropeanaTech members talked in a very open way, bringing their experience, insights and questions to the table. The write-up covers the issues that might lead to bad data quality and proposes solutions to tackle them. It also aims to help people understand what we mean by good quality data and why it’s so difficult to achieve. Read ‘We want better data quality now’.

We’ll continue to tackle the issues identified by the roundtable and the Task Force for the rest of this year and beyond, implementing some of the solutions we discussed at the conference. We’ll keep talking to our aggregators and the EuropeanaTech community to make sure we’re all working together, creating solutions that benefit everyone. And we’ll also extend our discussions internationally, working hand-in-hand with the likes of the Digital Public Library of America who have also identified data quality as an area of improvement. 

To get involved in our data quality work, please follow the links above and contact the person or people named in the article or report you’re interested in.