proposal part b - The Bernstein Project

CIP-ICT PSP Call 4 9
Pilot B
[Imperialle]
B1.3. Maturity of the technical solution
All partners within Imperialle are familiar with or even developers of new interfaces for public outreach
through the internet via digitisation of parts of their collection. The perspectives and technical system on which
the implementation of Imperialle will be based is the success of the “Bernstein portal”. The following section
will summarize the most important facts and results of this.
The Bernstein project was co-funded by the European Commission, eContentplus program, from September
2006 to February 2009 (ECP 2005 CULT 038097/Bernstein). The main goal of the Bernstein project was to
produce a digital infrastructure for the expertise and history of paper based on images visualizing the paper's
structure. The individual resources are databases of watermarks and other annotated features, image
measurement software, contextual resources for cartography and bibliography, and an integrated workspace.
The technologies that were used to implement the Bernstein portal are all of them open source, very well
developed and widespread. Below is a list of technologies and protocols used in Bernstein:
• MySQL (Database Management System; MySQL Community Server:
http://www.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/)
• Java (Programming language to implement the application itself;
http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp)
• Spring Framework (Application Framework; http://www.springsource.org/)
• SRU (Search and retrieval via URL; http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/)
• JFreeChart (Java free chart library; http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/)
• DWR (Direct Web Remoting; http://directwebremoting.org)
At the end of the Bernstein project (Feb 2009) the official ‘Bernstein portal’ was presented online
(http://www.memoryofpaper.eu) and since that time the portal services are used by “paper historians” and other
interested people in Europe and from all over the world. It consists of over 120.000 records of papers from premodern
Europe found in books, archive documents, and prints.
In Jan/Feb 2010 the Bernstein portal has been extended by a gateway to support the integration of Bernstein
artefacts into Europeana. This gateway makes use of the OAI-PMH protocol (Open Archives Initiative Protocol
for Metadata Harvesting; http://www.openarchives.org/pmh/). The acceptance tests for OAI-PMH harvesting
were successful and the Europeana harvesting in production started with end of February 2010.
To fulfil the requirements for Imperialle the existing Bernstein portal will be extended in various aspects. For
instance the database schemas will have to be expanded to support all the metadata available for the new
digitized objects, portal services have to be adapted, usability extensions have to be provided and the protocol
layer for data integration into Europeana has to be augmented. The new Bernstein portal will aggregate the
metadata from the distributed databases and thereby the performance of the search within the portal and of the
gateway for Europeana will be improved. The new architecture also will allow more advanced search features
(e.g. for temporary or geographically relations) and will support the additional metadata of the new databases.