Automatic Enrichments with Controlled Vocabularies in Europeana: Challenges and Consequences

Automatic enrichment of metadata is one option for digital libraries to add multilingual terms to their resources. Adding links to external vocabularies further contextualizes the metadata in a linked data environment. This paper reports on a case study using the digital library Europeana, which implements this type of automatic contextualization and enrichment strategy. A group of content and metadata experts analyzed seven datasets in Europeana and evaluated the successes and challenges of the implemented enrichment strategy. For each of the three enrichment process stages (analysis, linking and augmentation), common problems and errors were identified. The paper further categorizes the enrichment challenges by original cause and describes consequences of the enrichment errors for the user interactions within digital libraries. Results serve as best practice examples for analyzing enrichment challenges and provide insights and recommendations for other large digital libraries implementing similar enrichment or contextualization strategies.