The concepts of ECLAP content and metadata ingestions are described in the following points.

According to the Terms of Use you may be a registered user. A registered user can be a Private User (also called Simple Registered User) or an user beloing to a Content Provider, that may be an affiliated partner or a former partner of ECLAP. Each Content Provider may have unlimited registered users. Any registered or content provider should accept the classical Terms of Use to upload any content on ECLAP.
 

Private Users

If you are a Private User and you are registered on ECLAP you can upload your content via the ECLAP Fast Upload Service page.
Once uploaded a content, with metadata information, you will be entitled to re-edit and enrich metadata by using the ECLAP Metadata Editor. The content will be verified and passed to publication as soon as possible. The Edit Object functionality/action (accessible via the Action Menu of your objects) allows you to: edit/change metadata, upload a different icon/thumbnail, update the digital file, upload a new version of the digital file, update/change the classification, etc.  As a Private User, you will be entitled to remove the content from the ECLAP portal, your content will not be provided to Europeana. If you have the intention to manage your IPR for controlling the access to your content, and to post metadata content on Europeana, you could be interested in getting affiliated with ECLAP, so that please read the page to become an ECLAP Affiliated Partner., and read the following section.

Content Providers (contractors or affiliated partners)

The Content Providers are institutions and/or companies that can fully exploit the ECLAP services, facilities and tools for massive ingestion of content and metadata, content enrichment, as described in the following (many other features are also available for Content Providers andare described in other web pages and in the User Manual). ECLAP periodically organizes a training meeting for content providers (see past and future meetings web page). You can access at the videos and slides of the last training meeting by following this link. Other sources of information are mentioned in  this page. We suggest you to follow the Tutorial page.
Some of the advantages of providing content to ECLAP are reported in this web page. For a wider view, please alro read the Affiliation page.
So that, regarding content ingestion, Content Providers can provide and exploit services for providing:

• single content/item and metadata: can be uploaded in one shot via the upload on ECLAP Social Service Portal by using the ECLAP Upload Service and web page. Please note that you can upload any kind of content file format and type, and of any size (more than 500 file formats and kinds are managed). The ECLAP ingestion is capable to cope with them for you automatically, without your intervention!!! Once uploaded the Edit Object functionality/action (accessible on the Action menu of the object) allows you to: edit metadata, upload a different icon/thumbnail, update the digital file, upload a new version of the digital file, update/change the classification, and define the IPR model via the IPR Wizard, etc.
• multiple/massive content/items and metadata This can be performed in one shot by using the upload on ECLAP Social Service Portal by using the ECLAP Upload Service and web page. You can select in the file selection dialog several files at the same time. It is a batch process that is suitable, for example, to upload all files related to an event (having the same metadata) and being contained in the same directory of your computer. This model for content upload works quite well up to 150 files every time, in a single click. These files can be of different type, size, format, extension, etc., and may share most of the metadata, you can specialize for each of them the Title. The ECLAP ingestion is capable to ingest and manage them automatically for you!!!
• massive ingestion of metadata and then providing content files.  This last facility is the most powerfull to upload huge amount of content. To this end, you have to access at the ECLAP Metadata Ingestion Service, to provide there set of metadata as an XML, CSV file formats. They can be directly uploaded as a file or harvested them via a OAI-PMH access, if any.  In the latter case, ECLAP Metadata Ingestion Service will crawl your Content Provider archives to acquire the metadata. Once provided the metadata, the content provider has to map the metadata XML structure to the ECLAP metadata XML format (ECLAP Metadata Ingestion Semantic Model), by using the ECLAP Metadata Ingestion Service to define a XSLT that is used in the mapping phase. Examples of XSLT to map your metadata format toward ECLAP can be found at this page. For doing this work you can ask the help of our skilled personnel, to follow you during the ingestion process (contact info@eclap.eu ). Both original metadata sets (those provided by you as Content Provider and the mapped results, together with the XSLT map) are passed to ECLAP portal for storage and preservation for you. Please follows this link to access at the User Manual of ECLAP Metadata Ingestion Service. Please note that the ECLAP Full Semantic Model is much wider and expressive than the simple ECLAP Ingestion Semantic Model; The transformation of you metadata into the ECLAP Full Semantic Model, and from them to Europeana EDM model are performed autoamtically by ECLAP for you!!!

 
The ECLAP portal regularly takes care about the new content arrivals from the ECLAP Metadata Ingestion Service to acquire metadata represented using the ECLAP metadata format and in the original metadata format. Thus, in the first case, your metadata will be preliminarily accessible from the ECLAP portal without the content file, but not accessible to regular users. You, as content providers, will be entitled to access, edit and enrich them via the ECLAP Metadata Editor and tools. The real content files will have to be provided to make them accessible on the portal to the other users. Until the effective content/item files are not provided, the metadata set you provided will not be posted on Europeana, and the content would not be visible on ECLAP for all the users.
 
The ECLAP massive ingestion model is capable to ingest in one click hundred thousands of content, files and items at the same time. The web page for massive content ingestion can cope with hundreds of content items at the same time, up to 1 GByte per file in the case of direct upload, while in the case of FTP there is no limit, via FTP you can upload even singles files of 20Gbytes each, for example, and millions of files. 
 
The Content Providers (which passed their metadata set via the ECLAP Metadata Ingestion Service according to the ECLAP Metadata Ingestion Model) may use different solutions to provide their content/item files as:

• one by one upload/update of content files and/or metadata via the ECLAP Update facility, available on the content Actions menu for each single object, but only for the user that has uploaded/provided the content. Please click on Edit Object action/functionality, from lists of content or from the right side block of actions and chose the file update facility.The Edit Object functionality/action allows you to: edit metadata, upload a different icon/thumbnail, update the digital file, upload a new version of the digital file, update/change the classification, etc.  
• massive content upload via internet, including the corresponding links/URLs (or FTP location for files) into the metadata set you provided, and make them accessible via your web/ftp facility for direct download. In this case, the ECLAP portal back office service is going to  automatically do all the dirty work of download from your servers the files and will perform the joining of them with your metadata;
• massively content via FTP. In this case, you can post your content file via FTP, on the ECLAP FTP Service. In these cases the Content Provider has to accompain/include one or more files with a list of associations between the ingested metadata records and each single content file. These associations of content file and metadata could be based on Content Provider unique ID  (for the metadata record identification) and/or an AXOID (ECLAP adopted unique ID, accessible to the portal), and the simple file name to identify the provided content. The content provider ID or other identifier can be directly located in the source metadata of your metadata set, etc., if possible. A manual association of the file with metadata can also be performed on the portal if the ID is not available. The Content Provider has to provide single content files via FTP. For FTP posting please ask to get credentials to info@eclap.eu (to receive your account and password). The FTP site of ECLAP may ingest more than 200 Gbytes of content per day, each single file can be even greater then 20 Gbytes, for example.
• massively content via physical media, providing hard disk or DVD/CD data ROM or HD or tapes. In these cases the Content Provider has to accompain/include one or more files with a list of associations between the ingested metadata records and each single content file. These associations of content file and metadata can be based on Content Provider unique ID  (for the metadata record identification) and/or an AXOID (ECLAP adopted unique ID, accessible to the portal), and the simple file name to identify the provided content. The content provider ID or other identifier can be directly located in the source metadata of your metadata set, etc., if possible. A manual association of the file with metadata can also be performed on the portal if the ID is not available. Audio or Video CD/DVD to be ripped are not accepted as a valid format for providing content items. The Content Provider has to provide single content files, and them can be provided via DVD/CD ROM or HD. 

 

Once the content file/item is received, it is automatically associated with metadata by the ECLAP back office tools. Exceptions are managed by the content ingestion team at DISIT DSI, the back office of ECLAP. Thus, to each of those content files, the maximum restrictions are applied according to the Terms of Use. Please note that, the content provided is automatically associated with the Content Provider channel/group, ONLY, and posed private of the group. Therefore, only ECLAP Trusted User would be entitled to access at the content for the purpose of metadata and content validation and enrichment. Then, the authorized personnel by the Content Provider would be entitled to exploit all the ECLAP services for:

• metadata enrichment via ECLAP facilities for voting, leaving comments, tagging, creating annotations, collections, playlists; See for details this link; 
• metadata translation via ECLAP automated back office. This service is included in the back office content processing in ECLAP. Any Content provider can appreciate this service providing content to ECLAP. Moreover, each content provider can provide its content metadata validation/translation experts. 
• metadata edit, review and validation (via ECLAP Metadata Editor), accessible only for the authorized person of the content provider and for the single user that uploaded their own content, including association with multiple groups, revision of taxonomical classification, review of all languages, review of technical metadata, etc.;
• IPR definition via the ECLAP IPR Wizard. A tool accessible for the authorized persons indicated by each Content Provider (namely the IPR Manager of the channel/group). With the IPR Wizard, the IPR Manager can define and assign the IPR Model (restrictions and permissions) for each content of the group on the basis of the preferences and decisions of the Content Provider. The IPR Model also include a link to and ECLAP page in which you can put your licensing information and redirect the interested people to contact you, for example;
• content metadata publication on Europeana, accessible only for the authorized person of the Content Provider and group coordiantor. They can decide to make available for Europeana each single content metadata as well as a group of them. ECLAP is going to make automatic generation of the EDM format of metadata suitable for Europeana. If you are interested to see examples of metadata set provided to Europeana you can get it from your uploaded content into the block on metadata on right side of the web page.

These activities are orchestrated by using the so called ECLAP Workflow Management tool integrated into the ECLAP Portal and back office. More details regarding ECLAP Tools can be recovered following this link.
 
More details about ECLAP Ingestion Workflow and IPR Model can be found in DE3.1 –Infrastructure: ingestion and processing content and metadata. While, details about the metadata mapping can be recovered from DE4.1 Metadata/descriptors' Identification and Definition. Specific details regarding IPR Wizard and IPR Model can be recovered from the specific web page. 
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