The European Drug Report: A new approach to data sharing
Publication Date/Time
2023-12-15T07:00:05+00:00
Country
Europe
Interview with David Penny, web manager at the European Monitoring
Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction
The _European Drug Report _is an annual report on the drug situation
in Europe published by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and
Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) [https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/index_en], an
agency of the European Union. It provides an overview of the current
drug landscape in Europe, focusing on aspects such as illicit drug
consumption, associated risks and drug distribution.

For the first time, this year’s report was designed as a
digital-first publication. It is interactive and visually rich, with
over 100 data visualisations, graphics and maps. Additionally, all the
source data behind the visualisations is available for sharing and
reuse
[https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets/european-drug-report-2023-all-source-data?locale=en].

We met with David Penny, part of the core digital team for the project
at the EMCDDA, to discuss the behind-the-scenes making of the report
into a digital publication while including data publishing in the
process.

 

WHEN DID YOU START PUBLISHING THE _EUROPEAN DRUG REPORT_?

The _European Drug Report_
[https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publications-database_en?f%5B0%5D=publication_type%3A404]
is almost as old as the agency itself! We’ve been publishing it
every year since 1996, which is an impressive achievement in itself.
It depicts the history of the drug situation in Europe over nearly
three decades. It’s one of our ‘flagship’ products – it’s
an important publication for our audience, for our stakeholders and
for us.

The report has evolved over the years, but some things have remained
constant: the analysis is data-driven (data is submitted annually by
our partners in the Member States), it’s always been graphic-rich,
and it’s always been conceived of as a printed (or downloadable)
report.

 

WHAT IS NEW ABOUT THE 2023 REPORT?

The big change with this year’s report
[https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publications/european-drug-report/2023_en]
is that we moved to a digital-first_ _approach. From the outset, we
didn’t think of the report as a book to be read cover to cover but
tried to develop it in ways that would work both as an online product
(or series of interconnected products and modules) and a more
traditional report for those who needed it. We didn’t merely want to
make an HTML version of a printed/PDF report, which we’d done in the
past – it was important for us that the product be ‘born
digital’ so that we could take full advantage of the benefits of
this approach.

 

WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO MAKE THE REPORT DIGITAL-FIRST?

There are so many reasons. We could say there were four overarching
drivers for this digital-first approach: accessibility, openness of
data, responsiveness (mobile friendliness) and findability (search
engine optimisation). Whenever we found ourselves in uncharted
territory, we could usually look to one of those four principles to
guide us in the right direction. And the great thing about those
principles is they are complementary – usually when you improve
one, it gives the others a boost too; there’s a lot of synergy
between them.

 
 
_Interactive table of contents in the European Drug Report 2023._

 

COULD YOU TELL US A LITTLE BIT MORE ABOUT THE OPEN DATA ASPECT?

It was a key aspect and probably had the biggest impact on the project
and workflow. As I mentioned, the _European Drug Report_ contains a
wide variety of data visualisations. In the past, our data
visualisations would be fully developed in external software, with
data being inserted there directly. If any changes were made to the
data, this would invariably be done only within the tool. As you can
imagine, at some point, the original source data for the graphic would
no longer match the data used in the graphic.

Also, when providing data this way, it was done purely for the purpose
of creating the graphic, not with the intention of sharing the data
later. And at the end of the process, we found it difficult to share
source data from the report because it would have to be painstakingly
reconstructed from the final graphics, supplemented with missing
metadata, etc.

With the 2023 report, we really wanted to address this issue. As the
report was to be built on our website, we could use our own web-based
data visualisation library to build all the graphics and dashboards.
We always made sure that all data tables were constructed in a way
that made them reusable and shareable. Once the data was structured
this way, it could be understood and imported into the data
visualisation library to generate all the graphics and dashboards we
needed for the report.

This way, we could uncouple the data visualisation aspect from the
underlying data updating aspect. If we had to make changes to
underlying data, we could do this directly in the source data, and all
the data visualisations in the report would automatically update. By
taking this approach, we already had all the data available in a
shareable format by the time the report was published.

In addition, it made our graphics more accessible because it meant
that close to each graphic, we could always provide an easy-to-read
data table, for example for screen readers.

 

WHAT CHALLENGES DID YOU ENCOUNTER WHEN IMPLEMENTING THESE CHANGES?

Of course, there were big technical challenges. We needed to develop
new features and tools in our web content management system to meet
all the requirements essential for the digital-first report. We had to
work closely with the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the
European Union to adapt the translation process. We also had to make a
lot of changes to our data visualisation library to handle more
complex graphics, such as dashboards and data explorers. All these
technical aspects were very challenging but also rewarding because all
of them were system changes (we just had to do them once), and now we
can build upon them and use them for next year’s report and other
outputs.

 

DID THOSE TECHNICAL CHALLENGES INFLUENCE OTHER ASPECTS OF THE PROCESS?

Indeed, along with the technical challenges, there were human and
organisational challenges. Going digital-first changed not just the
output but the entire_ _process – the writing and drafting, the
workflow for providing data and creating graphics and the process for
consultation and approvals. Our agency is quite innovative, but change
is always daunting. We had to answer a lot of questions, demonstrate
that the approach would work and show that our customers wanted this.
It helped that we already had some experience with digital-first
publications from previous projects and were confident we could
achieve it, even if this time the scale was more ambitious. In the
end, it was really rewarding to see everyone pull together; it was a
huge collective effort, but without that, we wouldn’t have achieved
our goal of a digital-first_ European Drug Report_.

 
 
_EMCDDA Digital-first European Drug Report — Communication
core team members (from left to right): Rosemary Martin de Sousa,
Silke Vitt, David Penny, Sónia Vicente._

 

WHAT WAS THE IMPACT OF THE NEW APPROACH?

Overall, it’s been very positive. Most people have responded
favourably to the refurbished report. We can also see from our web
metrics that these resources are being found and visited more than was
the case with our previous PDF-only versions. Journalists,
particularly data journalists, who in the past were asking us for
source data, are now getting this data directly from our website,
which is exactly what we want. As an organisation, we’ve moved a
little further along in our digital transformation path.

 

ARE YOU PLANNING ANY FURTHER CHANGES TO YOUR DATA SHARING AND
PUBLICATION PROCESSES IN THE FUTURE?

Yes, definitely! We still see ourselves as very much at the start of
our open-data journey. We’re really grateful to our colleagues at
data.europa.eu [https://data.europa.eu/en], who we see as guides we
can turn to when we’re unsure of the next step. In fact, they helped
us realise that the data in the _European Drug Report_ was hard to
share in the first place, and this, in turn, gave us the impetus we
needed to fix the problem.

Even though our data is now easier to find and reuse, we want to keep
improving – for example, by making the data available in more
formats. But we’re not trying to change everything and everyone’s
mindset all at once – so long as we are going in the right
direction and we can see progress over time, we’ll be happy and,
hopefully, so will our customers. We know we can count on the
data.europa.eu [https://data.europa.eu/en] team to accompany us on
this journey!

 

_If you are interested in finding out more about the _European Drug
Report_ and the work done by the EMCDDA, __check out their website_
[https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/index_en]_ and __consult their data via
data.europa.eu_
[https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets?locale=en&minScoring=0&catalog=emcdda&dataScope=eu&country=eu&page=1]_._
