Europeana
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| URL | europeana.eu |
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| Commercial? | no |
| Type of site | Meta-aggregator and display space for European digitised works |
| Owner | Europeana Foundation |
| Launched | 20 November 2008 (prototype) |
| Current status | beta |
Europeana.eu is an internet portal that acts as an interface to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe. Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer, the works of Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton and the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are some of the highlights on Europeana.
More than 2,000 institutions across Europe have contributed to Europeana. These range from major international names like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the British Library and the Louvre to regional archives and local museums from every member of the EU.[1] Together, their assembled collections let users explore Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage from prehistory to the modern day.
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[edit] History
The catalyst for Europeana was a letter sent by Jacques Chirac, President of France, together with the premiers of Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland and Hungary to President of the European Commission José Manuel Durão Barroso in April 2005. The letter recommended the creation of a virtual European library, to make Europe's cultural heritage accessible for all.[2] The letter added resonance to the work that the Information Society and Media Directorate had been engaged in for over a decade, with programmes such as Telematics for Libraries. It gave strong political endorsement to the Directorate’s strategy, i2010: communication on digital libraries which was published on 30 September 2005. The strategy announced the intention to promote and support the creation of a European digital library, as a goal within the European[3], which aims to foster growth in the information society and media industries. The project that would begin the building of Europeana was called the European digital library network – EDLnet – and was aimed at building a prototype of a cross-border, cross-domain, user-centred service. It was funded by the Commission under their eContentplus programme, one of the research and development funding streams of i2010. The prototype was launched on 20 November, 2008.[4] At its beta launch, the site gave access to 4.5 million digital objects – more than double the initial target – from over 1,000 contributing organisations, including world-famous national library, gallery and museum collections from the capitals of Europe. Due to an unexpected user surge (peaking at an estimated 10 million hits an hour), the servers were unable to cope with the massive load. The site was temporarily taken down, and after series of technical upgrades went up again in December 2008. In February 2009, the successor of EDLnet – Europeana version 1.0 – began. This 30-month project was to develop the prototype into a fully operational service. In 2010, the project accomplished its objective of giving access to over 10 million digital objects.[5] Early in 2011 new features on the site included a translation tool and the ability to expand on information by automatically transferring the search term to Wikipedia and other services.
[edit] Function
Europeana gives access to different types of content from different types of heritage institutions. The digital objects that users can find in Europeana are not stored on a central computer, but remain with the cultural institution and hosted on their networks. Europeana collects contextual information – or metadata – about the items, including a small picture. Users search this contextual information. Once they find what they are looking for, if they want to access the full content of the item, they can click through to the original site that holds the content. Different types of cultural heritage organisations – libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections – catalogue their content in different ways and to different standards. Approaches also vary in different countries. In order to make the information searchable, it has to be mapped to a single common standard, known as the Europeana Semantic Elements. This metadata standard at present takes a lowest common denominator approach to the integration of different types of digital content. However, the introduction of a richer metadata standard, the Europeana Data Model, will help to give users more and better information. Europeana accepts metadata about digital objects, it doesn’t make any decisions about digitisation. The decision about which objects are digitised lies with the organisation that holds the material.
[edit] Strategy
In its Strategic Plan for 2011-2015[6], which was published in January 2011, Europeana outlines four strategic tracks that will shape its further development:
- Aggregate – to build the open trusted source for European cultural and scientific heritage content;
- Facilitate – to support the cultural and scientific heritage sector through knowledge transfer, innovation and advocacy;
- Distribute – to make heritage available to users wherever they are, whenever they want it;
- Engage – to cultivate new ways for users to participate in their cultural and scientific heritage.
[edit] Organisation
The Europeana Foundation[7] is the governing body of the Europeana service. Its members are the presidents and chairs of European associations for cultural heritage and information associations.
The Foundation promotes collaboration between museums, archives, audiovisual collections and libraries so that users can have integrated access to their content through Europeana and other services.
The Foundation is incorporated under Dutch law as Stichting Europeana and is housed within the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands. It provides a legal framework for the governance of Europeana, employing the staff, bidding for funding and enabling the sustainability of the service.
The executive director of the Europeana Foundation is Jill Cousins.
[edit] Europeana Projects
There are a number of projects – the Europeana Group – that are contributing technology solutions and content to Europeana.[8] These projects are run by different cultural heritage institutions, and are part-funded by the European Commission’s eContentplus programme eContentplus programme and the Information and Communications Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP).
The Europeana Group projects are:
- Europeana v1.0 is developing a fully functional Europeana website.
- APEnet – Archives Portal Europe
- ASSETS aims to improve the usability of Europeana.
- ATHENA aggregates museum content and promotes standards for museum digitisation and metadata.
- Biodiversity Heritage Library - Europe
- CARARE aggregates content for the archaeology and architectural heritage.
- Digitising Contemporary Art (DCA)
- ECLAP will build a large digital library of performing arts and UGC. *ECLAP Portal
- Europeana Connect adds sound material to Europeana.
- European Film Gateway (EFG)
- Europeana Libraries will add over 5 million digital objects to Europeana from 19 of Europe’s leading research and university libraries.
- Europeana Local brings content from regional and local content holders.
- Europeana Regia is digitising royal manuscripts from Medieval and Renaissance Europe.
- EURO-Photo digitises photographs from news agencies.
- EUscreen contributes television material to Europeana.
- Europeana Travel will bring material associated with travel, trade, tourism and migration into Europeana.
- Heritage of People’s Europe (HOPE) aims to improve access to digital social history collections.
- JUDAICA Europeana looks at the Jewish contribution to Europe's cultural heritage.
- Linked Heritage aims to add substantial new content from commercial and public sectors, and enrich Europeana's metadata with a "linked data" approach.
- Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO)
- Natural Europe connects the digital collections of natural history museums.
- OpenUp! brings Europe's natural history heritage to Europeana
- PATHS Personalised Access To cultural Heritage Spaces
- The European Library aggregates the content of national libraries.
- thinkMOTION gathers content from the field of motion systems.
[edit] Financing
Europeana and the projects contributing content to Europeana.eu have been funded by the European Commission under eContentplus, the Information and Communications Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) and similar programmes. In order to participate in a wide range of projects, which are only funded by the Commission for 50-100% of the costs and do not include overheads, Europeana is also reliant for an element of its funding on Member States’ ministries of culture and education.
[edit] References
- ^ List of partners and contributors List of partners and contributors, Europeana.eu. Accessed February 2, 2011.
- ^ Letter of 28 April 2005. Accessed February 2, 2011.
- ^ http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/eeurope/i2010/index_en.htm. Accessed March 10, 2011
- ^ Background, Europeana.eu. Accessed March 10, 2011
- ^ http://version1.europeana.eu/
- ^ Strategic Plan 2011-2015, Europeana.eu. Accessed March 10, 2011.
- ^ The Europeana Foundation, Europeana.eu. Accessed May 10, 2011.
- ^ Europeana Group. Accessed March 10, 2011.
