Europeana case study
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OVERVIEW
Europeana Europeana allows people to explore the digital resources of Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. It promotes discovery and networking opportunities in a multilingual space where users can engage, share in and be inspired by the rich diversity of Europe's cultural and scientific heritage.
Ideas and inspiration can be found within the more than 15 million items on Europeana. These objects include:
•Images - paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects •Texts - books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers •Sounds - music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts •Videos - films, newsreels and TV broadcasts Some items and topics are world famous, like Isaac Newton's book about the Laws of Motion, the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Vermeer's painting of the Girl With A Pearl Earring or objects about the Berlin Wall. Others are hidden treasures, waiting for you to discover them.
Around 1500 institutions have contributed to Europeana. Renowned names such as the British Library in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Louvre in Paris are featured alongside smaller organisations across Europe. Together, their assembled collections allow you to explore Europe's history from ancient times to the modern day.
Europeana
Summary of the initiative
The creation of a virtual European library, aiming to make Europe's cultural and scientific resources accessible for all.
Aims
The European Commission's goal for Europeana is to make European information resources easier to use in an online environment and to link users directly to digitised content from all EU Member States, and accessible in a Web 2.0 environment. Europeana demonstrates the aims of the EDL Foundation.
Intended audience
Europeana is intended for all types of user and meeting user needs is the driving force of the work. The prototype is concentrating on users of heritage institutions.
Lead Body
The project is run by a core team based in the national library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek.
Partners
A partnership of 100 representatives of heritage and knowledge organisations and IT experts from throughout Europe. List of contributors.
Area of special interest
Technical and usability issues involved with providing access to cultural materials from many institutions in Europe through a single interface.
Description of the work done to create the service
Project development website. Outlines of the workpackages for the Europeana prototype, this development website also provides useful technical papers and conference presentations. For example, the specification for metadata elements used in Europeana; papers from the Users Expect the Interoperable conference of June 2008
Marketing
The dissemination plan for the Europeana prototype.
Evaluation and impact
Work to build Europeana is still in progress and evaluation and impact plans have not yet been made available.
Preservation strategy
The work of the project is to provide a specification for an operational system arising from work done on the prototype. Plans are not yet available, but will include elements such as persistent identifiers for objects.
Future service development, management and sustainability
A follow-up project, Europeana v1.0 has just begun which will develop an operational service. The work plan for this can be found on the Europeana development website. Europeana is also supported by several associated projects including Europeana Local which will help local and regional libraries throughout Europe make their content available to Europeana, the European Film Gateway. EuropeanaConnect will undertake the specific technical implementation work, to increase the amount of content that can be accessed interoperably in Europeana. At a policy level, the statutes of the EDL Foundation commit members to co-operating on the delivery and sustainability of the joint portal (i.e. building it into their individual content development policies).
Lessons learned
To be identified as work moves forward.
Related Digipedia articles
Further information
Davies, R.:Europeana: an infrastructure for adding local content. Ariadne, issue 57, October 2008.
