About us

Europeana version 1.0 is an EU project that will develop a fully operational Europeana website. This will allow you to access over 10 million digital items from Europe's rich cultural and scientific heritage by 2010.

We will involve users widely in the development of Europeana, so that we can give you the service you want. Europeana content will be easy to use on mobile devices. We also want to bring Europeana content to your virtual space. These could be college and school websites, special interest sites, virtual learning and research environments, blogs and social networks.

Europeana's interface is already multilingual; the next step is to start making the search system work across languages, so a word entered in one language is automatically translated and results retrieved in other languages. We will be working with related projects on the research and development of multilingual search.

Europeana version 1.0 will enable automatic streaming of large amounts of digitised content from our contributors into the portal.

We will also be looking at copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR). We want to make it possible for people to re-use and re-purpose out-of-copyright or rights-cleared content in Europeana and will work with rights holders to achieve this.

Europeana version 1.0 is coordinated by the EDL Foundation. The Foundation was set up to run Europeana and act as a partner and coordinator in a range of projects that will develop the portal and related services in the coming years.

Main objectives

Build a powerful alliance of stakeholders
We are developing related project, partner and end users networks. This will improve quality and quantity of content, and usability of the website in line with demands and wishes of our stakeholders. Currently, we have over 1000 content providing partners and aggregators and a partner network of 12 projects that will be contributing technology solutions and content to create the fully operational Europeana.

Improving usability of Europeana website
Europeana is now at its initial stage of development. Its features and services are still work in progress. But we are continuously working on how to improve delivery and access of content. For example, we are looking at how to make the search system work across languages, and make content delivery an automated process.

Promoting Europeana website to end users
We want to ensure active involvement of the website end users. Informing users about new developments of Europeana and the related matters will help us achieve this objective. Our communication channels include international and national press, TV and radio, various electronic media, and of course, regular updates on the Europeana website itself.

Finding a viable organisational solution
Europeana has an extensive network of partners and content providers. As their number is expected to grow even further, we will create a network of aggregators. Aggregators will collect content from their contributing institutions and deliver it to Europeana, making the process of contributing content more efficient and maintainable.

Creating a sustainable business and funding model
The EDL Foundation is developing a viable business and funding model to ensure that Europeana is a sustainable service with multiple revenue streams. This will allow Europeana to develop well beyond the project funding period.

Background

Europeana was started by the European Commission in 2005 as part of the European Information Society i2010 Initiative, which aims to foster growth and jobs in the information society and media industries. The European Commission's goal for Europeana is to make European information resources easier to use in an online environment. It builds on Europe's rich heritage, combining multicultural and multilingual environments with technological advances and new business models.

Europeana is a Thematic Network funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, as part of the i2010 policy. Originally known as the European digital library network – EDLnet – it is a partnership of 100 representatives of heritage and knowledge organisations and IT experts from throughout Europe. They contribute to the Work Packages that are solving the technical and usability issues. Europeana version 1.0 is the successor network to EDLnet which created the Europeana prototype.

The EDL Foundation, which runs Europeana, brings together the professional associations that represent European archives, museums, audiovisual collections and libraries. Their statutes set out their intention to work together to promote the interoperability of Europe's cultural and scientific heritage:

  • to provide access to Europe's cultural and scientific heritage by way of a cross domain portal;
  • to facilitate formal agreement across museums, archives, audio-visual archives and libraries on how to cooperate in the delivery and sustainability of joint portal;
  • to stimulate and facilitate initiatives to bring together existing digital content;
  • to support and facilitate digitization and Europe's cultural and scientific Heritage.

Credits & Thanks

Thank you to the following organisations who have supplied us with their vocabularies. This will help us enrich the data from our contributing institutions by linking the vocabularies to Europeana's search functions.

Unidad de Coordinación de Bibliotecas del CSIC is assisting the Europeana project by giving us access to their Authority Records Catalogue