3. The political vision ‘ Digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material are essential to highlight cultural and scientific heritage, to inspire the creation of new content and to encourage new online services to emerge. They help to democratise access to culture and knowledge and to develop the information society and the knowledge-based economy.’ European Council of Ministers, 20 November 2008
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7. Aggregation structure Domain Aggregators Country Aggregators Museums National Aggregators Regional Aggregators Archives Libraries Museums, libraries & archives Film Archives Sound Archives Dark Aggregators Museums, libraries & archives Museums, libraries & archives
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9. “ Metadata should be widely and freely available for re- use” “ Public Domain material should be freely available for all” “ All public domain masterpieces should be brought into Europeana” “ the reference point for European culture online” “ Public funding for digitisation should be conditional on free accessibility through Europeana ”
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12. Build the trusted source for cultural heritage AGGREGATE Expand the network Source content Improve data quality
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14. FACILITATE Support the cultural heritage sector through knowledge transfer, innovation & advocacy Strengthen advocacy Share knowledge Foster R&D
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16. Make heritage available wherever users are whenever they want it DISTRIBUTE Upgrade portal Develop partnerships Put content in users’ workflow
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18. Cultivate new ways for users to participate in their cultural heritage ENGAGE Enhance users’ experience Extend social media presence Broker new user / curator relationships
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20. “ Europeana - Erster Weltkrieg” World War One in pictures, letters and memories www.europeana1914-1918.eu
21. The 1914-1918 Europeana programme – A puzzle of 8 stories Bernard Darley (Service no. 28345), R.A.F, was commended for fighting a fire at Workshop No. 2 M.T.R.D. Royal Air Force, St Omer. He entered a burning building and fought the fire from within to prevent the explosion of two petrol filled tanks and the possibility of an electrical fire spreading to a nearby power station, at great risk to his own life. He was assisted through the entire operation by a German Prisoner of War named Otto Arndt of the 139th P.O.W. Company. The two became friends. Otto crafted Bernard a matchbox (pictured here) as a gift and a reminder of their joint act of courage. Images of the matchbox and papers detailing Bernard's gallantry were submitted to the Great War Archive by Bernard's great-granddaughter, Merilyn Jones of Sutton Coldfield. Story 1 Story 2 Story 3
Homepage: highlights current exhibitions, featured items and social network activity. Drop down menu lets you translate interface into 29 languages
T he governance of Europeana ensures integration and collaboration between the cultural heritage domains at the policy and strategy level. That has enabled Europeana to achieve the scale and scope of content
At a working level, we operate in a network of aggregators. They aggregate by domain – libraries, AV collections, museums - or by country or region, eg Hispana, the Spanish national aggregator. Most aggregators have a public web presence themselves; some don’t, and are therefore ‘Dark Aggregators’ These aggregators share a language, or know the professional practice, material types, standards so can work with their constituency better than we can. They aggregate the data, then channel it into Europeana. The aggregations model enables Europeana to collect huge quantities of data from thousands of providers, through only a handful of channels.
The context in which Europeana now operates was framed at the beginning of 2011 with the publication of The New Renaissance, a report about bringing Europe’s cultural heritage online. It was written by the Comite des Sages: 3 experts on digital content and strategy appointed by the Vice President of the Commission for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes. Last year, Commissioner Kroes published her Digital Agenda for Europe, covering all aspects of commercial broadband, internet services, online government etc. In commissioning The New Renaissance report, she wanted to understand the costs and benefits of digitising cultural heritage and what social and economic value it could contribute to the Digital Agenda.
The New Renaissance report said many very positive things about Europeana’s work. It gave pointers towards our future, and raised topics for attention by our stakeholders It also called for a longer term vision for the development of Europeana as a focus for generating public value through the digitisation of cultural heritage
This helped shape our Strategic Plan 2011-2015 We developed it in close collaboration with our key stakeholders: Our data providers – the cultural heritage organisations of Europe The policy makers in the European Commission and national Ministries of Culture and Education Our end users Players in the wider online cultural heritage environment, including publishers and other content providers, software developers and apps designers They helped us focus on the value that they derived – or wanted to derive - from Europeana
The strategic plan comprises four tracks around which our activity turns and on which all our resources are focused
I have mentioned aggregation as our model, and we are actively encouraging member states to set up national aggregators to channel content into Europeana, in part to fulfil the Commission’s ambition to have all out of copyright masterpieces from every country in Europeana by 2016. We have a membership forum: the Council of Content Providers and Aggregators – which elects 6 officers onto the Foundation Board, in order to ensure that the providers’ point of view is represented in our policy-making. Improving metadata : e.g. persistent identifiers so that material can always be found by users, and clear statements of rights so users know what is in and out of copyright. Diversity: we strive to ensure coverage of every country, every language group. We need to achieve a better balance of types of content: people are 10 times more likely to click on a video in their results, but audiovisual material is under-represented – in part because of rights issues. We are looking at ways to bring in more AV material.
Our second strategic track is about facilitating innovation in the sector so that digitised cultural heritage material can generate social and economic value. By bringing together a large network of professionals and researchers, Europeana helps develop and share best practice in areas of common interest in the digital environment such as usability research, multilinguality, IPR, business models, data standards and semantic web technologies. We run workshops and conferences on current topics to generate ideas, move the debate forward and create consensus. R&D : Europeana is committed to developing open source technologies and applications and is acting as a test bed to support creative innovation in the cultural heritage sector. We have recently run hackathons in 6 countries, at which software developers worked with Europeana data to create prototype apps for the growing mobile and tablet market. Our Linked Open Data pilot has made a dataset of 3 million records from 15 providers available for new LOD initiatives. Advocacy: Helping to open up online access to cultural content. Public Domain: We are working with content providers to encourage them to keep digitised content in the public domain and not to impose new rights on it after digitisation. All our Public Domain content links to guidelines to educate users about legitimate re-use of material Advocating open licensing of metadata so that re-use of the cultural heritage metadata is possible in Linked Open Data initiatives, and new apps We support initiatives around IPR to make more material available in digital form - e.g. harmonisation of rights throughout the EU responding to the Commission’s recent Directive on Orphan Works, which proposes to streamline rights clearance to allow digitisation of works which are no longer in commerce, or whose rights holders can’t be traced.
We continue to improve Europeana: the new interface makes searching more accurate and enables users to automatically translate information about the results into 37 languages. But a destination portal is not enough: to provide most value, cultural heritage information has to be integrated into the sites where people congregate – in social networks, in wikipedia, in their learning resources and college sites. One way we are doing this is by providing an API [check audience understanding of API; use the Google maps API as an example]. At this stage, our partners are using it in their sites to bring in relevant data to complement their own collections We’ve recently made it possible to easily embed objects from Europeana into social networking sites and blogs. New partnerships Last month we announced a partnership with the Digital Public Library of America to say that we would both make our systems and data interoperable to the greatest possible extent and cooperate on collection building. The first fruits of that relationship will be a joint exhibition about migration of people from Europe to the Americas. In January 2012 we start a project in which Wikipedia is a partner, to look at ways in which our data can be incorporated into their articles. 97% of all research enquiries go through Wikipedia at some point and cultural institutions – such as the British Museum and the German National Archive - that have put content into Wikipedia have seen their traffic increase significantly. The new project will also develop prototype services with tourism and broadcasters We are also working on a project proposal with European schoolnet, the joint collaboration platform of the European ministries of education, in order to use Europeana data in primary and secondary education through learning environments such as interactive smartboards.
We want users to engage more with culture. We want them to look for it, to play with it, to share it, to annotate it, to use it in their own projects as much as possible. Our first step in engaging our users was to improve their experience on Europeana. We now have 7 virtual exhibitions, including Reading Europe, 1,000 full text literary masterpieces Weddings in Eastern Europe, a celebration in music, dance and photographs of marriage rituals over the past century Art Nouveau – the early 20 th century design style that is reflected in almost every country in Europe Using leading edge technologies, HTML 5 and popcorn.js we have developed an interactive video, Europeana Remix, that draws in content from several sites including Europeana, and gives opportunities for comment and user interaction Social media blog and facebook presence, enabling us to highlight the stories around the content working with Wiki loves Monuments – a massive competition in which people upload their photos of important buildings. We are awarding a prize for the best photos of Art Nouveau structures, and they will then be used to add further imagery to our curated Art Nouveau exhibition New relationships between content and users: User Generated Content project: the First World War in Everyday Documents. 8 roadshows in German cities where the public brought family papers and memorabilia relating to WW1 to be digitised, plus a website where people could upload material themselves. Result: 25,000 scans and images of previously unseen and unpublished diaries, letters, photographs, drawings In the coming year we hope to extend the project to more countries – Belgium, Poland, Austria, Italy, for example. In this way we are adding the unofficial history to the official history that’s found in the national collections, so that it becomes possible to see the war from new perspectives. This then becomes a important primary resource for teaching, research and wider interest as we move towards the centenary of the war in 2014.
Costs : On 27 October the Commission issued a recommendation that encouraged all member States to accelerate their rate of digitisation, and provided targets for content contributions to Europeana by 2015. The Recommendation encouraged public private partnerships to achieve this, but with preferential commercial use limited to 7 years and non-exclusive contracts. Black hole: ARROW – a project developing a pan-European rights database that will enable those wanting to digitise to perform simple, centralised checking of rights ownership. Commission’s current consultation on their Directive on Orphan Works and the Memorandum of Understanding between publishers, licensing agencies and library bodies both show that there is progress towards a solution to the complexity of rights clearance so that material can be digitised and made accessible to users. Their focus is on published books, and from the audio visual perspective, sound material and unpublished works are critically important, so the Europeana Foundation - on which three AV associations sit – has responded to the consultation, setting out the importance of extending the Directive to sound recordings and unpublished works. Funding : Europeana’s development since 2007 has been funded on short term project budgets. This makes strategic planning difficult. The Commission recognises Europeana as a success, not only in terms of promoting interoperability among the memory organisations across Europe, but also acting as a crucible for experimentation and digital innovation. On 19 October the Commission proposed a long-term funding solution as part of the Connecting Europe Facility. This is a €9bn digital investment in pan-European broadband infrastructure and related digital services, with a small amount – in the region of €5 million a year - going to Europeana to cover running costs. This is a very welcome announcement, and assuming that it is agreed by the European Parliament, secures Europeana’s future at the heart of digital innovation in Europe’s great memory organisations.
