Jill Cousins, Europeana Executive Director, and Beth Daley, PR and Editorial Officer, discuss the challenges and importance of developing Europeana; the world’s biggest cultural heritage database.
Europeana – Europe’s digital library, museum and archive – and the Special Libraries Association share a mission. The SLA’s strapline ‘connecting people and information’ perfectly describes what Europeana does – uniting digitised collections from cultural institutions across Europe ,and making them findable and re-usable by a world public.
Europeana is a catalyst for change in the world of digital cultural heritage. We create new ways for people to engage with cultural history for work, learning or pleasure. We believe in making cultural heritage openly accessible in order to promote the exchange of ideas and information. This leads to a better understanding of our cultural diversity and contributes to a thriving knowledge economy.
Europeana.eu provides access to 29 million items from small regional libraries, archives and museums to big names like the Rijksmuseum, the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the British Library. However big or small your library’s collection, Europeana helps it reach millions more people across the world.
Our journey began in 2005 when six heads of state wrote to the European Commission suggesting the creation of a European digital library. The EC then published a strategy on digital libraries which funded the prototype (launched in 2008) that became Europeana.
From 2008-2012, we concentrated on developing a solid technological infrastructure with a strong aggregation model. We worked with partners across Europe on standards for collecting and organising metadata, developing a data model and licensing framework. Copyright is a delicate subject and we established rights labels that make it easy to see which items are re-usable and which aren’t. We’re now working on addressing the re-use of orphan works and in-copyright but out-of-commerce works. We work with experts to enhance Europeana’s data, turning it into Linked Open Data by connecting it to places, concepts, people and time periods, making it even more useful. Enrichment of data is one of the key benefits for Europeana’s content providers.
Last September, all Europeana metadata describing the digital object was released under a Creative Commons Zero Public Domain Dedication (CC0), making it possible for anyone to re-use both commercially or non-commercially. This was the first time a move of this magnitude had been made anywhere in the world, and was the result of intensive advocacy, legal work and engagement with partners and the Europeana Network (our open forum of 750 experts). Some organisations are uncomfortable with opening up their data, they think they will lose control and possibly revenue, but we’ve found that the benefits of opening up far outweigh the concerns. Take the Rijksmuseum – this year, they released 111,000 items in high resolution for anyone to use. This has raised the profile of the organisation and its collections enormously and has not resulted in a decline in sales.
Our public movement towards openness, interoperability and common standards influences the way that others view and use cultural content online. Organisations like the Digital Public Library of America and Korea Copyright Commission look to Europeana for advice, collaboration and inspiration. The DPLA, which launched in April 2013, uses the Europeana Data Model and also adopted CC0 for its metadata, making the two datasets from either side of the Atlantic interoperable.
The technological advances such as the Europeana API (Application Programming Interface) and Linked Open Datasets enable innovation to happen in both the public and private sectors, particularly among SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) within the creative industries. One very recent API success is the launch of our first iPad app – Europeana Open Culture – which was in the top 20 free educational apps.
In addition to 29 million cultural heritage items (including 11 million texts) that you can discover on our portal, over the last 5 years we have gained a wealth of experience to do with library categorisation, aggregation, metadata, licensing and technology. Our Europeana Professional website is the place to find this information – it’s a great resource for anyone involved with libraries and digitisation. One of our projects, Europeana Awareness is also developing a public libraries network – read our blog about it.
With a critical mass of data and good distribution, Europeana is positioned not only as a content-gathering network, but as a content-distributing movement. But we are facing a major challenge. Due to the economic climate, the public funding we had hoped to access for 2015 onwards is under threat and we are fighting for survival alongside other equally worthy causes. Our #AllezCulture campaign (playing on our ‘Think Culture’ strapline) enables supporters to raise their voices and show policymakers the strength of feeling that exists for Europeana and the importance of cultural heritage.
Funding issues aside, Europeana continues to grow and expand. With our partners in the cultural heritage and digital sectors, we have created the world’s biggest cultural heritage database which connects Europe (and the wider world). Open access to culture helps communities understand the past and appreciate cross-cultural differences. To date, we’ve collected over 50,000 objects and stories related to the First World War through our crowd-sourcing project Europeana 1914-1918, and over 7,000 objects through Europeana 1989, which focuses on memorabilia from the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Democratised access makes culture available to everyone: there are no barriers as to who can access Europeana and the online portal is available in 30+ languages. Our 21,000 Facebook followers, 50,000 newsletter subscribers, and 4.5m portal visitors prove that there is a public appetite for cultural heritage. We’re now distributing Europeana’s material far beyond our online portal by reaching out to creative industries. Creative industries in Europe are growing at an estimated 7% per annum and need fuel. Europeana provides that and so supports economic growth. So far, 770 businesses, entrepreneurs, education and cultural organisations are re-using our data in websites, apps and games.
Our future value lies in developing and enhancing services for our contributors and users. We’re working on providing value-added services that allow the cultural sector to do their work cheaper, faster and better, with more efficient aggregation tools and cloud-based services that bring cost savings to content providers. We’re also addressing accessibility issues like cross-border access to content, ISO standards, improved interoperability of data, multilingualism, and the development of semantic web/Linked Open Data. We’re building a service centre for the creative industries and cultural entrepreneurs, providing easy access to free and licensed content, consultancy services, and a network of entrepreneurs and venture capital and incubation services. Finally, we’re developing strong end-user services through community platforms such as Wikipedia and HistoryPin.
If you’re interested in what we’re doing, we’d love to have you along for the ride. You can keep up-to-date with our progress by following our blog, becoming a Europeana Network member yourself, or following us on Twitter (@europeanaeu and #AllezCulture).