Europeana

Europeana.eu is a virtual library to make a broad public the scientific and cultural heritage of Europe from the prehistory and early history to the present day in the form of image, text, sound and video files accessible. As a German contribution, the Federal Government decided on 2 December 2009 to create a German Digital Library (DDB ).

History

Previous projects of Europeana were in 1997 founded the web portal GABRIEL (Gateway and Bridge to Europe 's National Libraries) and its development, which was founded in March 2005 by the Conference of European National Librarians and operated European digital library network ( EDL ) as a prototype of a cross and specialist areas, border, user-centered European Internet service. Starting point for Europeana was then a dated on 28 April 2005 joint letter by the French President Jacques Chirac, President of Poland Aleksander Kwasniewski, the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány to the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso. In this letter, the establishment of a virtual European library was proposed, which makes it accessible to anyone in digital form Europe's cultural heritage. Thus, existing initiatives should at the same time in Europe together, redundancy is avoided as well as the growth of the Information Society and the European media industry be encouraged.

Since 2007, Europeana was funded by the European Commission eContent Plus program. A beta version of the portal with claims to more than 4.5 million digital objects from over 1,000 participating institutions went online on 20 November 2008. Due to the unexpectedly high demand, with more than 10 million page views per hour, there were problems with the accessibility, so that it no longer was for a time able to access the portal. Only after a series of technical upgrades, the site went back online with a replicated server capacity in December 2008. At this time, France was still half of the content of Europeana.

The launch of Europeana Version 2.0 was first announced for November 2011, however, only took place in October 2011. The project is expected until February 2014 [ deprecated] run.

Function

Europeana provides access to different content types that are provided by the affiliated European institutions. The decision as to which objects are digitized lies in the organization that owns the material. The digitized content is not stored on a central computer, but remain with the respective cultural institution and its network. Europeana collects only the contextual information (metadata ) of the available objects, including small images. Users can search on Europeana this contextual information. Have they found what they were looking for, forwarding on the site is possible via a link, which keeps the original object. The inferred material is not copyrighted, so it can be used freely for scientific or educational purposes. Since the digitization and cataloging principles of European states, and then might differ even that of the connected cultural institutions (libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections ) within a country, the contents are recorded in a uniform after the Europeana Semantic Elements default to them searchable to make. This metadata standard provides a common denominator for the integration of different types of digital content dar. The planned introduction of a richer metadata standards - the Europeana Data Model - to provide users with better search facilities are provided.

Strategy

The Strategic Plan 2011-2015 in January 2011, four development objectives are formulated for the near future:

• Collecting ( sets): - build a trustworthy and public access to the diversity of Europe's cultural and scientific heritage
• Support ( Facilitate ) - to support the development and preservation of a European scientific and cultural heritage through knowledge transfer, innovation and advocacy
• Make European cultural heritage available to users at any time and regardless of location - Spread ( distribute )
• Participate ( engage ) - develop new ways to provide users with better access to cultural and scientific heritage

Organization

The Europeana Foundation is the administrative body of the Europeana service. Members are the President and Chairman of European clubs for information and cultural heritage. CEO was 2007-2011 Elisabeth Niggemann. In November 2011, Bruno Racine, the director of the French National Library was chosen as her successor.

The Foundation is incorporated under Dutch law as Stichting Europeana and is located in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands. It provides the legal framework for the management of Europeana, the employment of staff, the request for funding and the sustainability of the services. The Executive Director is Jill Cousins ​​.

Projects

A number of projects - the Europeana Group - help to find technical solutions and Europeana to expand more content. These projects are carried out by various cultural institutions and are partly funded by the European Commission and the Communications Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) eContent plus program.

Europeana Group projects ( selection):

• APEnet ( Archives Portal Europe): The aim of the project is to develop an Internet portal for European archives
• ATHENA: Museum collects content and support standards for museum digitization and metadata, based on the European Commission's MINERVA project
• Biodiversity Heritage Library ( BHL-Europe ) project of 28 European natural history museums, botanical gardens and other partner institutions to digitize literature on biodiversity / biodiversity
• Carare: collecting and cataloging archaeological and architectural European cultural heritage
• DCA: digitized and opens up contemporary art from 12 European countries
• ECLAP: building a digital library through the performing arts in Europe
• EFG: opens photos, posters, set drawings, newsreels, feature and short films as well as text documents, such as film programs and censorship cards from 22 institutions - including 16 European film archives and film libraries
• Europeana Collections 1914-1918: A group of 12 partner institutions, mostly national libraries, digitized by 2014 more than 400,000 objects from the period of the First World War
• Europeana Libraries: Project of the European Library, which opens up over 5 million objects from 19 European university and research libraries
• Europeana Local: Project to support local and regional libraries, museums, archives and audio - visual archives in the digitizing their holdings (term June 1, 2008 to May 31, 2011)
• Europeana Regia: digitization of 874 most precious manuscripts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (duration from January 2010 to June 2012 )
• EURO- Photo: to open up historical photographs from the archives of 10 leading European news agencies digital
• EUscreen: opens TV recordings from 18 European audiovisual archives
• Europeana Travel: has European archive material around travel, trade, tourism and migration digitally accessible ( Duration: May 2009 to April 2011 )
• HOPE: taps into more than 880,000 digitized objects on European social history and the history of European workers' movement from the late 18th century to the present day
• JUDAICA Europeana opens up and digitized Jewish contributions to the European Cultural
• MIMO: digitized and opened collections of six of the most important European musical instrument museums ( Duration: September 2009 to September 2011 )
• Natural Europe: opening up the digital collections of natural history museums
• Think motion: opening up the holdings of the Digital Mechanism and Gear Library

Financing

Europeana and the projects attach Europeana.eu content that is funded by the European Commission, the Information and Communications Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) and similar programs eContent plus program. In order to participate in many different projects and is Europeana but also dependent on other funding opportunities from the culture ministries of the Member States, as 50-100 % of the costs are covered by the European Commission.