Europeana and open cultural heritage data
Europeana (europeana.eu) is Europe’s digital library, museum and archive. Since its launch in 2008 it has aggregated more than 18m records that link to digital objects online. Such objects are 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) and 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 users to explore Europe’s history from ancient times to the modern day. Europeana harvests, normalises and enriches metadata from data providers. The content (ie the digital object) itself is held with the data providers that make available only a thumbnail of the object where possible. Under the existing agreement with the data providers, Europeana can make available the aggregated data for re-use only for non-commercial purposes. However, over the past months Europeana has been engaged in an extensive advocacy program to convince data providers about the necessity of opening up re-use of their metadata for all purposes. This will allow Europeana to publish all data as Linked Open Data and enable API applications that are created for commercial purposes. We believe that this is to the benefit of the providers as it will enhance the findability and usability of their objects and open up many more profit-making opportunities for them online and offline. Libraries seem more ready to adopt an open data policy but the case is not the same with museums and archives, for different reasons. In my presentation I will describe Europeana’s advocacy activities to convince European museums, libraries and archives to make available their metadata to Europeana under the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication over the past months. I will also touch upon the related activities we are carrying out in order to create best practice in the cultural heritage sector like the pilot LOD we did with 20 pioneer institutions and the hackathons for the Europeana API and LOD in the Hack4Europe Day.
by Georgia Angelaki on July 1st at 11:30 in Track I
Georgia Angelaki studied Media and Communication at the Panteion University of Athens and holds an MA in eBusiness Management from ICHEC Brussels Management School. She witnessed the beginnings of the Digital Libraries policies and related initiatives doing an internship at the DG INFSO in Luxembourg in the Unit responsible for Cultural Heritage and eLearning. She worked as project coordinator for The European Library since 2006 and moved on to Europeana when it was created in 2008. She is now working for Europeana as business development coordinator and is currently responsible, among other things, for Europeana’s advocacy activities related to Open Data. In this function she has been coordinating over the past months Europeana’s advocacy program for a new agreement with content providers and aggregators to make available cultural data under CC0.
Rufus Pollock
Daniel Dietrich
Jason Kitcat
Sebastian Hellmann
Lucy Chambers
Hauke Gierow