Europeana News

Europeana News

By Celeste Pedro

November 2024 – Our readers might already familiar be with the europeana.eu database, developed and maintained by the Europeana Foundation, the Europeana Network Association, and the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum for the past 15 years. If you’re not, there are good reasons to get to know this massive Initiative for the digital transformation pertaining to cultural heritage.

Figure 1. Front page of the Research Catalogue website.

The Common European Data Spaces is part of the EU strategy to make digital content more accessible and reusable, providing data infrastructures and governance frameworks to facilitate knowledge and control over individual or institutional data generation, security and preservation.

Europeana is a Data Space created specifically for cultural heritage, now with over 60 million digitised items: artworks, books, music, videos, newspapers and many more.

Database

The main website for Europeana has a database with two main parts and a few different search methods.

Collections can be accessed by themes, topics, popular items, features, centuries, galleries and organisations/contributors.

Stories are shorter collections that tell a story to the user about an author, an event, a technique, etc.; they are divided into stories and exhibitions and are searchable by tags.

Registration

By registering, users can create their own archive and also their own galleries from the available items and apply for publication on europeana.eu.

Europeana Classroom

Europeana Classroom is a feature on the website that provides resources educators can use in the classroom. These are ready-made thematic programs for different ages, with videos and learning scenarios, such as the ones developed by Europeana for distance learning. Many of these resources are also set up by other institutions or research projects; as an example, check out the Arma – medieval reads.

There’s also a chance for individual users to contribute to these resources in a number of ways.

Data Visualisation

Europeana also provides statistics on its database. The dashboards available can be very useful for research and reflection on the state of the art of digital collections. If we look at individual countries’ contributions to the database, for example, at a glance, we can see 45 countries (primarily European, from a total of 2000 institutions), an immense difference in the number of items from the bottom of the list to the top (not related to the size of the country or demographics); and that top contributors are the Netherlands, Germany and Spain.

Europeana Pro

If you want to know more about how Europeana works behind the scenes, visit: https://pro.europeana.eu/about-us/mission#who-we-are

There’s plenty to explore and use on europeana.eu, and there is yet another set of reasons to learn about this Initiative: there are many events, virtually all online, happening every month: https://pro.europeana.eu/about-us/events

Upcoming events not to miss

Heritage Horizons – Europeana Project Week
25 to 29 November 2024 – Online.
Register at: https://pro.europeana.eu/event/heritage-horizons-europeana-project-week

EUreka3D Final Conference – Public Conference and Workshop
13 December 2024 – Hybrid.
Register at: https://eureka3d.eu/final-conference/

Our colleagues at Leiden University have set up a one-hour webinar titled Experiences from the Europeana Research Community: Data Science and Reuse of Europeana Data, by Peter Verhaar (LU Centre for the Arts in Society).
3 December 2024 – Online.
Register at: https://pro.europeana.eu/event/experiences-from-the-europeana-research-community-data-science-and-reuse-of-europeana-data-at-leiden-university

Enjoy!

stic Research makes available to all of us.