EuropeanaLocal - Making local and regional content available through Europeana

EuropeanaLocal aims to make digital content from regional and local museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual institutions interoperable and accessible through Europeana and other service providers.

EuropeanaLocal will ensure that the approaches, standards and tools developed by Europeana are adopted widely across the cultural heritage sector, thereby supporting the interoperability of content within Europeana beyond that which is held by purely national level institutions.

EuropeanaLocal, which runs from 1 June 2008 until May 2011, is funded under the European Commission's eContentPlus Programme and co-ordinated by MDR Partners from the UK. The project consortium consists of 32 partners from 27 countries across Europe. There will be no portal by the end of the project; all material will be made accessible through the main Europeana interface.

EuropeanaLocal and Europeana

The Europeana service offers access to millions of digital items provided by Europe's museums, galleries, archives, libraries and audio-visual organisations. Some of these are world famous, others are as yet hidden treasures. Europeana will deliver access to over 10 million digital objects by 2010.

By working closely with Europeana, through the involvement of the EDL Foundation as a key partner in the project, EuropeanaLocal will support the establishment of a cooperation structure which benefits cultural institutions of all types and levels in every Member State.

EuropeanaLocal adds substantial added value to Europeana and it's users by:

  • Promoting and enabling future Europeana participation by local and regional content holders
  • Contributing to a practical understanding and solution of interoperability issues across cultural heritage domains, taking account of the particular needs of local and regional institutions
  • Acting as a real world test bed for Europeana' s standards, tools and infrastructures and providing feedback to Europeana
  • Implementing Europeana compatible infrastructures, standards and tools so as to make available millions of digital items from local and regional institutions across Europe, thus contributing powerfully to the growth of Europeana
  • Adding value by also making the digital content provided to Europeana available for other service providers to use, for example in the areas of tourism, education, family history, humanities research etc. and through other search engines and services on the web

EuropeanaLocal and EDL Foundation

EuropeanaLocal will work closely with the EDL Foundation to establish simple, efficient and sustainable processes through which local and regional institutions can easily make their content available to Europeana during and after the project.

EuropeanaLocal will put in place an infrastructure that will continue to increase the content available to Europeana and at the same time enhancing the skill, expertise and motivation required to support local institutions throughout Europe in contributing their content.

Main EuropeanaLocal developments so far

  • The EuropeanaLocal project has specified the numbers of content that partners will deliver to Europeana for the forthcoming Rhine release. The project aims to add some 3 million items to Europeana by mid-2010, making it one of the biggest contributing projects
  • The first content from EuropeanaLocal partners has already been made available through Europeana.eu. With new content from Poland, UK and Norway, Europeana's collections passed the 5 million mark early December taking it over halfway to its target of 10 million searchable items in 2010
  • The first of 27 planned National meetings took place in Sweden and Belgium. The National meetings are organised with the aim to encourage and promote the Europeana service, the contribution of more local and regional content for Europeana and sensible and sustainable levels of aggregation

Contacts

For more information see the project website www.europeanalocal.eu or contact: Rob Davies or Mary Rowlatt
www.mdrpartners.com

Subscribe to EuropeanaLocal news by registering on the project website
www.europeanalocal.eu

Links

Partners


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