Introduction
These pages are for organisations wanting to provide cultural and scientific heritage content to Europeana. They give guidelines showing you what you need to do.
At present, Europeana is not able to accept any content from individuals. People with interesting material should keep in touch with us, because in time we would like to be able to include users' own content.
What Europeana is
Europeana gives people access to millions of digitised objects from Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual collections.
We hold a central index of metadata, but not the full digital objects. To read the digitised book or see the digitised film clip, we link users to the digital object in the content holders' own site - to the National Library of Spain or the Institut national de l'Audiovisual, for example.
Why provide content?
Europeana enriches your users' experience by helping them to find not only your collections but also related information held in other countries, or in other formats. It makes cross-border and interdisciplinary study possible in new ways, and your content gains from association with linked material.
Users today expect content to be integrated - to be able to see videos, look at images, read texts and listen to sounds in the same space. Users don't expect to have to enter new search terms at separate sites to bring together related content.
Europeana will expose your metadata to search engines, making deep web content accessible.
Europeana drives traffic to your site by linking users back to the content provider's website.
Europeana will soon be able to provide a set of API's through which the content of Europeana maybe re used or taken back in its enriched form by Europeana partners and integrated for display in their own online platforms.
Knowledge transfer is a key reason for being part of the Europeana network. We work with digital library experts from across Europe and America. They lead our work packages, give presentations at our conferences, run our workshops and seminars. They are leading thinkers and practitioners in the fields of metadata standards, multilinguality, semantic web, information architecture, usability, geolocation, object modelling and other topics.
Future expansion
Europeana has an ambitious expansion programme: we will give access to 10 million items by summer 2010, and to more than twice that number by 2012. These items will be drawn from every European Union member state and represent the broad diversity of cultural and scientific heritage. The majority of the material will be out-of-copyright, although we will also include material that has been digitised and made available by agreement with rights holders.
