Europeana

Europeana.eu is a virtual library that aims to make the scientific and cultural heritage of Europe from prehistory and early history to the present available to a broad public in the form of image, text, sound and video files. On December 2, 2009, the federal government decided to create the German Digital Library (DDB) as a national aggregator that provides contributions from Germany .

history

Forerunner projects of Europeana were the GABRIEL web portal (GAteway and BRIdge to Europe's National Libraries) founded in 1997 and its further development, the European digital library network (EDLnet) founded and operated in March 2005 by the Conference of European National Librarians as a prototype of a cross-border and cross-disciplinary , user-centered European internet service. The starting point for Europeana was then a joint letter dated April 28, 2005 from the French President Jacques Chirac , the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski , the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder , the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi , the Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány to the President of the European Commission , José Manuel Barroso . This letter proposed the creation of a virtual European library that would make Europe's cultural heritage accessible to everyone in digital form. At the same time, this should bring together initiatives that already exist in Europe, avoid redundancy and promote the growth of the information society and the European media industry.

Europeana logo

Europeana has been funded by the European Commission's EContentplus program since 2007 . A beta version of the portal with more than 4.5 million digital objects from over 1,000 participating institutions went online on November 20, 2008. Due to the unexpectedly high demand with more than 10 million page views per hour, there were problems with accessibility, so that for a while it was no longer possible to access the portal. Only after a series of technical upgrades did the site go online again in December 2008, with the server capacity multiplied. At that time, France was still providing half of Europeana's content .

In February 2009, Europeana Version 1.0 was launched as the successor to EDLnet. In 2010, the intermediate goal of developing 10 million digital objects had already been exceeded. The largest contribution to Europeana at this point in time came from France with 18% of all properties, but Germany had meanwhile increased its share to 17%. The rest was distributed among the other members of the European Union. At the beginning of 2011 new functions were integrated into the site. These include a translation tool and the option of being automatically redirected to Wikipedia or other services to obtain further information.

The follow-up project Europeana Version 2.0 took place from October 1, 2011 to May 31, 2014.

function

Europeana enables access to different types of content made available by the affiliated European institutions. The decision as to which objects are digitized rests with the organization that owns the material. The digital copies are also not stored on a central computer, but remain with the respective cultural institution and its network. Europeana only collects the context information ( metadata ) of the available objects, including small images. Users can search this contextual information on Europeana. Once you have found what you were looking for, a link can be used to redirect to the page that contains the original object. The developed material is not subject to any copyright so that it can be freely used for scientific or educational purposes. Since the digitization and cataloging principles of the European states and within a country possibly also those of the connected cultural institutions (libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections) differ, the content is uniformly recorded according to the Europeana Semantic Elements Standard in order to make it searchable close. This metadata standard represents the lowest common denominator for the integration of the various types of digital content. The planned introduction of a more extensive metadata standard - the Europeana Data Model - is intended to provide users with better search options.

strategy

In the Strategic Plan 2011–2015 of January 2011, four development goals are formulated for the near future:

• Collecting (aggregate) - building trustworthy and public access to the diversity of Europe's scientific and cultural heritage
• Support (facilitate) - support the development and preservation of the European scientific and cultural heritage through knowledge transfer, innovation and advocacy
• Spread (distribute) make European cultural heritage for users anytime, regardless of location available -
• Participate (engage) - develop new ways to provide users to allow greater access to the cultural and scientific heritage of Europe

organization

Bruno Racine at the Salon du livre de Paris March 2010

The Europeana Foundation is the administrative body of the Europeana Service. Members are the presidents and chairmen of European associations for information and cultural heritage. Elisabeth Niggemann was the CEO from 2007 to 2011 . In November 2011, Bruno Racine , director of the French National Library, was elected her successor.

The foundation is registered as Stichting Europeana under Dutch law and is located in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek , the national library of the Netherlands. It provides the legal framework for running Europeana, employing staff, requesting funding and making the service sustainable. The executive director is Jill Cousins.

Projects

A number of projects - the Europeana Group - are helping to find technical solutions and adding additional content to Europeana. These projects are carried out by various cultural institutions and are partially financed by the eContentplus program of the European Commission and the Communications Technologies Policy Support Program (ICT PSP).

Europeana group projects (selection):

• APEnet / APEx (Archive Portal Europe): The aim of the APEnet project was to set up an Internet portal for European archives, which was further expanded in the subsequent APEx project; the archive portal Europe is available and will be continued after the end of the APEx project in 2015 by the foundation archive portal Europe
• ATHENA: , AthenaPlus were called aggregation projects, the museum contents collected and standards for museum digitization and metadata, building on the. MINERVA project of the European Commission support. These projects were the basis for the formation of the [Michael Consotrium http://www.michael-culture.eu/ ], which is the specialist aggregator for museums in the Europeana.
• Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL-Europe) project of 28 European natural history museums, botanical gardens and other partner institutions for digitization of literature on biodiversity / biodiversity
• CARARE: collects and develops archaeological and architectural European cultural heritage. Duration of the project February 1, 2010 to January 31, 2013
• DCA: digitizes and makes contemporary works of art from 12 European countries accessible
• ECLAP: Building a digital library on the performing arts in Europe
• EFG: indexes photos, posters, set drawings, newsreels, fiction and short films as well as text documents such as film programs and censorship cards from 22 institutions - including 16 European film archives and cinematheques
• Europeana Archeology: improves the visibility and findability of existing archaeological and architectural objects in Europeana and increases the amount of high quality digital content. Duration of the project February 1, 2019 to July 31, 2020
• Europeana Collections 1914-1918: A group of 12 partner institutions, mostly national libraries, digitized more than 400,000 objects from the First World War
• Europeana Libraries: European Library project that indexes 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 digital indexing of their holdings (duration June 1, 2008 to May 31, 2011)
• Europeana Newspapers: Project to make over 18 million newspaper and magazine pages available
• Europeana Regia: Digitization of 874 particularly valuable manuscripts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (running from January 2010 to June 2012)
• EURO-Photo: aims to digitally make historical photographs from the archives of 10 leading European news agencies accessible
• EUscreen: accesses TV recordings from 18 European audiovisual archives
• Europeana Travel: has digitally indexed European archive material relating to travel, trade, tourism and migration (duration: May 2009 to April 2011)
• HOPE: opens up more than 880,000 digitized objects on European social history and the history of the European labor movement from the end of the 18th century to the present
• JUDAICA Europeana: indexes and digitizes Jewish contributions to European cultural assets
• MIMO: digitized and indexed the collections of 6 of the most important European musical instrument museums (duration: September 2009 to September 2011)
• Natural Europe: opens up the digital collections of natural history museums
• thinkMOTION: opens up the holdings of the digital mechanism and gear library

financing

Europeana and the projects add Europeana.eu content funded by the European Commission's eContentplus program, the Information and Communications Technologies Policy Support Program (ICT PSP) and similar programs. In order to be able to participate in many different projects, however, Europeana is also dependent on further funding options from the culture ministries of the member states, as the European Commission covers 50–100% of the costs.

literature

• Jean-Noël Jeanneney : Google's Challenge. For a European library . Wagenbach, Berlin 2006. ISBN 978-3-8031-2534-7

Web links

Commons : Europeana  - collection of images, videos and audio files

 Wikinews: EU library Europeana goes online  - news

• Europeana.eu
• Europeana 1914-1918 - Photos, films and text documents on the First World War
• Europeana version 1.0
• Europeana Group website
• European Commission
• Elisabeth Niggemann / Jacques De Decker / Maurice Lévy : Report of the 'Comité des sages'. Reflection group on bringing Europe's cultural heritage online (PDF; 267 kB) from January 10, 2011 (German version; last accessed on September 12, 2011)
• Europeana at Google Cultural Institute

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Lehmann : The infinite library - an acclamation . Pp. 103–116 in Jean-Noël Jeanneney: Google's Challenge. For a European library . Wagenbach, Berlin 2006
2. ^ Letter of April 28, 2005 (in French; last accessed on September 16, 2011)
3. ↑ EContentplus: List of projects funded since 2006 (last accessed on September 18, 2011)
4. ↑ Britta Woldering: Start of the Europeana: Review and Outlook . In: German National Library (Hrsg.): Dialogue with libraries . tape 21 , no. 1 , 2009, ISSN  2567-7225 , p. 21–23 , urn : nbn: de: 101-2010032354 .
5. ↑ Oliver Junge: Digital Library Europeana. Success is when you break down . FAZnet of November 21, 2008; The Europeana digital library is no longer available shortly after the start . Heise online on November 21, 2008 (both last accessed on September 18, 2011).
6. ↑ Europeana online library back in operation . Verivox on December 24, 2008 (last accessed on September 18, 2011)
7. ↑ Stephen Castle: France Dominates Europe's Digital Library . New York Times November 19, 2008 (last accessed September 18, 2008)
8. ↑ Directorate-General for Communication of the European Commission: Digital Agenda: Europeana enables online access to over 14 million examples of European cultural heritage . Published on Europa.eu on November 18, 2010 (last accessed on September 18, 2011)
9. ↑ Europeana V2.0 | Europeana. Retrieved October 16, 2017 (UK English). 
10. ↑ Europeana Strategic Plan 2011–2015 ( Memento of the original from February 10, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
11. ↑ The course set for the Europeana future . Heise online on May 5, 2010 (last accessed on September 18, 2011)
12. ↑ The Europeana Foundation ( Memento of the original from July 20, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Europeana.eu. Retrieved May 10, 2011. 
13. ↑ French National Librarian to chair the Europeana Foundation  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Press release of the Europeana Foundation of November 2, 2011 (last checked on October 6, 2012)  
14. ↑ Europeana Group ( Memento of the original dated December 28, 2009) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved March 10, 2011. 
15. ↑ (last accessed on December 18, 2014)
16. ↑ ATHENA - Access to cultural heritage networks across Europe ( Memento of the original dated November 1, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (last accessed October 1, 2011) 
17. ↑ Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe (BHL-Europe) ( Memento of the original from November 13, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (last accessed October 1, 2011) 
18. ↑ CARARE.eu (last accessed October 1, 2011)
19. ↑ Digitizing Contemporary Art '(DCA) (last visited on 1 October 2011)
20. ↑ European Collected Library of Artistic Performance (last accessed October 1, 2011)
21. ^ European Film Gateway (EFG) ; Films in the themed portal First World War (EFG1914) see Europeana 1914–1918 (last accessed on June 2, 2014)
22. ^ Europeana Archeology. Retrieved October 30, 2019 (UK English). 
23. ↑ Europeana Collections 1914-1918 ( Memento of the original from March 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Topic portal First World War see Europeana 1914–1918 (last accessed on June 2, 2014) 
24. ↑ Europeana Libraries project (last accessed October 1, 2011)
25. ↑ Europeanalocal.eu ( Memento of the original dated August 24, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (last accessed October 1, 2011) 
26. ↑ Europeana regia (last accessed on October 1, 2011)
27. ↑ Project description of the European Commission (last accessed on October 1, 2011)
28. ↑ EUscreen beta version (last accessed on October 1, 2011)
29. ↑ European atravel Virtual Exhibition ; Press release on the publication of May 4, 2011: The European Library launches Reading Europe: Europe's Literary Gems Online For Free ( Memento of the original of October 18, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (both last accessed on October 1, 2011; PDF; 25 kB) 
30. ↑ HOPE. Heritage of the People's Europe (last accessed October 1, 2011)
31. ^ Judaica europeana (last accessed October 1, 2011)
32. ↑ MIMO project presentation after the data transfer in 2011 ( Memento of the original from September 6, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on October 9, 2012) 
33. ^ Natural-europe. Archived from the original on May 2, 2011 ; accessed on April 17, 2018 (English). 
34. ↑ thinkMOTION (last accessed October 1, 2011)
35. ^ Konrad Lischka: Digital Libraries. The state is saving, Google is digitizing . SPIEGEL online on March 26, 2011 (last accessed on September 18, 2011)