Europeana: opening up access to our cultural heritage

Abstract

Europeana opens up access to three elements of our digitised cultural heritage: the code, the data and the content. Our code base is open source, so the developer community can refine and re-use it to develop aggregation and search services in new contexts, add functions and services to Europeana and create innovative services in other sectors. We hold authoritycontrolled metadata for our 12 million objects. This will provide a rich resource for testing and developing linked data and semantic web applications. We also want to make it easier for users to engage with the content itself. We are working with social media communities and also piloting APIs in popular cultural heritage sites. We want to encourage users to add information, such as tags or their own content. Finally, we want to enable people to research, re-use and remix the content, especially material in the public domain. Inspiration, ideas and knowledge are all generated from this engagement with our cultural and scientific heritage.