1. Europeana.eu: cultural collaboration across borders and domains
Jon Purday
Senior Communications Advisor, Europeana
The 12th Annual International Conference «EVA 2009 Moscow»

2. Prototype portal launched in November 2008
What is Europeana.eu ?
Prototype portal launched in November 2008
Public access point for European cultural and scientific heritage
Links users to content digitised by libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections
Content from all 27 European Union Member States
Multilingual interface in 26 languages
Material from over 1,000 content providers
Read slide

3. What’s in the Europeana prototype ?
Current contents: 4.5 million items
3,500,000 images: paintings, drawings, postcards, posters, photos, pictures of museum objects
935,000 texts: books, newspaper articles, manuscripts, letters
115,000 videos: movies, documentaries, TV broadcasts, public information films
13,000 sounds: cylinders, 78rpm discs, radio, field recordings
This integration of media enriches the users’ experience
It also enhances the content – each items gains by association with related material from different sectors, different countries
The site meets the evolving expectations of users, which have been formed in a web 2 environment - that they should be able to read text, see images, hear sounds and watch video in the same space.
Users expect to be able to integrate content, and they aren’t concerned what sort of institution holds it, nor which country it’s held in.
It opens up new opportunities for pan-European and cross-disciplinary study and research
So how did we get to this point, what’s the model that’s enabled us to bring together all this material

4. Securing collaboration
political endorsement
provider involvement
Triangular model – three way involvement provides strength
The Europeana prototype is a proof-of-concept project funded by the European Commission, who endorse it to the European Parliament and national Ministries of culture and education.
In their turn, CLICK they reinforce our message to the cutural heritage sector who are our content providers. Politicians want to see national culture celebrated in a pan-European portal; content providers recognise that they gain credibility with their funders and policy makers by working with Europeana.
The content providers are also keen to look at new ways of presenting their content, wanting to demonstrate their relevance to new generations of users
They in turn influence their visitors and interest groups – they act as a channel to their users CLICK – often directly by links on their sites.
Users are consulted in surveys and focus groups, and our most recent survey found not only a high level of satisfaction with the site, but also that 90% of users had visited the site before, 60% 5 times or more. Over 99% of our 3,000 respondents wanted to visit the site again. So all our results indicated a high level of loyalty and user engagement.
And users’ engagement with the site reflects on the politicians, whose policies are vindicated
That creates a willingness to continue funding a sustainable operational version of Europeana
The outcome is a virtuous circle of collaboration.
I want to look at our collaboration with the providers in more detail
user engagement

5. Stakeholder collaboration at the top level
EDL Foundation’s Board of Participants from the cutural heritage and research associations:
ACE: Association Cinémathèques Européennes
CENL: Conference of European National Librarians
CERL: Consortium of European Research Libraries
EMF: European Museum Forum
EURBICA: European Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives
FIAT: International Federation of Television Archives
IASA: International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives
ICOM Europe: International Council of Museums, Europe
LIBER: Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche
MICHAEL: Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe
Collaboration is built into our governance at the top level
The Europeana portal is a service of the EDL Foundation, set up at the start of the project as the legal entity that employs people, and submits funding bids for funding and seek sponsorship
Policy is set by a Board comprising the Chairs and Presidents of the key professional member organisations
Endorses Europeana’s objectives to their members, who comprise most of Europe’s cultural heritage and research institutions
Communicate Europeana’s objectives to their membership
Represent the specific interests of their domain at Board level

6. Partner collaboration at the site-building level
The Europeana partner network
150+ partners from museums, libraries, archives, audiovisual collections, software developers, university research
Representatives from every Member State
Promotes technology and knowledge transfer across the sectors and between Member States
Shares common standards and best practice
Technical experts lead work groups developing use cases, data models, components etc.
Network translates all parts of the interface into 26 languages
The Europeana prototype was built by a core team of 6 full-time staff hosted in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Den Haag. This number has now doubled, and includes the project management, development and content team, marketing and communications
They co-ordinate the work of a wide range of partners in a distributed network
The 6 work package leaders manage their workgroups – each workgroup has about 15 members
Work group members give their time freely and we pay travel expenses
All members of the network partnership sign Formal agreement
Undertake to communicate Europeana’s aims and objectives to their national and domain networks

7. Aggregators promote collaboration
Museum A Archive A Library A
Library X
National Digital Library
Film Archive 1
Film Archive 2
Film Archive 3
Archive X
National aggregator
ACE
Museum X
Museum 1
ICOM Europe
Museum 2
CENL
Europeana works with aggregators
National aggregators, eg in france, and italy.
Domain aggregators – film, libraries, TV in EU screen, Archives in APEnet – or Archives portal europe, and museums in Athena
They integrate diverse content from smaller institutions
Establish standards, harvest and map metadata
Devise tools, ensure rights compliance and provide help
Aggregators understand the issues in their own country or sector, and can create close collaboration with large numbers of similar content providers.
Then Europeana has the relationship with the main aggregator, and not with the multiplicity of individual players.
Also just launching the Council of Content Providers and Aggregators, who will elect members to our Board, giving the voice of the content provider into the centre of our policy making
Let’s see what that looks like as we develop the fully operational Europeana
MICHAEL
Eurbica National Archive 1
            
EU Screen
National Library 1 NL 2 NL 3
National Archive 2
FIAT
National Archive 3
Television Archive 1
Television Archive 2

8. Collaboration and the growth of Europeana
Athena
Archives Portal Europe
[APEnet]
STERNA
BHL Europe
EUScreen
Video Active
European Film Gateway
Europeana Local
Europeana Travel
MIMO
Judaica
Europeana Connect
Europeana v1.0
Europeana.eu
Presto Prime
Arrow
Next steps as we develop a fully operational site,
2 projects started this year to take Europeana’s core technology and functionality to the next stage,
Europeana v1.0
Putting the content in the users’ workflow – APIs
The idea of developing APIs that can be incorporated into people webspaces, into university sities, into blogs to enable users to access Europeana within their own work program is important
User focus and usability
Europeana Connect
next make the actual search multilingual, so that a word entered in one language can be translated on the fly into other languages that the user selects.
Next year we expect to launch a multilingual search in 5 languages - English, French, German, Spanish, Italian
and develop a further 5 the following year:
Mobile applications– so people can use it as a reference and research tool anytime, anywhere
Geospatial data
Semantic enrichment
And around this technology core are all the aggregation projects that we saw on the previous slide
And beyond them are 2 enabling projects – Arrow about copyright and a registry for rights in out of print material, and PrestoPime, which is establishing best practice in large scale film digitisation

9. Content providers to Europeana
Major new release in 2010 will give access to 10 million items from:
Athena: museum objects
Archives Portal Europe [APEnet]: national archives
Biodiversity Heritage Library [BHL Europe]: texts and taxonomies
European Film Gateway: film, scripts, posters, stills
Europeana Connect: sound recordings
Europeana Travel: exploration, tourism and cartography
Europeana Local: regional libraries and museums
EU Screen: TV broadcasts
Judaica Europeana: documentation of Jewish life in Europe’s cities
Museum of Musical Instruments Online: images and audiovisual of instruments
Information about all the projects contributing to Europeana:
All of these projects are part funded by the European Commission. All are working with digitised material and automating its journey into Europeana
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10. Rhine release
Danube release
This slide provides a timeline of the Europeana group of projects universe with the major releases. [CLICK]
Releases are named after the major rivers of Europe –
The Rhine release is scheduled for summer This release focuses mostly on Content and Functionality.
It will also integrate APIs for interactions with other applications. The functional specification is currently being set. [CLICK]
For the Danube release, which is scheduled in Spring 2011 the main focus is technology and architecture.

11. Homepage – search screen
You can choose from 26 langagues in which to see the interface.
I’m going to search for Stravinsky – just to give you a sense of the range of material

12. I get a range of results, primarily images, which range from all of Picasso’s designs for the ballet Pulcinella, 1920, and his portrait of Stravinsky from the same time. If I click on any of these, I can bring up higher resolution images

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Showing Picasso’s sketchbooks

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And I can also find photographs of Stravinsky – this one showing him in 1937 with Nadia Boulanger on a transatlantic liner on their way to America.
This image has been digitised by the French national library and is part of their digital library – Gallica.
One important way in which we sustain the collaboration is by being able to show the content provider’s branding. We link the user to the provider’s website, so there’s no loss of identity of the content provider.

16. From this same period we can hear Jean Cocteau talking about Picasso and Stravinsky in Montparnasse.
This is from the Institut national de l’audiovisual in Paris

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We can also hear a number of Stravinsky pieces, and see performances.
This one features the Brodsky Quartet playing Stravinsky’s concertino for string quartet.
I was intrigued to discover that the Brodsky Quartet come from northern England, as I do, and studied together at the Royal Northern College of Music.
They named themselves after one of the great principals of that college, Adolph Brodsky, who was a true European. Born in Russia, he taught at the Moscow conservatory, and in Leipzig, Berlin, Vienna as well as Manchester. Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Grieg all met at his house, and he founded the very first Brodsky Quartet

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And here they are, in an undated image, probably around 1890, from the Leipzig museum.
So that’s a very brief snapshot of a search – gives you a sense of the range of Europeana, but of course, it’s very early days yet: we have been live for barely a year, and our content is projected to increase to 25 million items around 2012: at that point, the richness and diversity of the resource will be splendid
Click END

19. Thank you