Europeana.eu is about ideas and inspiration. It links you to 6 million digital items.

    * Images - paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects
    * Texts - books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers
    * Sounds - music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts
    * Videos - films, newsreels and TV broadcasts

Some of these are world famous, others are hidden treasures from Europe's

    * museums and galleries
    * archives
    * libraries
    * audio-visual collections

Europeana is recruiting for the following positions: Java Developer and Office Manager

Here is a list of the organisations that our content comes from. They include the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the British Library in London and the Louvre in Paris.

You can use My Europeana to save searches or bookmark things. You can highlight stuff and add it to your own folders.

This website is a prototype. Europeana Version 1.0 is being developed and will launch in 2010 with links to over 10 million digital objects.

Europeana.eu is funded by the European Commission and the member states.

More about:

    * How Europeana came to be developed: the background to the project
    * The deliverables from the project: technical plans etc
    * New projects that will be channelling material into Europeana Version 1.0
          o EuropeanaLocal
          o European Film Gateway
    * How organisations can contribute content to Europeana
    * Getting in contact with the Europeana team
    * To be added to the press list
    * The e-news to keep you in touch with developments

Background

The Commission has been working for a number of years on projects to boost the digital economy. These prepared the ground for an online service that would bring together Europe's cultural heritage.

The idea for Europeana came from a letter to the Presidency of Council and to the Commission on 28 April 2005. Six Heads of State and Government suggested the creation of a virtual European library, aiming to make Europe's cultural and scientific resources accessible for all.

On 30 September 2005 the European Commission published the i2010: communication on digital libraries, where it announced its strategy to promote and support the creation of a European digital library, as a strategic goal within the European Information Society i2010 Initiative, which aims to foster growth and jobs in the information society and media industries. The European Commission's goal for Europeana is to make European information resources easier to use in an online environment. It will build on Europe's rich heritage, combining multicultural and multilingual environments with technological advances and new business models.

The Europeana prototype is the result of a 2-year project that began in July 2007. Europeana.eu went live on 20 November 2008, launched by Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media.

Europeana is a Thematic Network funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, as part of the i2010 policy. Originally known as the European digital library network – EDLnet –  it is a partnership of 100 representatives of heritage and knowledge organisations and IT experts from throughout Europe. They contribute to the Work Packages that are solving the technical and usability issues.

The project is run by a core team based in the national library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. It builds on the project management and technical expertise developed by The European Library, which is a service of the Conference of European National Librarians.

Overseeing the project is the EDL Foundation, which includes key European cultural heritage associations from the four domains. The Foundation’s statutes commit members to:

    * Providing access to Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage though a cross-domain portal
    * Co-operating in the delivery and sustainability of the joint portal
    * Stimulating initiatives to bring together existing digital content
    * Supporting digitisation of Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage

 
Technical plans

The development route, site architecture and technical specifications are all published as deliverable outcomes of the project. After the launch of the Europeana prototype, the project's final task is to recommend a business model that will ensure the sustainability of the website. It will also report on the further research and implementation needed to make Europe's cultural heritage fully interoperable and accessible through a truly multilingual service.
Contact us

Feedback form

Europeana.eu
c/o the Koninklijke Bibliotheek
National Library of the Netherlands
PO Box 90407
2509 LK The Hague
To be added to the press list contact

Jonathan Purday Phone 00 44 1937 546614
To provide content to Europeana

See the content providers page on our project site.