Europeana: Think Culture

The Europeana website was so overwhelmed by viewers wanting to connect with this site, that it crashed last November. Finally, it is (almost) ready for prime time. Actually, it won’t be until 2010 that it will be officially a complete site. Here’s what it’s about:

"Europeana.eu is about ideas and inspiration. It links you to 4 million digital items. There are 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), and videos (films, newsreels and TV broadcasts). Some of these are world famous, others are hidden treasures from Europe’s museums and galleries, archives, libraries and audio-visual collections. "

"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."

Europeana is run by my favorite people: "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."

There is a page that instructs on the search function at Europeana (see below). The Resource Shelf’s contributing editor, Adrian Janes, has clarified some points of the site:

"The types of items collected in Europeana are in the broad categories
of Text, Images, Video, and Sound. Text, for instance, may include
books, articles and music scores. However, although the site can be
searched in a preferred language (26 in all), it is important to note
that all items are presented as originally created (e.g., a Hungarian
text will remain in Hungarian). From that point of view, the most
international aspect of the site is the range of images, such as
paintings, photographs and maps, and access to some music recordings.
Similarly the site spans the centuries, with artists like Giotto,
Watteau and Picasso, and composers like Mozart and Debussy among those
represented.

All items are thoroughly catalogued, which helps make for productive
searches. However some contributing organisations are more generous in
the access they allow than others. The British Library’s images can be
freely viewed at a good size, whereas those provided by Scran, a
Scottish source, are only thumbnails: anything more requires a
licence.

Basic searching can be refined by Language, Country, Date, Provider or
Type, or a combination of these. There is also an Advanced Search
facility which allows the site to be investigated in other modes,
namely by Title, Creator, Date, or Subject. Again, the fields can be
combined. But it would be a mistake to assume that searching by an
artist’s country will necessarily produce the best results. The items
provided by French sources tend to be the most relevant and plentiful,
at least at the moment. Apart from the richness of their collections,
this may be explained by the greater progress achieved in digitisation
by some countries and their institutions compared to others.

By clicking on ‘View in original context’ (displayed beneath any
selected result), you are taken to the originating website — a way of
opening up the possibilities of discovery beyond Europeana, although
facilitated by it. Complimenting this, a very useful gateway page
brings together links to all of the websites of Partners and
Contributors of content.

There are also customisation possibilities available to registered
users, such as the ability to save particular searches, add tags, or
share items.

The subtitle to Europeana is ‘Think culture,’ and its strength lies in
its vast range of historical and artistic materials. As the project
develops, this can only become even more the case. It is certainly a
real collaborative achievement, but would be even more useful if the
amount of access granted to items by the contributors was equalised.
Nevertheless, this collaboration amongst such a diversity of
institutions, languages, and countries is both heartening in itself,
and also suggests exciting possibilities for parallel projects in
other areas of European expertise, like science or medicine.