Karin Heijink Europeana Meeting, Belgium 16 December 2009

1. EUROPEANA
Brussels December 2009
Karin Heijink - Business Development Director

2. Vision
“A digital library that is a single, direct and multilingual access point to the
European cultural heritage.”
European Parliament, 27 September 2007
“A unique resource for Europe's distributed cultural heritage… ensuring a
common access to Europe's libraries, archives and museums.”
Horst Forster, Director, Digital Content & Cognitive Systems Information Society
Directorate, European Commission

3. Europeana v1.0
• Successor of EDLNet – proof of concept/prototyp
Objectives
• Maintaining and extending a powerful alliance of
stakeholders
• Creation of an operational Europeana service
• Disseminating the service to end users
• Finding a viable organisational solution
• Policy development
• Creating a sustainable funding model.

4. EDL Foundation Governance
Advisory & Executive Holds legal power &
Budgetary roles Committee Reports on finance &
Up to 9
strategy
elected
Board of Participants
Up to 5/6
elected
Council of
Content Providers & Aggregators
Funding & Orientation Group
Linked to Member States Expert Group

5. EDL Foundation
Board of participants from the professional heritage
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

6. Europeana Group of Projects
Biodiversity Heritage
Libraries Europe
Presto
Judaica Europeana Arrow
Prime
Europeana Local
Europeana v.1.0
Musical Inst.
Museums Online European
Europeana Film
Gateway
Europeana
Travel EuropeanaConnect
EUScreen
APEnet
Athena
The European Library

7. Rhine release Danube release

9. Audiences
• Professional Users
• Librarians, curators, archivist
• Educational Users
• Professors/teachers
• Students/pupils
• General Users
• Serious hobbyist (genealogy, local history)

10. User survey
• Online User Survey 6-26 May 2009
• 3,204 completed
• Replies from 54 countries - 53% of replies from five
countries
• Almost everyone expects to visit the site again – less
than 1% says they will not revisit
• Main route to Europeana is from a paper or journal
(47.4%), second most popular is a link from another
web site (21%)
• Personal research is dominant reason (72.9%)

11. 3. Statistics – Users’ rating of general features
• Majority rate features and functions as “good” or “excellent”. Around a
third of all respondents only rate the general features and functions as
“average”.
Ease of access to Poor/very
Good/excellent Average 100
content poor
Presentation of Poor/very
Good/excellent Average poor
100
results
Poor/very
Search functions Good/excellent Average 100
poor
Poor/very
Site navigation Good/excellent Average poor 100

12. Content
• Content : 5+ million items from every domain, every EU
member
• 3,500,000 images: photos, paintings, drawings, postcards,
posters
• 1,300,000 texts: books, newspaper articles, manuscripts,
letters
• 82,000 videos: movies, documentaries, TV broadcasts,
public information films
• 20,000 sounds: cylinders, 78rpm discs, radio, field
recordings

13. Spread by country
82% of the content comes from 4 countries

14. Spread by provider
3%,
Stadtgeschitliches
4%, Kansalliskirjasto 12%, Others
4%,
40%, Culture Fr
Nasjonalbiblioteket
5%, Knowledge
Management
7%, Scran
8%,BNF 12%, Saxon
9%, Het Geheugen
van NL
70% of the content comes from 4 providers

15. Content Strategy
• Promotion and support of aggregators
• Collaboration between all Europeana related projects
• Even representation of all European Countries & Cultures
• Increase diversity of types of Content
• Development of relevant themes of content available

16. The role of Aggregators
• Business Process
• Content Aggregation & Ingestion Process
• Organisational Model
• Information flow and expertise
• Financial Sustainability
• Broader support & keeping Europeana office small
• End-users
• creating a virtuous cricle

17. Content & Information flow

18. Activities to promote Aggregation
• Establishement of CCPA & Aggregators Group
• Aggregator Survey
• Aggregator Handbook
• Training
• Developing business models and assessment of cultural and
economic impact of aggregators
• Europeana Content Checker
• Europeana source code
• Identifying potential new aggregators

19. Collaboration between projects
• Content Aggregation
• EuropeanaLocal – local and regional aggregators
• Athena – Museums
• Collaboration new partners
• Focus on tier 1 countries
• Focus on audio & audio visual

20. Representation of countries
• Identified 3 tiers
• Tier 1 < 1% - high priority
• Tier 2 1-5% - medium priority
• Tier 3 >5% - low priority
• Belgium – 54,311 items
• Now tier 2 country – but only just with 1,09%
• Aim for Summer 2010 – 4% of content – 400,000 items
Join a local or regional aggregator,
help us build the Belgium content in Europeana

21. GP1
GP2
Why joining Europeana?
• Prestigious initiative
• Endorsement from European Commission
• Erasmus Award 2009
• Knowledge exchange with professional network
• Metadata standards
• Best practices
• Technological innovation
• Popularity among users
• User survey results:
Loyal user base (60% of respondents visiting the site more
than 5 times);
Overall positive ratings for Europeana features and functions

22. Dia 21
GP1 Europeana’s cross-domain content
The value of contributing content to Europeana
Metadata standards
Case studies demonstrating benefits and best practice
Milestones, deliverables and achievements, notably Rhine release
Forthcoming events – workshops, conferences etc
Strategic and policy issues
Staying relevant to users
Value of sharing source code
Technolgical innovation
aal030; 30/10/2009
GP2 Europeana’s cross-domain content
The value of contributing content to Europeana
Metadata standards
Case studies demonstrating benefits and best practice
Milestones, deliverables and achievements, notably Rhine release
Forthcoming events – workshops, conferences etc
Strategic and policy issues
Staying relevant to users
Value of sharing source code
Technolgical innovation
aal030; 30/10/2009

23. Why joining Europeana?
• Reaching out to users
• Remain relevant
• Put content where people are
• Open up your marvelous collections
• Content remains within your organisation
• Increase traffic to your site
• User interest in viewing items in original context
• 75% of Europeana user survey respondents thought it very useful
to view the searched object in its original context.

24. Future Vision
Europeana beyond Europeana Version 1.0
• Full services and functionalities
• Greater content
Summer 2010 Rhine Release
10 million items
2011 Danube Release
expect to double content
By 2012 25 million items
… Further growing content

53. Questions?
• Karin.heijink@kb.nl
• www.europeana.eu
• https://version1.europeana.eu