Europeana

Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised museum collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 10 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought together on a single platform and presented in a variety of ways relevant to modern users. The prototype for Europeana was the European Digital Library Network (EDLnet), launched in 2008.
The Europeana Foundation is the governing body of the service, and is incorporated under Dutch law as Stichting Europeana.
History.
Europeana had its beginnings after a letter was jointly sent in April 2005 by Jacques Chirac, President of France, and the premiers of Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland and Hungary to the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Durão Barroso. It urged the creation of a virtual European library in order to make Europe's cultural heritage more accessible to everyone.
The letter helped to give added support to work that the European Commission's Information Society and Media Directorate had had already been conducting over the previous ten years, such as the Telematics for Libraries project. It also offered strong political support to the Directorate's strategy (i2010: communication on digital libraries), published in September 2005. This made clear the intention to create and support a European digital library, covering the whole European Union in order to encourage growth of the information society and related media industries.
The first project that started the building of Europeana was the European Digital Library Network (EDLnet), whose role was to establish a prototype model for a user-focussed service, capable of working across national borders and across differing domains. The European Commission funded EDLnet from its eContentplus programme.
The European Digital Library Network prototype was launched on 20 November 2008. It initially provided access to 4.5 million digital objects, which was twice as many as initially intended, and received data contributions from over a thousand separate organisations, including many internationally renowned libraries, gallery and museum collections from many different European capital cities. 
The successor of EDLnet (Europeana version 1.0) began life in February 2009. It ran for 2.5 years and, by 2010, the initial prototype had developed into a full service, providing access to over 10 million digital records of cultural objects. New features were added in 2011, including a translation tool and a function to expand searches onto other platforms, including Wikipedia.
Function and description.
Europeana contains digitalised museum collections.
Europeana gives access to different types of content from different types of heritage institutions. The digital objects that users can find in Europeana are not stored on a central computer, but remain with the cultural institution and are hosted on their networks. Europeana collects contextual information – or metadata – about the items, including a small picture. Users search this contextual information. Once they find what they are looking for, if they want to access the full content of the item, they can click through to the original site that holds the content.
Different types of cultural heritage organisations – libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections – catalogue their content in different ways and to different standards. Approaches also vary in different countries. To make the information searchable, it has to be mapped to a single common standard, known as the Europeana Semantic Elements, and based on Dublin Core. This metadata standard at present takes a lowest common denominator approach to the integration of different types of digital content. In 2010 the "Europeana Data Model", a richer metadata standard, was introduced to help give users more and better information.
Europeana accepts metadata about digital objects, it does not make any decisions about digitisation. The decision about which objects are digitised lies with the organisation that holds the material.
More than 3,000 institutions across Europe have contributed to Europeana, including the Rijksmuseum, the British Library and the Louvre. Records of over 10 million cultural and scientific artefacts have been brought together on Europeana's platform, and are presented in a variety of ways relevant to modern users, such as smartphones or APIs.
Strategy.
In its Strategic Plan for 2011–2015, which was published in January 2011, Europeana outlined four strategic tracks that would shape its further development:
The subsequent strategy document is for the period 2015-2020.
Organisation.
The Europeana Foundation is the governing body of the Europeana service. Its members are the presidents and chairs of European associations for cultural heritage and information associations.
The Foundation promotes collaboration between museums, archives, audiovisual collections and libraries so that users can have integrated access to their content through Europeana and other services.
The Foundation is incorporated under Dutch law as Stichting Europeana and is housed within the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands. It provides a legal framework for the governance of Europeana, employing the staff, bidding for funding and enabling the sustainability of the service.
The executive director of the Europeana Foundation is Harry Verwayen.
Europeana projects.
There are a number of projects – the Europeana Group – that are contributing technology solutions and content to Europeana. These are run by different cultural heritage institutions, and are part-funded by the European Commission's eContentplus programme and the Information and Communications Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP).
The Europeana Group projects are:
Financing.
Europeana and the projects contributing content to Europeana.eu have been funded by the European Commission under eContentplus, the Information and Communications Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) and similar programmes. To participate in a wide range of projects, which are only funded by the Commission for 50–100% of the costs and do not include overheads, Europeana is also reliant for an element of its funding on Member States’ ministries of culture and education.