Jill Cousins

1. Europeana: The Digital Humanities as a
Trojan Horse
17 October 13 Leuven

3. 5 million

4. UIM
4

5. Why is Europeana important?
Impact, Impact, Impact….
•
Europeana supports economic growth
Europeana connects Europe
Europeana makes Europe’s culture available to everyone

6. Europeana supports economic growth:
Creative Industries in Europe are growing
fast (estimated 7% per annum) and they
need fuel.
Europeana provides that.
To date 770 businesses, entrepreneurs,
educational & cultural organisations are
re-using our data in websites, apps and
games.

7. Impact 1:
Europeana Supports Economic Growth
7

9. Europeana connects Europe:
“Much more than an economic alliance, Europe has
to becomeopen, democratised access
a cultural union”
to culture
helps all communities across Europe
to understand the past and to
appreciate cross-cultural differences.
Robert Schuman, Founding of the ECC in 1951
Rober

10. Impact 2:
Europeana Connects Europe
10

11. Europeana makes Europe’s culture
available for everyone:
29 million records under a Creative
Commons Zero public domain
dedication (CC0) means Europe’s
heritage becomes available for re-use
for everyone, young and old

12. Impact 3: Europeana makes Europe’s
Culture available for everyone
.
12

13. What do we have?

14. Why not?
Too broad a
potential user
base
The data leaves
a bit to be
desired

15. Would like to show in an
app all the music scores
available for free
Raw Data
Where’s the
museum that
has the
drawing of
Rembrandt ‘s
son?
Need some new
resources for my
lesson on 1989

16. Why not?
Too broad a
potential user
base
The data leaves
a bit to be
desired

21. Why can’t we give
the users what
they want?
Scale
Fear (and
money)

23. So what should our
new strategic plan
solve?

26. Europeana is extremely well positioned as a catalyst of change, a Digital Service
Infrastructure that can reduce costs of accessibility, fuel a burgeoning creative
economy, and realise spin-off effects in other sectors.
26
26

27. In order to realise this potential the Europeana ecosystem will be funded as a “Digital
Service Infrastructure” and will continue to provide services on 4 different levels:
Aggregation, Facilitation, Distribution and Engagement.
27
27

28. A Digital Service Infrastructure is
an underlying service for a sector or
sectors in europe that will solve
coordination and market failure
issues.
Several will be funded under the
Connecting Europe Facility from
2014-2021
Others include: eHeath, Automatic
Translation, eGovernment

29. 1. Europeana will provide value-added services that allow the Cultural sector to do their
work faster, cheaper and better, for example with cloud based hosting services and
more efficient aggregation tools.
Impact:
22.7 million in cost reduction
A unified repository of >100 million objects
Increased direct access to content (in particular PD)
29
29

30. Impact:
Shared practices for data modelling and IPR
Strong spin-off potential in other industries
Machine readable content for new services
2. Europeana will co-ordinate solutions for pan- European accessibility issues such as
cross-border access of content, ISO standards and improved interoperability of data,
multilingualism, development of semantic web/LOD, e.g. to work with Google
30
Knowledge Graph.
30

31. Impact:
Data delivered into user systems
Researchers direct access to big data in culture
Between 9 and 20 successful startups
20 + Europeana apps in appstores
3. Europeana will develop a service centre for the GLAMS, the creative industries and
cultural entrepreneurs. They will get easy access to free and licensed content,
consultancy services, a network of entrepreneurs and venture capital and incubation
services.
31
31

32. 4. Europeana will develop community based end user services, that allow users to
access validated content through strong community based platforms such as Wikipedia
and thematic partner sites such as Europeana Fashion.
Impact:
Dramatically Increased visibility (on wiki 10
WW1 images = 9 million impressions)
Increased participation
32
32

34. European Cultural Commons Principles
Access
Mutuality
Engagement
Attribution
Consistency

35. Europeana Strategy
Move away from Portal
2015-2020
thinking to Platform
Continue to solve
Encourage providers to
issues of
deliver better data
interoperability
(including decent
resolution content)
Deliver proof of
concepts, but
concentrate on API’s
and letting others create
the sites that work for
them

36. How is this
interesting for the
digital humanities
scholar

37. What does the Digital Humanities Scholar
need?
1. high quality full text, images, film, sound and their met
2. full text semantically enriched,
3. without licensing restrictions
4. persistency

38. Europeana Digital
Service Infrastructure (DSI)
And Europeana Foundation acts as the facilitator of this collectively owned
Europeana ecosystem

39. Everyone is invited to act as a distributor by building services for users on top

40. Europeana
Research - A proof
of Concept
Research is not
threatening to the
museums,
libraries, archives,
audio visual
collections, &
circumvents some
of the IPR issues

42. Europeana Research
?

43. “Ecosystems only survive if you
deliver more value than you
capture”
(Tim O’Reilly)

44. “Instead of policy-makers deciding on what ‘European heritage’
is, the Europeana project allows its users to research European
history themselves, create new transnational links between
cultures, look at historic events from different national angles,
and put history in new contexts.” Joris Pekel
Thank you
Jill Cousins
Jill.Cousins@kb.nl