Connected to

The Europeana Jigsaw

The Europeana Group currently comprises eleven projects run by different cultural heritage institutions, the majority part-funded by the European Commission's eContentplus programme. While some projects develop technology solutions and others focus on providing content, they all work towards the same goal: the creation of the fully operational Europeana.eu by 2010 with links to over 10 million digital objects.

During the past months several new projects from the Europeana Group have been launched: the Best Practice Network EuropeanaConnect, the Targeted Project for cultural content EuropeanaTravel and the Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe - BHL-Europe - all started in May 2009. The content supplier JUDAICA (Jewish Urban Digital European Integrated Cultural Archive) saw its official project start in July and the last project to kick-off in October 2009 is EUscreen, a Best Practice Network focusing on television collections.

The core project and successor Thematic Network to EDLnet, Europeana v1.0, has recently updated the Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE) and issued the XML Schema, which are available as public outcomes on the Europeana v1.0 website. ESE lists the fields used in Europeana to describe the digitised object. The XML Schema enables content providers to check that their metadata complies with the Europeana Semantic Elements. Their publication marks an important milestone and will help content providers deliver correct data to Europeana and speed up the ingestion process. The website now also offers guidelines about the ESE and how to use the XML Schema.

Europeana Plenary 2009

From 14-15 September 2009 Europeana is organising the conference “Creation, Collaboration & Copyright” in The Hague/Netherlands. Renowned speakers like Charles Leadbeater, author of the book “We-think” and one of Europe's most famous thinkers on mass creativity and innovation and copyright expert Bernt Hugenholtz, Director of the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam, provide for inspiring ideas and expertise. The programme further offers master classes on aggregation as well as on technical and copyright issues.

Find out more about the individual projects of the Europeana Group
Download the XML Schema and the Europeana Semantic Elements
For further details please visit the Europeana Plenary website