Contributing to Europeana?
Just spent an afternoon in discussion with a national museum about them possibly contributing to Europeana. So it be a good point to discuss some of the issues to do with submission of content.At the moment Europeana is still being worked on technically to make robust enough to be able to cope the the level of interest it got at launch and which caused it to be temporally suspended.
Europeana stores the following:
- Metadata about the content you wish it to have access to;
- A ‘thumbnail’ of the content. In most cases this will be an image thumbnail although audio and video content this would be a sample. The thumbnail is optional but they would prefer one.
After a search on Europeana users can look at the thumbnail and metadata you have provided and also follow links back to your website with the full description of your content and larger images or full multimedia on it.
Therefore you:
- Must have your content available on-line;
- Be able to supply a stable URL for each item of content;
- Make your data harvestable, preferably by OAI-PMH.
Another issue that is emerging is that Europeana is unable to deal all the organisations in Europe on an individual basis. Therefore they are promoting the idea of national, regional and thematic aggregators.
Luckily in the UK we already have a national aggregator - The People’s Network Discover Service.
Collections Trust will soon be taking resposibility for the Service. So please contact us if you are interested in making your content available to it and therefore to Europeana.
