Digital Past 2014

Changing Cultural Heritage Online

Europeana.eu is Europe's largest cultural heritage resource, opening up access to 30 million items from 2,300 of Europe's libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual collections from national institutions such as the Louvre and British Library to regional archives and local monuments.

Jon Purday, Head of Communications at Europeana, will discuss their move to open up heritage content by making this massive dataset freely available under an open licence. Out of copyright items are increasingly marked as Public Domain, and together with its extensive use of social media and presence in Wikimedia Commons is designed to encourage re-use. Europeana is also working with experts from libraries, archives, museums and the AV sector to implement a common metadata framework, the European Data Model, as well as working with partners co-ordinate advocacy across the heritage sector on concerns surrounding orphan works and the harmonisation of copyright.

Europeana is also pioneering the digitisation of personal histories. Major initiatives currently include the digitisation across Europe of families own stories, documents and memorabilia associated with the First World War, European 1914-1918.eu and the fall of the Iron Curtain, europeana1989.eu.