Europeana launches a social media tribute to World Book Day

For World Book Day, Europeana wants people to engage with famous European texts using social media, taking them on a month long literary tour of Europe.

23 April is the anniversary of the death of two of Europe’s best known authors: Cervantes and Shakespeare. It is also the date symbolically chosen by UNESCO to celebrate World Book and Copyright Day internationally. As part of its #AllezLiterature campaign, Europeana is joining this world-wide tribute to literature and will be sharing some of Cervantes and Shakespeare's greatest works available on the platform in various languages, including Don Quijote de la Mancha and Macbeth.

To highlight the variety of resources and languages available on Europeana, more authors and events that marked Europe’s literary History will be highlighted over the coming weeks, with the hashtags #AllezLiterature and #OnThisDay linking to relevant content. This includes numerous images and digitised manuscripts such as a first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which was first published in its entirety in Paris.

From Homer to Gustave Flaubert and Kafka, the campaign will feature works by authors across Europe, promoting literature and the continued relevance of these texts. We will encourage users to interact with the content on social media using the #AllezLiterature hashtag. Activities dedicated to books will include literary quizzes, and sharing opening lines from famous books. Some European classics will also be available to download as PDFs.

World Book Day marks the third phase of Europeana’s pan-European campaign #AllezLiterature working with libraries, archives and the public across Europe to celebrate the written word and texts in 2017. Led on social media, the campaign explores the value of the written word in our cultural heritage through words, in all their forms and languages. The first two phases have been dedicated to love letters and poetry, respectively celebrating Valentine’s Day (14 February 2017) and World Poetry Day (21 March 2017) with social media activity and Transcribathon events. Over 700 transcribers took part, and completed over 4,000 documents.

ENDS

Media contacts:

Camille Tenneson - Europeana Foundation
E: Camille.Tenneson@europeana.eu

Eleanor Kenny - Europeana Foundation
E: Eleanor.Kenny@europeana.eu

Notes for the editor:

Europeana is Europe's digital platform for cultural heritage, collecting and providing online access to over 53 million of digitised items from over 3,500 libraries, archives, audio-visual collections and museums across Europe, ranging from books, photos and paintings to television broadcasts and 3D objects. Europeana encourages and promotes the creative re-use of these vast cultural heritage collections in education, research, tourism and the creative industries. www.europeana.eu

Europeana DSI is co-financed by the European Union’s Connecting Europe Facility