Europeana REST API wins the 2017 Data APIs category award

This award recognizes the exciting work of Europeana at the interface of technology and cultural heritage. At API World 2017, the API Industry’s largest award event, the Europeana REST API will be crowned API winner in the Data APIs category.

Among hundreds of nominations, the API World advisory board selected the Europeana API based on three criteria: reputation in the API industry, recent media coverage, and innovativeness of the API initiatives. Geoff Domoracki, Founder of API World, said: ‘Europeana REST API is a great example of how more and more of the tech industry is realizing that APIs are not just how we integrate tools and apps, APIs are the new way of doing business and building new revolutionary technologies.’

The Europeana REST API allows people to build applications that use the cultural heritage objects stored in the Europeana repository. It is open-source and the code is available on GitHub. The metadata information is structured in the Europeana Data Model (EDM), an open flexible data model featuring various types of resources and relations between them, allowing anyone to search and filter on anything. From high resolution images of artworks in the Rijksmuseum to wildlife sounds recordings, Europeana makes sure this material can be found and used, encouraging creative industries, educators and research professionals to build on the content and create amazing new products. Recently, it has supported, the new Creative Commons Search tool which lets people search a variety of open repositories through a single interface, and Historiana, a digital learning platform for history educators. Steven Stegers, Programme Director at EUROCLIO, said, ‘The Europeana API makes it possible to search and select items from the digital collections of heritage institutes from Europe and beyond in one go. This is of tremendous value to developers of educational tools, who can then access these collections, and find relevant information including the rights statements and the origins of the source.’

The API World 2017 award is a great recognition of the efforts of Europeana’s API team to make this content accessible and reusable. Hugo Manguinhas, Product Owner for API at Europeana, said: ‘We are proud to have built a unique API for the cultural heritage sector that spans thousands of institutions across Europe, in several languages. It shows what persistence and hard work mixed with audience knowledge can achieve, and acknowledges the dedication of our API team who want to transform the world with culture.’

The 2017 API Awards take place during the API World 2017 Conference & Expo in USA, the world’s largest API conference and expo with 3,000+ attendees. Europeana, among winners in other categories, will be presented with their award at this API World conference in September 2017 in Silicon Valley. API World is dedicated to the mission to be independent and facilitate connections, knowledge, trust and business within the developer community of API providers and consumers.

ENDS
Media contacts:

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

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

Notes for editor
Europeana is Europe's digital platform for cultural heritage, collecting and providing online access to tens of millions of digitized items from over 3,500 libraries, archives, audiovisual collections and museums across Europe, ranging from music, books, photos and paintings to television broadcasts and 3D objects. Europeana encourages and promotes the creative reuse of these vast cultural heritage collections in education, research, tourism and the creative industries.

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