New Europeana Collections site brings people closer to culture

Everyone in Europe can now get closer to their cultural heritage on the new Europeana Collections website. Online now at www.europeana.eu.

The new site offers visitors an immersive cultural experience. Its fresh, clean design makes it easy to navigate.

Improved search and filters, including innovative colour searches (try this one for ‘Dark slate blue’) and quality searches (find our very best maps of Paris), mean finding what you’re looking for is simple.

Better, bigger previews, a zoom function for high resolution images and documents (get really close up to this Monet), direct play for video (try this silent film) and audio (listen to this Maria Callas aria) and a new download option mean less time clicking and more time engrossed in cultural content.

Clear copyright information shows you what you can and can’t do with the treasures you find.

All together, this means trustworthy and relevant content to use, to learn, to share or to contribute to research. See Europeana Collections for yourself with our quick demo.

The name is new too - ‘Europeana Collections’ lets visitors know that Europeana brings digital culture from diverse sources across Europe together. Europeana Collections is a doorway to Europe’s rich digital heritage and a showcase for the Europeana digital platform.

Bruno Racine, Chair of the Europeana Foundation and President of the National Library of France, says:

“Europeana Collections gives everyone access to tens of millions of cultural items and artefacts and the new site presents in dazzling detail those given to us in high quality by our 3,500 partners. Nearly 3 million of our higher quality items are also openly licensed, which means people can use them for their own purposes. The range of this open material is breathtaking - from the unique and iconic like a painting by Edvard Munch, or handwritten notes and diagrams by Leonardo Da Vinci, to the unexpected like an allegorical and plundered painting of the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II or a personal account of the First World War.”

Europeana Executive Director, Jill Cousins, says:

“In just the first few weeks of its test phase, Europeana Collections saw more than 15,000 items being downloaded, demonstrating that the new site is answering a genuine audience desire for high quality, downloadable content. The growing number of high quality and openly licensed content is helping this and helps our partners to improve their international visibility, audience growth, outreach and engagement. We still have many more improvements to make but feel that our new Europeana Collections is a significant step in the right direction.”

Also new for 2016 are curated collections on popular interest topics. Europeana Music Collections and Europeana Art History Collections are available as test versions now and will launch officially in early 2016, with other themes including fashion and newspapers to follow.

Discover Europeana Collections at www.europeana.eu and find news and updates on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

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Examples of openly licensed collection items from Europeana

Portrait of Emperor Rudolf II as Vertumnus, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Skoklosters Slott, public domain.
Adolf Hitler’s postcard, ‘Greetings from Nuremburg’, Europeana 1914-1918, CC BY-SA.
Sketches and notes from BL Arundel 263, Leonardo da Vinci, British Library, public domain.
Death Struggle, Edvard Munch, Statens Museum for Kunst, CC0.
Results filtered by ‘Sky Blue’

Notes for editors
Europeana
Europeana is Europe's digital platform for cultural heritage, collecting and providing online access to tens of millions of digitized items from libraries, archives, audiovisual collections and museums across Europe.

It opens up access to over 48 million digital records from over 3,500 heritage organizations in 35 countries. These collections represent great thematic, language and media variety, 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.

For more information please contact:
Imogen Greenhalgh
E: imogen.greenhalgh@europeana.eu
Eleanor Kenny
T: +44 (0)78 2789 6875
E: eleanor.kenny@europeana.eu