New Europeana Generic Services call now open

About the call

The European Commission recently published a new call for Europeana Generic Services projects under the amended Multi-Annual CEF Work Programme 2019-2020. The call allocates €3 million to support cultural heritage institutions to open up their collections, apply technological innovations and make best use of Europeana in their public activities. Proposals for the call must address both objectives of content aggregation and use of innovative technologies. 

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the deadline of the 2020-1 CEF Telecom call for all Digital Service Infrastructures (DSIs) has been extended to 25 June to give more time for applicants to prepare their proposals. The original deadline was 12 May. Read more about the extension.

Content aggregation

With regard to content, applications should foresee aggregation of new, curated, high-quality content and rich metadata that have the potential for high audience engagement. Proposed actions should include the development of curated editorial formats which explore topics of European significance, including exhibitions, galleries and blogs. We recommend that all applicants consider the new entity-powered design of the Europeana collections portal which makes it easier than ever to explore, discover and enjoy cultural heritage based on subject interests.

Innovative technologies

Proposed actions supported under this call are expected to use innovative technological approaches and tools, such as automation of tasks using Artificial Intelligence (AI), language processing, machine learning, big data-processing, automatic metadata enrichment tools, and tools for regularly translated digital content and its application to cultural heritage.

Multilinguality and improved user experience of the Europeana collections portal remain a high priority for us. Therefore, we welcome proposals that envisage development of software solutions for detecting the language of either metadata or content for the 27 EU official languages, with particular demand for Czech, Bulgarian, Croatian, Latvian, Gaelic, Maltese. Other areas of interest are solutions for manual or machine assisted translation, validation of automatic translations, and activities targeting the correction of text resulting from OCR. 

We are also interested in proposals that use AI for usage data mining and deliver metadata improvements to enhance the search and browsing experience on the Europeana collections website. 

Special focus on 3D

The call strongly encourages applications with a focus on highly accurate 3D models (such as monuments, buildings and museum objects). Please note that 2D representations (images) of three-dimensional real-world objects and embedding 3D content into PDF documents do not qualify as 3D for the purpose of this call.

Throughout last year the Europeana Network Association task force on 3D content explored the challenges and opportunities related to 3D cultural heritage. Take a look at their recommendations to understand the current thinking around 3D (these are not a formal call requirement). In line with these recommendations, Europeana Foundation will welcome proposals that envisage collaborations between cultural heritage institutions, Europeana aggregators, projects and developers to identify best practices around 3D content and metadata. This could include proposals to increase standardisation to improve the findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of 3D content. Furthermore, we are interested in projects that will develop measures for 3D content quality. 

We also strongly encourage applications that offer solutions for uniform and consistent display of 3D objects, and recommend that such solutions support most common formats in use for representing 3D (as indicated in the task force recommendations) and allow the content to be streamed directly to a webpage using standard technologies such as WebGL, Javascript and the HTML5 canvas. 

Integration with Europeana

To ensure compliance and the smooth integration of the project results in the Europeana Core Platform Service (CPS), proposals must conform to the relevant Europeana strategies, standards and frameworks including the Europeana Data Model, Content Strategy and Publishing Framework. 

Applications must ensure that any code proposed to be integrated in the Europeana CSP meets the requirements of the Europeana development guidelines. If technology solutions are proposed for inclusion in the CSP and Europeana Foundation support is desired, then it is strongly recommended that all technical and user experience proposals are agreed in advance with us.

How to apply 

Applications should be submitted via the European Commission portal until 25 June 2020. Take a look at the call text and do reach out to us if you would like to discuss a project proposal with Europeana.

For more information about the call, please consult our list of FAQs. 

This page was edited 6 May 2020 to reflect the extension to the call deadline from 12 May 2020 to 25 June 2020.