Europeana Awareness

Europeana Awareness was a Best Practice Network, led by the Europeana Foundation, designed to:

• publicise Europeana to users, policy makers, politicians and cultural heritage organisations in every Member State so as to encourage the use and contribution of content, raise awareness of cultural heritage as an economic driver and promote knowledge transfer
• promote its use by a broad public for a variety of purposes including recreation and hobbies, research, learning, genealogy and tourism – engaging users via usergeneration of content, creation of digital stories and social networking
• develop new partnerships with 4 key sectors which are currently underexploited by Europeana: public libraries; local archival groups; broadcast organisations andopen culture re-users (programmers, developers, researchers and activists)
• put in place new distribution channels for Europeana content working with the tourism sector
• further encourage cultural institutions to continue to provide content in particular by: raising awareness of the opportunities provided by the new Europeana Licensing framework; developing mechanisms for collective rights management; and increasing the amount of content in Europeana that can be freely re-used. A wide variety of media and channels, both online and offline, will be used to ensure promotion of appropriate and consistent messages to different stakeholder groups.

The 48 partner consortium brought together leading players with strong track records in the Europeana network in the areas of work that was undertaken, as well as some new players with specific expertise in areas such as PR, User Generated Content and cultural tourism. Every Member State was represented by a Country Partner with a key role in continuing the PR work kicked off by the EAwareness campaigns.