Judaica Europeana
Beginning in 2010, Judaica Europeana partners digitised and uploaded to Europeana 3.7 million items. They include 3,611,000 pages from books, newspapers and archives; 62,000 photographs, postcards and museum objects; 23,000 sound files of music and oral history.
Judaica Europeana worked with libraries, archives and museums to provide integrated access to digital collections, which documented the Jewish presence and heritage in Europe. This content will continue to grow with the second stage of the project (2012-2014) as new partners provide access to their digital collections to be integrated in Europeana.
The Judaica Europeana network is involved - through the European Association for Jewish Culture - in the Digitized Manuscripts to Europeana (DM2E) and the AthenaPlus projects.
Judaica's achievements
- Documentation of Jewish expression in Europe: Judaica encouraged and supported content-holders in identifying Jewish content in their collections that reflects the activities, creativity and self-expression of Jews in European cities.
- Digitisation and aggregation of this content: A coherent thematic collection has been created and incorporated into Europeana: Standards were coordinated across institutions in order to synchronise the metadata with the interoperability requirements of Europeana.
- Deployment of knowledge management tools: These enable communities of practice to adapt and apply controlled vocabularies, thesauri and ontologies for the indexing, retrieval and re-use of the aggregated content pertinent to their own areas of interest.
- Use of the digitised content: Judaica Europeana digital collections are available in scholarship and academic research; university-based teaching; online learning; museum curatorship and virtual exhibitions; events and initiatives of cultural institutions; cultural tourism; and formal and informal education.
Judaica facts
- Judaica Europeana was launched in January 2010 and concluded successfully in February 2012. It was co-funded by the eContentplus programme of the European Commission.
- The second stage of Judaica Europeana began in March 2012. Project partners formed a network and a consortium under a Memorandum of Understanding to enable continued growth and enrichment of digital Jewish content published in Europeana.
- The network is led by the European Association for Jewish Culture, London in association with the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt and the National Library of Israel.
- It has 27 associated partner institutions in Europe, Israel and the US.