Europeana Creative to launch innovation challenges

Yesterday, we announced the launch of Europeana Cloud. Today, it's the turn of Europeana Creative.

Europeana Creative is an exciting new European project which will enable and promote greater re-use of cultural heritage resources by Europe’s creative industries. The project was launched at the end of February 2013 at the Austrian National Library in Vienna and will run for 30 months. 26 partners from 14 European countries with diverse backgrounds are contributing to the project. These include content-providing institutions with world-famous collections, creative industry hubs and organisations, the tourism and education sectors, living labs, software developers and multimedia experts, as well as think tanks.

The Europeana Creative team

Europeana provides access to more than 26 million digitised cultural heritage objects from Europe’s libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections. The Europeana Creative project sets out to demonstrate that Europeana can facilitate the creative re-use of digital cultural heritage content and associated metadata. Partners will develop a number of pilot applications focused on design, tourism, education and social networks. Building on these pilots, a series of open innovation challenges will be launched with entrepreneurs from the creative industries to identify, incubate and spin-off more viable projects into the commercial sector.

The project goals will be supported by an open laboratory network (the Open Culture Lab), an on- and offline environment for experimentation with content, tools and business services, and a licensing framework where content holders can specify the re-use conditions for their material. The project will be supported by continuous evaluation and business modelling development.

Why now?

The re-use of digital content is an essential part of the Digital Agenda for Europe. Several activities are already stimulating the re-use of cultural heritage in order to demonstrate the social and economic value of cultural content. With the publication of the Europeana metadata under the terms of the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) in September 2012, further development of innovative applications based on this metadata is now possible. Europeana Creative takes this a step further by facilitating re-use of the digital objects themselves.