Europeana Inside’s One-Year Anniversary

Guest blog from Carolien Fokke of the Collections Trust.

It is hard to believe that the Europeana Inside project kicked off just a year ago, in April 2012. The work that the 26-partner consortium has done in such a short amount of time is incredible, and we would love to share the story of our journey so far with you.

Europeana Inside meeting in The Hague, The Netherlands. Image by SPK (Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz).

For those of you who are less familiar with the project, Europeana Inside is a Best Practice Network connecting content providers with technical partners throughout Europe. We aim to achieve a lasting transformation in the quantity, scope and usability of the content available to Europeana from European cultural institutions. We mean to reach this goal by developing the Europeana Connection Kit (or ECK) – a set of open-source software tools that will enable cultural heritage institutions throughout Europe to share their collections online via Europeana.

In this past year, much has already been achieved. The project was off to a good start with the creation of our website and social media channels, as well as a bunch of printed dissemination material. Then it was on to gathering the user requirements from the content providers, developing use case scenarios, and investigating the current technical standards. At the end of 2012, a technical specification was written which combined all the information gathered over the previous months.

The ECK box! Image by SPK (Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz).

The user requirements and specifications have since served as the basis that the technical partners use to do what they do best: develop software. The first iteration of the ECK is due at the end of this month, which means that we can start testing the prototype software very soon. This is an enormous milestone for the project, and we are all looking forward to the cooperative testing and evaluation process.

Over the past year, we’ve also extended the Europeana Inside family with a number of Associate Partners ranging from content providers to aggregators and Content Management System vendors who are sharing their expertise and knowledge with us. We are always looking for more Associate Partners so if you’re interested in becoming involved with the project, please contact us via the website.

One of the highlights of the past year was certainly the first Europeana Inside Review in Luxembourg on 15 February. The management board was excited about the opportunity to show the European Commission how much work had been done by all partners with so much enthusiasm. It was wonderful to hear from the reviewers that the project was well on its way to becoming very successful, and that the work that had been done was excellent.

In short, it’s been one amazing year, and we’re all sure that next year is going to be even better!

If you are keen to receive updates about the project, what’s been happening, and what’s going to be happening, you can always visit our website, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, join our LinkedIn group, or sign up for our newsletter.

Europeana Inside meeting in Leuven, Belgium. Image by SPK (Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz).