Local content in a Europeana cloud

By Barbara Morganti, member of the LoCloud consortium

The LoCloud project aims to make over 4 million items of digital content available through Europeana within two years. In March 2013, the team started its work to facilitate aggregation of digital resources from small and medium local cultural institutions.

Content from local museums, archives, libraries, archaeological sites, and other similar institutions is still underrepresented in Europeana and, in general, on the internet. Cloud-based technology offers an affordable and user-friendly solution for making their content available online. This recently published video explains the project aims and how it can help smaller and mid-size institutions to get their collections on the web.

LoCloud CC BY-SA

LoCloud is developing a cloud-based technology infrastructure for aggregating local content. It will also provide a number of micro-services offering geo-location and metadata enrichment, multilingual vocabularies for local history and archaeology, a historical place name gazetteer and a Wikimedia application to handle relevant ‘crowd-sourced’ content. Moreover, the project is working on the implementation of a lightweight digital library software for deployment in a cloud environment, compatible with Europeana requirements. This will benefit those data providers requiring a user-friendly, scalable system for cataloguing their digital content and metadata.

LoCloud relies on a large group of technical partners, content providers, aggregating services and partners with specific expertise which make together a very strong consortium.

Contacts:

Gunnar Urtegaard

National Archive Norway/Riksarkivet