Meet the Members Council: Max Kaiser

Hi! I am Max Kaiser (@maxkaiser) and I’m delighted to start this series of blog posts by members of the Europeana Members Council.

To give a brief introduction to the Members Council, we are a group of 25 Councillors who were elected by the Europeana Network at the end of 2014. The idea behind the creation of the Council was to give the Network a formal role and a strong voice in the newly created Europeana governance structure. In early 2015, we nominated a Management Board of six to oversee the work that we do and I am currently the Chair of this board. In this role, I represent the Network in any decisions made by the Europeana Foundation Executive Committee.

The Members Council meet in The Hague. Europeana. CC BY SA.

Let me start with a few words about myself and what I do. I’m currently Head of Research and Development at the Austrian National Library in Vienna. The Austrian National Library has one of the world’s most important historical collections of books, maps, images, manuscripts, papyri and other heritage material. During the last decade or so, we have been investing huge resources in digitising these fantastic collections and building hooks for everyone to access and work with this material. I am responsible for Austrian Books Online, a public-private partnership with Google where we are digitising 600,000 public domain books to make them available for everyone. You can find them in Europeana as well. 

The Austrian National Library has been involved with Europeana from the very beginning and we believe in it as a powerhouse for innovation in the cultural heritage sector in Europe. Currently, I am coordinating the Europeana Creative project, working with the creative industries on developing great new things by re-using the cultural resources available in Europeana. Re-use of cultural heritage is an important part Europeana’s strategy for the coming years and Europeana Creative offers an end-to-end process for cultural heritage institutions and creatives, from developing ideas together to crowdfunding and financial investment. This has been carried out, for example, with the development of VanGoYourself, a highly engaging and playful app which encourages you to interact with cultural heritage by recreating paintings.

As a result of this work, I am excited about Europeana’s move towards becoming a platform where people can build on, and create with, the collections they find. With its network of more than 2,000 institutions that have heritage to share, Europeana is in a unique position, and by moving towards becoming a platform, this unique position will be strengthened even further. 

Part of this move will need a shift in how we provide access to Europe’s cultural heritage. We’d like to complement the protected gardens we already enjoy with a greater number of open playgrounds fertile for re-use. Several leading institutions like the Rijksmuseum, with its Rijksstudio, or the British Library with British Library Labs, have paved the way and demonstrated what can be achieved by opening up collections, and we hope many more institutions will choose to follow. Here, the Europeana Network can play a crucial role by highlighting possible benefits, and leading by example. Advocating opening up Europe’s cultural heritage collections as much as we can will be an important priority in my personal agenda for 2015.


A recent VanGoYourself by Nick Grimshaw. VanGoYourself. CC BY SA.

I’d also like to let you know about our activities in the Members Council so far and our plans for the immediate future. In February, we had our first Council meeting in the Europeana offices in The Hague. As the Council is new, and we all are new to our roles, we had a number of things to plan, namely how we should work together with the Network and what our next steps should be. 

The Europeana Network is established as an Association under Dutch Law. Currently, we are defining the Bylaws to our statutes which will govern our work. They involve, for example, creating criteria for membership to the Network or the rules for our elections. Our guiding principle as we establish these Bylaws is to ensure decision-making is always transparent and effective, and that the diversity of the Network is represented at every opportunity. We expect to finish work on these in early spring and will keep you posted.

We are also busily planning our next Annual General Meeting which will take place in Amsterdam in autumn. The AGM is the key event for Europeana and the Network and provides everyone with an opportunity to share experiences, discuss and develop ideas and make recommendations for the future of Europeana. We will announce both the date and location very soon, so watch this space.

You have probably already seen that the Europeana Professional Website has been given a major makeover. We will use Europeana Pro as the main communication tool for the Network. Here you find our blog and our newsletters; we will soon add information about each councillor, our new Network Task Forces and our Working Groups. The new Europeana Pro is still an initial version that we want to improve, so please let us know what you think!

This year will be of huge importance for Europeana. It will be the first year of the implementation of Europeana’s Strategy 2015-2020. It will see the transition from the previous Europeana funding structure, and Europena will now be funded as a Digital Service Infrastructure under a new financial instrument of the EU, the Connecting Europe Facility. 

The most important role for the Europeana Network is to act as a catalyst. On the one hand, it provides Europeana with buy-in by its constituencies: Europe’s cultural heritage institutions and the creative sector. On the other hand, the Network can deliver strong returns to its members for their valued investments. Together we can make a difference and realise Europeana’s dynamic vision to ‘transform the world with culture’.

Let me know your thoughts!
@maxkaiser