Two Years of Europeana Creative – and what have we done?

It’s been 24 months since Europeana Creative kicked off in Vienna in January 2013. Time for an update to inform you about what we have already achieved. We are now in the final stretch of the project, the part where it all comes to a conclusion.

The beautifully designed Public Annual Report can be found here, and here achievements of year 2 shall be highlighted:

• The online laboratory space Europeana Labs was launched in April 2014 as beta release and counts already more than 16,000 unique users and 2,000 registered API keys. Have a look at this website full of information and exciting tools here.
• Our technical Work Package which has ended with year 2, implemented the Media File Checker successfully into Europeana. Services were especially developed supporting e.g. Design Pilot with the Image Similarity Service, the Tourism Pilot with an Image Twinning WordPress plugin and the Social Networks Pilot with services for geo-referencing. Thanks for all your effort!
• Our project partners developed great ideas – how to use them successfully? Facilitated business models were documented in four White Papers, covering the themes off the Pilots developed so far (education, social networks and tourism). Additional, an Image Embedding Service is currently developed, which will allow users to embed high quality pictures from Europeana on the web.
• Within the second year of Europeana Creative, four Pilots have been delivered:
  1) The History Education Pilot, led by Euroclio, was finalised in September 2014. History educators now can create their own learning activities online via the Historiana platform and by using content from Europeana. Click here to make a trip back in time.
  2) The Natural History Education Pilot, led by NMP, was finalised in August 2014. Not only one prototype, but two were delivered: The museum game “Secret Legacy” is a serious adventure game, taking users on a treasure hunt. And the memory game “Memory Match” allows children and young adults to create memory sets of objects using content from Europeana.
  3) The Tourism Pilot “VanGoYourself” led by PLURIO.NET is already a BBC darling! The concept is easy and playful: Re-enact a painting or image, upload it on the website and share the new image with the twinned original via social media. Try it out here, it’s great fun!
  4) Did you every wonder, how a sparrow sounds like? The Social Networks Pilot “Sound Connections” led by NISV is a flexible tool for communities of interest to enrich specific sets of sounds in different ways on the themes of aviation, city soundscapes (London and Amsterdam) and birdlife. Find out how to geo-tag these sound files.
  5) The Design Pilot prototype is called “Culture Cam”. AALTO leads this collaboration between AALTO, SAT, AIT and Europeana. Take a picture of a shape or pattern and this application shows you objects in Europeana similar in shape, colour or pattern. You don’t believe it? See for yourself!

• What a Challenge we had to face within year 2….. To be precise, we even organised two of them! For each of the five Pilot themes of the project, an Open Innovation Challenge was organised and promoted. The first Challenge Event for the Natural History Education and History Education domain was held on April 29 in Brussels. The second Challenge Event for the Social Networks and Tourism domain took place in Barcelona on September 23, 2014. The incubation support offer pack was delivered to all winners of the Challenges, covering assistance with business modelling, business planning, business strategy, user piloting and technical implementation.
• Europeana Creative does not only work, we also evaluate. UX testing on the Pilots had taken place as well as evaluation of the first and second Challenge. Lessons learned are fed back to improve all development processes in the project.
• In terms of dissemination a detailed promotion plan was elaborated to cover all aspects of the project to be promoted. Dissemination activities have been accompanied by five videos produced by labkultur.tv for each Pilot theme: Natural History Education, History Education, Tourism, Social Networks and Design. If you are interested in being updated constantly, join our more than 1850 Twitter Followers or +750 facebook likes.
• Since February 2015, we officially have a new partner: Ramululs Ltd. is now official member of Europeana Creative. Memoranda of Understanding have been signed with the Project PREFORMA and Europeana Food and Drink.

As you can see, much work has already been done, our remaining tasks will be fulfilled by the end of the project. One of the big and exciting challenges to come is the Final Conference of Europeana Creative. More information will follow soon!