Presenting the Europeana Publishing Framework

Europeana is evolving. Technology is ever improving. The future Europeana offers the inspired, creative or entrepreneurial the ability to take what our data partners provide and use it. For innovation. For education. For research. For business. For personal enjoyment.

We want the cultural heritage collections held in Europeana to be viewed, shared, used and re-used wherever and whenever possible. To support our vision to transform the world with culture, we need to look at how we manage content and bring it in line with the need to deliver it in higher quality to our audiences.

Our research shows us that today’s audiences want accurate information, and quick and easy access to relevant pictures, texts, videos and recordings. This means Europeana’s data partners need to deliver both good metadata and, where possible, direct access to content (the digital objects themselves). Direct access via Europeana makes the process of watching a video, listening to a track, reading a book or viewing a high-resolution painting much simpler and quicker and therefore a better user experience.

To manage content and deliver it in higher quality to our audiences, we’ve developed four tiers of participation in Europeana. What data partners provide will depend on their own agendas and capabilities, but the higher the quality of information provided by data partners, the more benefit they’ll create for their audiences.

These tiers are based on real examples and have been developed in wide-ranging discussion under the Europeana Creative project. The initial draft was written by the Europeana Network Content Re-use Task Force and together with Kennisland and our network of aggregators a final version was created.

The Publishing Framework clarifies the relationship between Europeana and the data partners. It clearly outlines what we will do for the institutions depending on the content and metadata you decide to make available. This makes it easy to see what everybody can get out your collaboration with Europeana.

So are you sharing your data with Europeana? Or are you thinking about doing so? Then have a look at the Publishing Framework. There is also a video introducing the Publishing Framework.

We also realise that some of our partners would like to translate the Publishing Framework into their own language. So you can do this easily, we have added the complete text to a translation tool.

Questions or comments? Get in touch!